like Robert Tchenquiz, recently in the headlines when he reportedly lost £560m on the value of his investments in 12 weeks.

Hilary Weston (pictured on previous page), Ireland's richest woman, worth £4bn, has retail assets in North America from her marriage to a Canadian retailer. County Fermanagh insurance tycoon Sean Quinn, Ireland's second richest individual with a fortune of £3bn, hunts for businesses that grow 30 per cent and has taken control of five-star Hilton hotels in Prague and Sofia, Bulgaria.

Sean Mulryan - who has two helicopters - owns most of London's Canary Wharf. Johnny 'The Buccaneer' Ronan, the pony-tailed son of a pig farmer, who has a chauffeur-driven metallic blue Hummer, is behind the Battersea power station development in

London and is involved in a €1.2bn property development in Shanghai.

All of which can make a pop star feel pretty small. U2, Ireland's leading pop export, are worth a mere £487m, putting them at a lowly 20th on the country's rich list. As a result they have been emulating the oligarchs' tactics to try to catch up, recently moving their publishing business out of Ireland to the Netherlands for tax reasons.

Frontman Bono now sits on the board of a private equity company, Elevation, with a previous senior MD of Blackstone, the world's largest private equity group. Elevation has raised €1.3bn in capital to invest in media and music industry businesses. In an interview in Portfolio magazine Bono (left) said he now spent 15 per cent of his time on Elevation where he is both a door-opener and a deal closer.