Michael Smurfit: Succession (2024)

In the dark days of the 1970s and 1980s, businessman Michael Smurfit was that rarest of sights – an Irish person who bestrode the world stage unapologetically and with absolute confidence. This exclusive club also included Charles Haughey and U2 – but not many others.

Just like Bono, Smurfit was widely admired but not quite universally beloved. In Michael Smurfit: Succession (Monday. RTÉ One, 9.35pm), there are flashes of the ruthless streak that propelled him towards a net worth of more than €350 million and which made him an ambivalent figure in the eyes of many.

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 Telecom Éireann, 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?”

That’s easy to say when you have inherited your father’s packaging business and your silver-spoon education included a stint with the Jesuits at exclusive Clongowes Wood (“I became a pawn in his grand scheme of things,” he says of the elder Smurfit). But Succession isn’t interested in skewering Smurfit and is essentially a celebration of his accomplishments in growing his father’s (already substantial) company into a global behemoth.