Ireland's minted classes keep ploughing rich fields of gold despite Brexit, US trade wars

Samantha McCaughren

New Entry: Founders of standout Irish retail tech company Pointy, Charles Bibby and Mark Cummins

Big deals: The sale of payments business PFS by Meath’s Noel and Valerie Moran for €327m was one of the year’s headline-grabbers

New Entry: Founders of standout Irish retail tech company Pointy, Charles Bibby and Mark Cummins

Big deals: The sale of payments business PFS by Meath’s Noel and Valerie Moran for €327m was one of the year’s headline-grabbers

Clare Gilmartin

New Entry: Founders of standout Irish retail tech company Pointy, Charles Bibby and Mark Cummins

February 16 2020 02:30 AM

It has been a bumper year for most of Ireland's wealthiest people. The top ten entries on the list now boast a collective wealth of more than €53bn. This is more than the total Rich List in 2010.

After some early nervousness around US trade wars and Brexit, last year delivered big returns for Ireland's richest investors. As the saying goes - it takes money to make money.

People with considerable wealth tend to pour their riches into a wide range of investments, with US tech stocks such as Apple and Alphabet, the company that owns Google, delivering stellar returns. Property had a more muted year, while most portfolios had a lower exposure to bonds than in the past. Our research suggests that wise investments last year would have boosted an individual's worth by 10 to 15pc. Many did much better than that.

There were several headline-grabbing deals last year, including the sale of payments business PFS by Meath's Noel Moran and his wife Valerie for €327m. The couple will enjoy a payout of up to €266m, while staff will also receive windfalls.

Over 15 new entrants have made it onto the list, including Dublin woman Clare Gilmartin who took over the UK's most popular train ticket website Trainline in 2014 and set the company on an accelerated growth path. The business made its stock market debut last June and shares have performed well, boosting the value of Gilmartin's stake in the €2.35bn company to over €50m.

Other newcomers include Mark Cummins and Charles Bibby. Google paid a reported $160m last month to acquire their company Pointy, which makes technology that connects the goods stocked in local shops to e-commerce sites. The pair were the largest beneficiaries of the deal.

For those of us without an entrepreneurial bent, a knack for financial wizardry or an inheritance to depend on, there is always the lottery. Among the new entries is the Rogers family syndicate from Naul, Co Dublin, which scooped €175m last year.

Meanwhile, some of Ireland's wealthiest people saw their estimates revised significantly upwards in light of new information. These include beef baron Larry Goodman and Galway property developers the Comer brothers, based on the most up-to-date details available on their assets and businesses.

Meanwhile, the Collison brothers, founders of payments platform Stripe, saw their collective worth soar to €7.7bn - on paper at least.

All the entries are based on our estimates of what the individuals are worth with information drawn from a wide range of available information. While fundraisings and outright sales offer a clear valuation for many companies, we used a range of sources to piece together the wealth of people included on Rich List 2020. We spoke to advisors of some of the country's wealthiest people, as well as several financial experts.

We also examined the latest publicly available company accounts, shareholding allocation filings to the Irish Stock Exchange and other markets, as well as deals news from the past year to establish the approximate wealth of each entry.

Despite our best efforts, we can only uncover so much information and the size of fortunes could be much higher or indeed lower than our estimates.

Many of the super-wealthy are extremely private and go to great lengths to shield their personal information from public view. We do not have access to information on their debt levels and other significant outgoings, for example.

As always, this year's Rich List contains an extremely diverse group of people, with entrants ranging from musicians and entertainers, to financiers and tech entrepreneurs.