Tony O'Reilly, or Sir Anthony as the interview in the business section of last Sunday's New York Times calls him, has explained why he never went into politics, despite his undoubted attractions to those on the look out for recruits. He avoids politics, not for fear of the limelight, he said, but out of an aversion to compromise. "Everyone owns a piece of politicians, and that's what I object to. Business is autocratic. It is not democratic," he said from the presidential suite he keeps at the St Regis Hotel, New York.
In 1977, the article continues, William Paley, the media mogul who built CBS, invited him to run the network. But O'Reilly turned him down, because he thought at the time, "Paley doesn't want me to run CBS. Paley wants to run me."
"I don't think there is any doubt what the theme in his life is," Kingsley T. Aikins, president and chief executive of the Ireland Fund tells the N Y Times. "He sees the Irish as one of the great tribes of the world, and he's a leader of it."