Ken O'Reilly Hyland, who was born in 1925, is a very wealthy former business executive, member of the board of the Central Bank and Fianna Fáil fund-raiser. He owns five homes including a 5,000-acre hunting lodge in Co Tipperary which he recently put on the market for €2.3 million. He also has homes in England and Spain.
Mr O'Reilly-Hyland was chairman of the Fianna Fáil general election fund-raising committee, the main channel for corporate funding of the party in the 1970s and 1980s. The committee was part of the party organisation but not under the control of the party leader. It operated from rooms in the Burlington Hotel, one of the Doyle Group hotels in Dublin. When Charles Haughey was elected leader of Fianna Fáil in December, 1979, he and Des Hanafin, secretary of the committee, disagreed over whether Haughey should have access to the names of donors. Haughey won. Around the same time Mr Haughey and Mr O'Reilly-Hyland are believed to have fallen out.
Mr O'Reilly-Hyland was also a member of the committee which ran Taca, the precursor of the general election fund-raising committee. Taca was generally viewed as creating a negative image of the relationship between business and politics. It was eventually disbanded because of its unfavourable image, though some suspected it simply went underground. Other members of the Taca organising committee have emerged as Ansbacher clients.
Mr O'Reilly-Hyland was a director of the Central Bank from 1973 to 1983. He told the Moriarty Tribunal that at the time of his appointment he told the then minister for finance, the late Mr George Colley, that he had an offshore trust in the Cayman Islands.