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Ann Riordan
Date of Birth: July 17th, 1947
Date of Death: March 5th, 2021
Ann Riordan, who has died aged 73, was the first general manager of Microsoft in Ireland. In that position she played a hugely influential role in key decisions that led to Ireland occupying the place it does today as a European and global leader in the information technology sector.
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In a career filled with personal and professional challenges, her life is testimony to the maxim that a person does not necessarily have to have a university education to be wildly successful.
For Ann Riordan the necessary qualities were character, drive and ambition, infused with a strong sense of fairness and a refusal to bend to arbitrary exclusion based on gender.
She was born Ann Kelly in July 1947, the eldest of seven children to Joe Kelly, a mechanic at CIÉ’s Broadstone depot, and Lillie Kelly, a seamstress who also taught at the Grafton Academy of Dress Designing.
The young Ann grew up on Loretto Avenue, a local authority housing scheme in the Nutgrove Avenue area of Rathfarnham, Co Dublin. She attended St Louis High School in Rathmines but left aged 16, taking the Leaving Certificate later. She did not have a college education.
Her first job was as an administrative assistant with the Alliance and Dublin Consumers Gas Company – better known simply as the Gas Company – where she earned IR£4 and 10 shillings a week – “which I thought was a fortune”, she wrote later.
But when handed her first pay packet she found that it, and the pay packets of all her female colleagues, was missing a backdated cost-of-living increase negotiated by the Irish Transport and General Workers Union (forerunner of Siptu).
“Aghast and furious” as she later described her feelings, she was told the increase was for men only, and was met with a “dismissive attitude” from union officials who saw the interests of female workers as a distant second to those of their male colleagues.
Robust demands from the women, led by Ann and eventually supported by male employees, galvanised reluctant union officials and forced the management to concede an equal increase to the women.
Man’s job
Kelly next applied for a position as a central heating designer only to be told, by the union, that this was a man’s job – an obstacle she refused to accept and won the appointment, aged 19.
In 1970, she married Frank Riordan, a trainee accountant, and became one of the first woman to breach the State ban on women returning to the workplace after their marriage. In a memoir written for her family, she recalled the Gas Company telling her it “would be delighted if I returned, but . . . the union did not approve of married women working and I would need to get its agreement”.
“I just couldn’t believe it: I had to approach and get approval from the union for a third time, this time to keep my job because I was woman,” she wrote.
After being granted a compromise paltry six months’ employment as a married woman, she left the Gas Company to become a full-time mother and housewife. However, it soon became evident she had to become the family bread-winner, and so, in October 1970, she left for London and her two children Lisa and John.
Riding the underground and scanning for job ads, she applied for several, was offered all, but settled for L’Oreal, the cosmetics company. Her role was to liaise between Bedfordshire-based employees and their families as the company moved to south Wales. She was delighted with herself.
“I just took both shoes off and walked barefooted around London, after all nobody knew me, so it didn’t matter? And I was alive again! I could have danced around the fountain with my arms in the air,” she wrote in her memoir.
Starting on a six-month contract, she stayed with L’Oreal and was given responsibility for administration and offices services, including oversight of a substantial budget.
“I approached my job with passion. Working with creative people in sales, marketing, the training school, was quite a challenge, to say the least,” she wrote.
After L’Oreal she worked for a time at a financial services company in the City of London, bought an apartment in Highgate and, in 1976, made her first foray into tech – becoming office services supervisor for Wordplex, a small start-up.
“Wordplex grew exponentially, as did my role and responsibilities,” she wrote in her memoir. “I was managing everything for the business apart from sales and marketing, including accounts, distribution, administration, office services, procurement and recruitment.
“This was my first experience of a start-up company; all hands were on deck and nobody paid heed to their job specification, whatever needed to be done was done.
“The flow of adrenaline was incredible and when we won a big order there were celebrations all around. . . there was no end to the workload. But it was exhilarating.”
