Patrick Rocca seemed to have it all. A poster boy for Ireland’s Celtic tiger economy, he lent Bill Clinton his helicopter whenever he was in Ireland for a round of golf and rubbed shoulders with Tony Blair at gala dinners.

He played tennis with Sir Alan Sugar in Marbella and ran a property empire that spanned the Irish Sea.

With a glamorous wife, three young children and a sister who is the partner of Van Morrison, the musician, he seemed to embody the shiny world into which Ireland transformed itself after decades on the periphery of Europe.

Yet on Monday morning neighbours noted something was not right when he was seen wandering outside his luxury home in his pyjamas. A little while later he shot himself in the head while his wife Annette was out on the school run.

His suicide, prompted by the prospect of financial ruin according to unnamed friends speaking to Irish newspapers, sent shockwaves through the beau monde of Dublin’s wealthy cocktail society, like a bell tolling the end of the heady days of Ireland’s rampant consumerism and ostentatious exuberance.

Mr Rocca, 41, died from a single gunshot to his head at the family home in Holmeleigh, an exclusive residential enclave on the edge of Dublin’s Castleknock Golf and Country Club. His end was as swift and dramatic as the reversal of fortunes for some Irish banks, including Anglo Irish, which the Government is nationalising and in which Mr Rocca was said to be heavily invested.

“From what I know, Patrick had more than ¤20 million in loans tied up with Anglo,” one source told an Irish newspaper. “News of the nationalisation was known to have come as a huge shock to him.”

There was no apparent sign in recent days that he was planning a violent death. At the weekend he was out on the town with his wife, at the exclusive members’ club Residence on Stephen’s Green and dined at a restaurant with friends on Sunday evening.

The grandson of an Italian marble mason who helped to rebuild some of Dublin’s finest buildings after the civil war and stayed in Ireland to build a business, Mr Rocca and his family liked to spend their summers in Marbella, where they own a villa.

Mr Rocca’s death came on the day that a High Court judge was picking through the debris of the vast pyramid scheme allegedly run by another Dublin socialite before deciding to refer it to the Garda fraud squad. Breifne O’Brien, a star in Dublin's party scene, is said to have conned friends out of tens of millions to fund an extravagant lifestyle. The crash in the Irish property market allegedly affected his sources of finance, so that he was no longer able to keep up the pretence of being a gifted investor.

British investments

— Lloyd’s Chambers in the City of London, bought for £104 million in 2007 from Robert and Vincent Tchenguiz

— Quadrant House in Sutton, southwest London, the headquarters of Reed Business Information, bought for £65 million in 2007 from the Tchenguiz brothers

— Norwich Union House, in Sheffield, bought in 2007 for £50 million from the Tchenguizes

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