The former property magnate, Paddy Gallagher, has died at the age of 54 after a short illness.
He was the former head of the Gallagher property and banking group which collapsed in the early 1980s.
Aged 22, Patrick Gallagher took over his father's property empire in 1974 becoming one of the country's best known property speculators, living on a large stud farm and later buying and refurbishing Straffan House, now the K Club, in Co Kildare.
His property deals made newspaper headlines. He made £2m in 1979 by buying and then selling the same property bank on St Stephen's Green in Dublin within months.
However, such deals involved servicing expensive bank loans. It was the failure of another deal on Stephen's Green, that led the banks to send in the receivers. That was 1982 and the Gallagher Group, which by then included a banking operation, collapsed.
An investigation into the Northern subsidiary of that banking operation ultimately saw Mr Gallagher serve a jail sentence in the North after he pleaded guilty to fraud.
On his release he moved to South Africa, but his affairs were to resurface at the Moriarty Tribunal in 1999 when it emerged that 20 years before, he had loaned former Taoiseach Charles Haughey £300,000. He told the Tribunal he had done so out of a sense of duty.
Mr Gallagher's funeral takes place tomorrow.
