The top business people of 2008. Where are they now?

Many of the entrepreneurs in an aptly titled 2008 book of business self-congratulation have gone bust, says Tommy Barker

HAVING banker Sean FitzPatrick write the foreword to a book profiling 12 Irish entrepreneurs — including ex-presidential hopeful Sean Gallagher, ex-bookmaker Ivan Yates, Aer Arann ex-high-flier Pádraig Ó Céidigh, and Richard Barrett, co-head of the now-folded Treasury Holdings — seemed a good idea at the time.

It was 2008, when money talked, banking had some cred, Lehman Brothers possibly believed in sub-prime stability, and Anglo Irish Bank’s FitzPatrick was Ireland’s money-lender supreme.