O'Reilly, Frank (Francis Joseph)

by Terry Clavin

O'Reilly, Frank (Francis Joseph) (1922–2013), businessman, was born on 15 November 1922 in Upper Fitzwilliam Street, Dublin, the only son of three children of Charles O'Reilly, a medical doctor of Upper Fitzwilliam Street, and his wife Dorothy (née Martin) from a wealthy Dublin shipping family. Charles served as a lieutenant-colonel in the Royal Army Medical Corps in the first world war, receiving the DSO and MC. The extended family controlled the whiskey maker, John Power & Son Ltd ('Powers'), with Frank being directly descended through his father from James Power (qv), the eighteenth-century founder of the Powers distillery in John's Lane, Dublin. Growing up in Booterstown, Co. Dublin, Frank suffered from asthma as a child and spent time convalescing in Switzerland. He boarded at St Gerard's College in Bray, Co. Wicklow, and then at Ampleforth College in York, England. Ampleforth was at altitude and had clean air, curing him of his asthma.

Opposed to Ireland's neutrality in the second world war, he joined the British army upon graduating from TCD with an engineering degree in 1943. A Royal Engineers cadet officer, he trained in Britain for participation in the D-Day landings but was dispatched instead to India in 1944 for further training, including a course in Urdu. Arriving in Burma only a few weeks before Japan's surrender, he helped free the prisoners working on the infamous Bangkok–Moulmein railway and then engaged in building roads, bridges and airstrips in jungles along the Malayan–Siamese border that harboured communist guerrillas.

Discharged from the army in late 1946, he started work as an engineer in the John's Lane distillery in January 1947. It was among a handful of surviving Irish distilleries, the once thriving whiskey industry having been devastated by the loss of its export markets to smoother-tasting Scotch. The job was hard but fulfilling and he enjoyed interacting with the workers. In 1950 he married Teresa Williams whose family owned a distillery in Tullamore, Co. Offaly. They had seven daughters and three sons, and settled on a seventy-acre farm in Rathmore, Co. Kildare, allowing him to become a keen follower of the Kildare Hunt.

Soon made a manager at John's Lane, he was far less busy, initially finding deskbound work tedious. He formed contacts with other businessmen through the Federation of Irish Manufacturers, later the Federation of Irish Industry (FII), sitting on the FII council (1957–62). Appointed joint managing director of Powers in the early 1950s along with his cousin Clem Ryan, he succeeded his uncle Bertram T. O'Reilly as chairman in 1955. Amid government pressure for lighter, more export-friendly whiskeys, O'Reilly was wary of alienating his domestic customers, since Powers boasted Ireland's most popular whiskey, especially among purists.

In a radical step for a company that had long refused to blend pot still whiskey with grain, he directed the installation of a continuous still for making grain spirit at John's Lane in 1958. He experimented with blended whiskeys for export and reduced the strength of the alcohol in Powers whiskey, first in Northern Ireland and then, acting in concert with the other Irish distilleries, in the Republic. The new plant could also distil gin and, from 1960, vodka, enabling successful launches of branded gin and vodka products on the home market. Pursuing change cautiously, often copying initiatives pioneered elsewhere, he delivered steady growth with profits more than doubling during 1960–65. Powers developed Ireland's most modern whiskey bottling and distilling facilities and purchased Tullamore Dew whiskey from O'Reilly's Williams in-laws.

Powers' highly successful Northern Ireland sales drive facilitated his appointment in 1959 to the advisory committee of the Ulster Bank, which caused a stir because he was a catholic. He joined the Ulster Bank board in 1961, subsequently becoming chairman of its southern area board. A heavy smoker as well as an appreciative whiskey drinker, in 1964 he began his seventeen-year tenure as non-executive chairman of a large British-owned tobacco company, Player & Wills (Ireland), and took to styling himself the 'chairman of vice'. When speaking in 1969 at the Player & Wills sponsored Cork Film Festival, he made criticisms of Ireland's film censorship regime that drew a public rebuke from the local catholic bishop. O'Reilly was a sincere catholic who wore his faith lightly.

Under his influence, his companies became important sponsors of Irish horse racing during the 1960s. He continued his family's involvement, dating to 1882, in the running of the Fairyhouse racecourse in Co. Meath, serving on the racecourse committee from 1951 and becoming committee chairman for a time in the early 1960s. Through his prominence in the Kildare Hunt, which owned the Punchestown racecourse in Co. Kildare, he was on the Punchestown racecourse committee by the early 1960s. He was also chairman of the Association of Irish Racecourses (1964–81) and from 1967 a member both of the Turf Club and of the Irish National Hunt Steeplechase Committee.

As moves towards free trade threatened the three remaining Irish distilleries – Powers, Jameson and the Cork Distillery Company (CDC) – with tough competition from imported spirits, they were pushed into engaging in secret, prolonged and fraught merger talks from 1964. CDC proved the most resistant, but O'Reilly gained the confidence of its controlling family, the Murphys, who arranged covert meetings with him. The final terms struck in 1966 were relatively unfavourable for Powers, the strongest of the three, further suggesting that he deserves most of the credit for a merger that astonished industry observers. Named United Distillers of Ireland, changing to Irish Distillers in 1971, the merged entity was the state's seventh largest industrial company, employing over 900 workers.

