Oxfam Ireland reported this week that the top 1% of Irish society holds more than a quarter (27%) of the country's wealth (€232bn) while the top 10% controls around two-thirds (64% or €547bn).

The eight Irish nationals whose net worth exceeds €1bn together hold close to €36bn, meaning they hold just over 4% of the wealth of Ireland - a country with a population of 5m people.

These eight men have built (or inherited) eye-watering fortunes through finance, telecommunications, building materials and technology and other sectors. Figures from Forbes.

Patrick Collison and John Collison

The Collison brothers are each worth $8.1bn, thanks to the staggering success of their San Francisco-based payments company Stripe, which processed payments of more than $640bn in 2021.

The company, which recently cut 14% of its workforce and reduced its internal valuation to $63bn, was named the third most influential fintech by Utility Bidder in September. John Collison spent €20m on a country estate in Abbeyleix two years ago.

In Association with

John Grayken

Valued at $6.5bn, Boston-born private equity giant John Grayken became in Irish citizen in 1999, four years after he founded Texas-based Lone Star Funds, which has found success investing in distressed property assets.

Denis O'Brien

Denis O'Brien ($3.6bn) has loomed large in Irish public life as a newspaper and radio proprietor, but his fortune is derived from his telecoms company Digicel, which is dominant mobile phone network operator in the Caribbean, Central America and the Asia Pacific region.

John Armitage

Co-founder of the Egerton Capital hedge fund, which has $22bn under management, John Armitage ($2.9bn) was born in Britain but became an Irish citizen five years ago. His firm has generated $22.6bn of net gains since its foundation in 1995, according to LCH Investments.

John Dorrance III

John Dorrance III ($2.7bn) is a grandson of John Thompson Dorrance, the inventor of condensed soup and the eventual owner of Campbell's Soup, and while his family are still the company's largest shareholders, he sold up and emigrated to Ireland in the mid-1990s. He was granted citizenship after spending $1.5m planting trees.

Dermot Desmond

Born in Cork and raised in Marino, Dermot Desmond ($2.1bn) built his fortune in finance, moving from Citibank to PwC and founding NCB Stockbrokers before selling in for $39m, which he used to start the International Investment & Underwriting private equity firm, which has stakes in the likes of Datalex and Celtic FC.

Eugene Murtagh

Eugene Murtagh ($1.9bn) is the founder of Cavan-based building materials multinational Kingspan, which over the past 55 years has built up annual revenues €6.5bn from sales of insulation and other products for commercial and industrial builds.

Photo: (l-r) John and Patrick Collison. (Pic: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images)