Television: With a who’s-who of interviewees, this RTÉ documentary is more of a hagiography than warts-and-all portrait
Michael Smurfit: Succession review - A soft-spoken and thoughtful multi-millionnaire with a killer instinct
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, 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?”
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.
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.
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