Who is Denis O’Brien?

This time last week, I didn’t know anything about Denis O’Brien.

Here’s what I learned in the past seven days.

Denis O’Brien was born in County Cork, Ireland, on 19th April 1958. He is probably Ireland’s richest native-born citizen. He owns Communicorp, a media company launched in 1989 that now owns 42 radio stations in 10 European countries (the UK, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Estonia, Finland, Hungary, Ireland, Latvia, Ukraine), including all Irish radio stations not run by the state broadcaster RTÉ.

The UK radio stations owned by Communicorp are: Capital South Wales, Capital Scotland, Heart North Wales, Heart Yorkshire, Real Radio XS, Smooth East Midlands, Smooth North East, Smooth North West.

He also has a controlling interest in the Independent News & Media group, which, in Ireland, comprises the Irish Independent, the Irish Daily Star, the Sunday Independent, the Sunday World, the Evening Herald in Dublin and several regional newspapers: and, in Northern Ireland, the Belfast Telegraph Group. He also owns telecoms provider Digicel, which is based in Jamaica, incorporated in Bermuda, has about 13 million wireless users, and operates across the Caribbean, Central America and Oceania. A listing of companies owned by Denis O’Brien can be found at OpenCorporates.

Our constitution, July 2012: Parliamentary privileges

“Protection of Parliamentary privileges, election of Presiding Officer, etc”

In April 2011, Ryan Giggs’s lawyers managed to convince a judge that Giggs’s girlfriend had had an affair with him for six months with intention of blackmailing him, and so ought not to be allowed to name Ryan Giggs in any interview, nor ought the UK media to be allowed to publish this, and the judge granted a superinjunction, which of course attracted the intention among the vast majority who didn’t care who Giggs was having an affair with. On 22nd May the Sunday Herald took advantage of its ambiguous position as a Scottish newspaper to identify Giggs to anyone who’d been following the story… but on 23rd May he was named in the House of Commons under Parliamentary privilege by John Hemming. The woman who’d been falsely accused of blackmail went on to clear her name in court, and the judge then suggested with remarkable meiosis that “There is no longer any point in maintaining the anonymity” though the gagging order wasn’t dropped until February this year.

Because of this incident, and because of the other more justly famous incident in the precursor to Leveson, when in November 2011 Tom Watson told James Murdoch that “You must be the first mafia boss in history who didn’t know he was running a criminal enterprise” probably what most people know about “Parliamentary privilege” is that an MP speaking in the House of Commons can say literally anything and cannot be prosecuted for defamation or for breaking a superinjunction.