O'Reilly became chairman, but struggled to assert his authority: board members and managers identified primarily with their old companies, impeding the integration process. In 1968 he recruited an outsider, one of Ireland's most respected businessmen, Kevin McCourt (qv), to be chief executive. Irish Distillers subsequently rationalised and professionalised its management, became more marketing-oriented, bypassed wholesalers by selling direct to retailers, gradually introduced blended versions of the traditional Irish whiskeys, precluded a hostile takeover by securing a minority investment from the international drinks conglomerate Seagrams and closed its four existing distilleries to concentrate production in a new plant in Midleton, Co. Cork.

Although he had had his disagreements with McCourt, they developed an effective partnership with O'Reilly adroitly piloting these traumatic changes past a conservative and contentious boardroom, dominated by dynastic shareholders. He enjoyed similarly good personal and professional relations after 1978 with McCourt's successor, Richie Burrows. A consummate corporate politician, O'Reilly was steady rather than brilliant and somewhat lacking in substance – ideal qualities for a chairman. He dominated in company by alternating a restless, slightly boyish affability with graceful, self-confident airs.

The great success of his chairmanship was the manner in which Irish Distillers rolled back the domestic market share initially captured by Scotch imports following the dismantling of trade barriers in the early 1970s. Especially after the Midleton plant began production in 1975, the company prospered off a booming Irish spirits market. Furthermore, as violence raged in Northern Ireland during the mid 1970s, his charm and northern business connections smoothed the gradual, surprisingly uncontroversial takeover of Ireland's only other distilling concern, the historically protestant-controlled Old Bushmills Distillery in Co. Antrim. This gave Irish Distillers a monopoly on Irish whiskey. The great disappointment was the failure to make headway in the US market, partly because Irish Distillers' internal politics precluded it from concentrating on the two most popular Irish whiskeys there, Jameson and Bushmills.

The Irish spirits market collapsed, along with Irish Distillers' profits, under the weight of an economic crisis and crippling government excises from 1980. Unlike most of his fellow board members, O'Reilly had not exploited Irish Distillers' surging share price in the late 1970s and retained a large shareholding, which he reduced only as his well-flagged retirement as chairman neared in 1983. Continuing a director, he was part of the 'war cabinet' formed when a consortium of British drinks companies attempted a hostile takeover in 1988. He left the board that December following the culmination of a friendly counter-bid from the French company, Pernod Ricard, receiving £2.25 million for his remaining 500,000 shares.

Amongst other directorships accumulated during the 1970s, he was chairman of Raleigh (Ireland) Ltd (1971–1980) and sat on the board of the national horse authority, Bord na gCapall (1972–81). As president of the National Equestrian Federation (1964–79), he attended fifteen General Assemblies of the Fédération Equestre Internationale (FEI) and, in a rare honour, was made a life member of the FEI in 1978. A longstanding member of the RDS committees for agriculture and for the Dublin Horse Show, he officiated as a judge at showjumping contests held in the RDS and abroad. In 1974 he led a members' revolt that compelled the RDS executive to build an international horse sales complex on its grounds.

His term as chairman of the executive council of the RDS (1980–86) coincided with a difficult period wherein the society's two main events, the Spring Show and the Dublin Horse Show, suffered from plummeting attendances, not least because of the inadequate catering and lack of ancillary entertainments. Moreover, O'Reilly's achievement in securing the 1982 World Showjumping Championships for the RDS miscarried, as the crowds stayed away. Although hampered administratively by the society's system of rule through a plethora of overlarge committees, he thrived off such constraints, which suited his genius for subtly eliciting the desired consensus from gatherings of high-powered individuals accustomed to getting their way.

Moving slowly and without undermining the outsized influence enjoyed by a clique of wealthy members, he kept the debts at manageable proportions by selling peripheral slivers of property and by making the organisation more active in controlling costs, seeking sponsorship and leasing out its grounds for events. He transformed the Spring Show into a family friendly carnival, the decision to open the show on a Sunday in 1985 drew Dubliners to what had been a country event. As president of the RDS (1986–9), he then saw off efforts by dissident members to wrest control of the continuing property disposals from the executive.

Having served as the Ulster Bank's deputy chairman since 1974, he became the bank's first southern catholic chairman in 1981, joining the board of the Ulster Bank's parent, the National Westminster Bank, a year later. As real competition developed within the Irish banking sector during the 1980s, he helped shake staff out of their assumption of an easy job for life and make them more conscious of their customers' viewpoint. By the time he resigned in 1989, the bank had introduced computers and re-introduced lunchtime openings.

A highly effective chairman during the 1970s of TCD's Development Fund Committee, which raised money for educational and research purposes, he acted later as chancellor of Dublin University (1985–98). He also raised funds for the partial restoration of the Irish College in Paris during 1988–9, leading the catholic church to make him a Knight Commander of the Equestrian Order of St Gregory the Great in 2002. As chairman of the Punchestown management committee (c. 1984–1993), he helped attract the prize-money that established the Punchestown festival as Ireland's premier National Hunt meeting before being forced out for controversially dropping Guinness as the main sponsor in favour rival brewers, Heineken. He then oversaw the extensive redevelopment of Fairyhouse during his second term as chairman of its racecourse committee (1990–2000). The recipient of honorary degrees from TCD (1978) and the NUI (1986), he was president of the Marketing Institute of Ireland (1983–5) and of the Institute of Bankers in Ireland (1985–6).

He died in Rathmore on 11 August 2013 and was buried in the local graveyard.