Billionaire Denis O’Brien May Stop When He Owns All Physical Matter

29th Apr 2015

A leaked Department of Finance memo into the Siteserv controversy has suggested that Denis O’Brien may be close to finishing his relentless lifelong ambition to have more money than everyone else. 

Sources close to controversial business man who now owns most newspapers, radio stations, water, eggs, flour and young families, say that he is now considering calling a halt to his relentless accumulation of wealth now that he is the clear “winner of everyone” with a €6.1 billion fortune.

The department believe that he will stop causing problems and controversies when he has finally purchased all physical matter in the state and has realised that the average Irish person is now worth just over €100,000 – making him approximately 60,000 times wealthier than the average citizen.

The current Fine Gael led government has been under fire in recent weeks after one of Mr. O’Brien’s companies bought Siteserv from IBRC, formerly Anglo Irish Bank, who had just written off €100m of its debt at expense of the Irish tax payer. The company’s subsidiary, Sierra, won the contract to install water meters for Irish Water soon after.

Mr. O’Brien has previously been embroiled in a tribunal investigating the awarding of a mobile phone license to his company in the nineties when Fine Gael were also in power.  

The People’s Republic of Cork Department of Sums has made some calculations on the back of an Irish Water bill. Based on the 2.325cm diameter of a 1 euro coin, if O’Brien’s €6.1 billiion fortune was laid out in a straight line of single euro coins it would stretch for more than 141,825km – that’s three and a half laps of the earth.

Here’s another way of thinking about his enormous wealth keeping in mind the extraordinary and heroic efforts that lots of Corkonians go to in cycling from Mizen Head to Malin Head to raise a modest sums for good, and often desperate, causes:

Denis O'Brien's fortune could create a pathway for cyclists made entirely of 1 euro coins that not only stretches the entire 555km length of the country from the most southerly point to the most northerly one but would also be a staggering 5.94 metres wide. That’s just short of the width of a two lane motorway carriage running the length of the island - entirely paved with euro coins.  All owned by one man.

Said to be a fan of old-school computer games, O’Brien is hoping to enter his initials into the top position of the country’s high score table when he finishes acquiring all physical matter in the country – a point likely to occur soon after he wins the license to supply air to the nation in 2019.

Sources say he hopes his initials will be seen from space after using controlled wildfires to burn them into the ground across most of Connaught and Leinster.

The government has said it is determined to thoroughly investigate the Siteserv controversy and has burst into action. A Dáil committee will now set up a working group which will create an independent panel which will hire a team of consultants to report back to an investigating body that will link in with a retired judge who will present a report to the working group who will write a letter to the Department of Finance who will hand it to a team of barristers who will heavily redact it and leak selected chunks to favoured Dublin journalists for publication.

Due to fears by department officials concerning libel actions, it will have only three words which we have been given permission to publish in this week’s column:

“A thing happened.”