Donation
In August 1981, she returned to Dublin as managing director of Wordplex Ireland, a move that proved to be an unwelcome eye-opener. She recalled in her memoir the advice of one Irish customer of the company.
The customer told her to pitch for “all government tenders and in those that we were successful, we would be expected to make an agreed donation to his political party”, she wrote.
“I immediately rang a former attorney general of the other main political party and asked for a meeting, which he agreed to. When I met him in Leinster House . . . I relayed the conversation that had taken place.
“His first reaction was to look around the room we were in; I think he thought the room may have been bugged. He relaxed when he realised that I was just a business person, not a journalist, and he simply said; ‘you should know how things work here, and if you can’t stand the heat get out of the kitchen and go back to London’.”
Riordan stayed in Dublin and paid no bribes. After Wordplex (the company became a victim of the 1980s recession), she became Ireland country manager for Zenith Data Systems, Ireland.
By now she had caught the eye of Bill Gates of Microsoft, whose London recruitment agent headhunted her in December 1990.
Microsoft had been in Ireland since 1988 but, despite that, remained largely unknown. It wanted to expand and was looking for someone to lead sales.
Riordan told the company she was not a sales person but was good at start-ups and general management. Undeterred, Microsoft hired her as country manager for Ireland, and in February 1991, Gates came to Dublin and asked if there was “anything he could do” to help her.
“I jumped at the chance and decided to hold an event at the Shelbourne Hotel during his visit,” she recalled.
Five hundred people turned up and saw Gates demonstrate how Excel could port Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheets, plus her own presentation of the company’s new development strategy revealed to employees just two days’ previously. Riordan’s “up-and-at-it” approach appears to have wowed the Microsoft boss.
Big win
Her first big win for Microsoft Ireland was to secure a contract with An Post that paved the way for the company winning a similar order from the Royal Mail in the UK.
In 1995, Gates returned to Ireland with his new wife Malinda and investment adviser Warren Buffet for the RDS launch of Windows 95 before 6,000 people and the bands Queen, Simple Minds and U2.
A year later at the company’s grandly-titled Global Summit in Montreal, Canada, Gates singled out Riordan in front of 12,000 people as recipient of The Chairman’s Award for what she had achieved in Ireland and, by extension, in Europe.
Microsoft today employs close to 3,000 people in Ireland, and the country is the company’s European headquarters. A further 100,000 people are employed overall in tech in Ireland.
Riordan retired from the company in 2000. She went on to hold several other senior positions, including president of the Institute of Directors in Ireland (IOD), chairwoman of Science Foundation Ireland, and was chair of the National Standards Authority of Ireland, Tourism Ireland, the Dublin Regional Tourism Authority, and a public interest director of the EBS Building Society.
This week, Maura Quinn, a colleague from the IOD, said Riordan was “one of the most extraordinary people I ever met”.
“She had an extraordinary ability to think very strategically,” Quinn said. “She was very bright and had great humanity. She was extremely kind and thoughtful. She would challenge [others] but brought out the best in them. She was never unpleasant and was totally devoid of ego.”
A trailblazer for women in corporate Ireland, Riordan did not see herself in terms of feminism. She was motivated more by a sense of fairness and humanity, according to her daughter.
Fantastic cook
Lisa recalled a mother who was a fantastic cook – “she did a wicked Sunday dinner” – and who took particular pride in her appearance, especially in her hair and make-up. She wore pearls while gardening.
She was not a church-goer but was sincerely spiritual, and in retirement devoted time to helping the Brigidine community build and manage a retreat, The Solas Bhride Centre in Kildare.
She coped with her final illness with a mixture of defiance and good cheer. Knowing Christmas 2020 would be her last, she bought a karaoke machine.
“She wanted us to sing and sing we did,” said Lisa.
Ann Riordan was predeceased by her husband Frank. She is survived by their children Lisa and John, and grandchildren Amy, Harry, Regan and Seán, and by her brothers and sisters.