O’Reilly walked on broken glass in his costly effort to save Waterford

PRAISE for Tony O’Reilly is in short supply in Waterford these days but the workers at the city’s near-doomed crystal manufacturer should be inclined to offer a word or two of thanks to their former chairman for his efforts to save the company.

The idea may seem ludicrous to some. After all, O’Reilly has presided over the near destruction of a traditional giant of Irish manufacturing. Waterford Crystal — or at least the Waterford Wedgwood group of which it is a main part — has accumulated enormous debts and losses, has made thousands of workers redundant in recent years, overseen the dilution of the Irish identity of the brand and left a massive deficit in the pension fund.

However, O’Reilly deserves considerable credit for his efforts to make Waterford Wedgwood a viable business. He and his brother-in-law, Peter Goulandris, invested more than €400 million in new capital for the group over the past five years and almost certainly have lost nearly all of it. They also guaranteed company loans amounting to something like €100m, almost one-fifth of the total, and will have to cover those repayments too.