The conventional wisdom says that Denis O’Brien Is a tax-avoiding, politician-bribing, overweight, over-rich bastard with dodgy hair. So when 12 ordinary citizens awarded him €750,000 in damages against the Mirror Group last Thursday, I was absolutely flabbergasted. I never thought he’d get a fair hearing.

By awarding such a large sum of money to a billionaire with a big wad stashed under his mattress, the jury sent a clear message. It wanted to punish a newspaper for printing blatantly defamatory lies and then refusing to apologise. A newspaper that was keeping its fingers crossed that the Joe Soaps on the jury would be sufficiently poisoned by a decade-long nightmare during which O’Brien’s reputation has been almost destroyed.

Fortunately, I was wrong. There are Irish people who believe that just because you’re rich doesn’t mean you’re a crook.

Media caterwauling over the size of the award is in full swing, but the jury’s logic was flawless. To make an impact, the award had to hurt. The Mirror admitted that its original story — claiming O’Brien had bribed Ray Burke to the tune of €30,000 in order to get the licence for 98FM — was wrong. But that didn’t stop its senior counsel dragging the businessman through a litany of unproven allegations that have consumed so much time and about € 100m in costs at the Moriarty tribunal.

Far from damaging him further, all it demonstrated to the jury was that the Mirror hadn’t learnt its lesson. A graceful apology would have been cheaper than using O’Brien as a punch bag.

Everyone brings their own agenda to the O’Brien story. Mine is straightforward: in 1994 O’Brien gave me a job with Esat Telecom. Working for Denis was a crazy experience: his management style swung from tantrum-throwing rows to party-throwing love-ins.

One day you were about to be fired for not addressing a letter correctly, the next he was sending a doctor and a flask of chicken soup round to your house because he’d heard you were sick. It was nerve-wracking, fantastic craic, and a superb education in business management.

With banks threatening to pull the plug, aggressive sales targets to be met, and civil servants to keep happy, it was a high- pressured and crazy environment.

Eventually I couldn’t stick the pressure any more, and when the mobile phone licence was won, I went to work for Esat Digifone, in which O’Brien had no executive role. So no, I didn’t get to cash in.

Instead, I may have to pay the costs in relation to evidence I was required to give to the tribunal. But I don’t begrudge a penny to those who did become millionaires out of Esat when BT bought the business. They worked hard and it paid off.

It’s depressing that some people remain convinced that O’Brien is rich because he was “handed” a licence at the knock-down price of IR£15m. Either he bribed Michael Lowry, the then communications minister, to get it, or he got lucky. I admit I am biased, but I am absolutely convinced Esat won that licence fair and square.

To the “got lucky” brigade I say: many entrepreneurs got rich in the dotcom fever of the 1990s; not many have repeated their success. O’Brien has built companies in both the radio and telecommunications industries all around the world. You can’t dismiss repeated success as luck.

Others complain that having been “given” a licence to print money, O’Brien hot-footed it to Portugal to avoid capital gains tax when he sold off Esat, but this country has lots of tax exiles — Tony O’Reilly, Michael Smurfit and JP McManus among them.

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