In the dark days of the 1970s and 1980s, businessman Michael Smurfit was that rarest of sights – an Irish person who bestrode the world stage unapologetically and with absolute confidence. This exclusive club also included Charles Haughey and U2 – but not many others.
Just like Bono, Smurfit was widely admired but not quite universally beloved. In Michael Smurfit: Succession (Monday. RTÉ One, 9.35pm), there are flashes of the ruthless streak that propelled him towards a net worth of more than €350 million and which made him an ambivalent figure in the eyes of many.
His lack of sentimentality is on full display in a notorious interview from the 1980s where, amid the bloodletting that had followed his appointment as chair of Telecom Éireann, he told RTÉ that nobody had a right to a job. “Do you think that any person in life has a God-given right to have a job? Are you saying that when a person is born, they have a God-given right to a job?”
That’s easy to say when you have inherited your father’s packaging business and your silver-spoon education included a stint with the Jesuits at exclusive Clongowes Wood (“I became a pawn in his grand scheme of things,” he says of the elder Smurfit). But Succession isn’t interested in skewering Smurfit and is essentially a celebration of his accomplishments in growing his father’s (already substantial) company into a global behemoth.
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Smurfit is now 88 and lives in Monaco, where he credits his longevity and still-brisk mind to his fondness for expensive Bordeaux wine. His favourite is the €5,000-per-bottle Château Pétrus, though friends and family dispute the rumour that he would serve a cheaper vintage to friends and colleagues at social gatherings while keeping the good stuff for himself.
He comes across as an enigma. He certainly isn’t a boardroom bully in the style of his sometime friend Donald Trump (Smurfit was among the first to buy an apartment at Trump Tower in Manhattan).
But nor is he the nice guy who somehow finished first. He could be hard-hearted when required. For instance, as he expanded into the United States by taking over US-based Container Corporation, he fired thousands (starting with the lawyers).
There was further pain at sclerotic Telecom Éireann after then taoiseach Jack Lynch talked him into becoming chairman. “I’m not going to be increasing employment,” Smurfit remembers. “I’m going to be increasing unemployment because we have too many people.”
His lack of sentimentality extended to his personal life, as he more or less admits when he reflects on telling his first wife, Norma, over dinner that he was leaving her for the woman who would become his second wife, Birgitta Beimark. “I made up my mind. I told Norma. She thought it was April Fool’s Day. She took the bottle of wine and poured it over my head,” he says.
The picture that emerges is of a hard-working business person but one with a streak of vanity. Today, he styles himself “Dr Smurfit”, having received several honorary doctorates (alongside the Legion of Honour from France and a British knighthood). He enjoys the finer things, too. In Monaco, he lives a gilded life, with his own yacht named after his mother, the €20 million Lady Ann Magee. “It’s the last bit of total privacy,” he says. “You’re on the sea on your own. I’ve always enjoyed the sea and solitude.”
That enthusiasm for accolades led to an amusing rivalry with another Irish tycoon, Tony O’Reilly, who instructed those at the Irish Independent that he was to be referred to as “Sir” Anthony while Smurfit was to be given no title whatsoever. Millionaires – they’re just like us!
A who’s-who of interviewees is lined up to give their perspectives, including businessman Denis O’Brien, journalists Matt Cooper and Justine McCarthy, Smurfit’s brother, Dermot and son Tony (chief executive of Smurfit Kappa). It’s a fascinating profile – albeit with a misleading title that riffs on Succession, the HBO series about the feuding scions of a global media empire.
The culture at Smurfit’s cardboard kingdom is very different – he inherited the business from his father, Jefferson, without controversy and passed it on to his son equally straightforwardly. In that respect, he is the opposite of Succession’s thuggish billionaire Logan Roy. Smurfit is soft-spoken and thoughtful but with a killer instinct. All those qualities are captured by RTÉ – even if the results are, in the end, more hagiography than warts-and-all portrait.
