“There’s nothing here for sale,” joked a man who passed him recently at the graveyard. Further on another man also recognised him. “Any big deals lately?” he asked O’Gorman.

“Another day I was in Dunnes looking at half-price jumpers. ‘What are you doing here?’ a fella said.

“That’s my life, everywhere I go. My nickname is Goldfinger.”

O’Gorman has made tens of millions through investments in property and shares. His story is as rags-to-riches as they come. The high point of his career came with the sale of Cove Energy for £1.2bn in 2012. He had bought the original shell company that former Petroceltic CEO John Craven would use to develop a Mozambique gas play that hit the jackpot.

His original £1 share famously turned into an £8.8m windfall – but in fact that was just the tip of a very large iceberg, the size of which he has never revealed. Much of his subsequent Cove investment was through pension funds and other structures.

“It was an awful lot of money. The neighbours presumed we’d move. But it didn’t change anything about how we lived. People didn’t realise I had already become a multi-multimillionaire before Cove happened.”

It’s a hot day in Newry, but O’Gorman is dressed in pinstripe suit trousers, a crisp white shirt with cufflinks and matching Rolex and a fine silk tie.

“It’s all bluff,” he jokes. “I don’t have much in the head so I try and present it in the appearance.”

The suit was bought in a sale. He bought the Rolex years ago. Nevertheless, he is, in fact, much wealthier than most imagine.

“I can buy anything I want. But I don’t need it. I spend about £500 a week. All I want is this,” he says, beckoning to the cup of tea in front of him.

He opens his mobile banking app and shows a long row of digits – an account balance that would buy even the most expensive homes. But there’s no sense of arrogance as he points at the number. It is just the place to which an extraordinary life has brought him.

“I’m not a normal person. I don’t fit the normal criteria. I don’t drink, smoke, gamble, socialise or holiday. I don’t go out for big meals. I live and breathe business.

“At the start I did it because I needed it. But as you get older and you get very wealthy – very, very wealthy from being very, very poor – you think you’ll take the foot off the pedal. But you actually don’t.

“I’ve as much energy now as I did when I was 30 and I’m very good at what I do. I’m a wheeler dealer, a deal junkie.”

He is friendly, easy in conversation and courteous, constantly greeting passers-by at the hotel by name. But wealth has created barriers between him and the people around him.

“You have no idea how lonely it is. It is very intense and I do struggle with it. Every time someone approaches you, 90pc to 95pc of it is opportunistic. You incline to recluse a wee bit.”

Making friends is not easy, he says.

“I have very few. There’s friends and there’s real friends. Human nature disappoints me a lot of the time when it comes to money. I don’t fit in well with wealthy people and sometimes ordinary everyday people are a bit intimidated of the wealth I have.”

He doesn’t always deal well with this. 

“There’s no use saying I do. I just don’t. This is where the isolation and the loneliness comes from. I’m caught between two worlds. You get up some mornings and there is a cloud over you. People think because you are wealthy you must be happy, when sometimes you’re not.”

There is a quiet young man who walks the streets of Newry avoiding eye contact, looking down at his feet. O’Gorman tried to catch his eye for months. He’d pass him regularly, and the silent man would avert his eyes.

Then one day the man looked him in the eye. “Hello, it’s a nice day today,” said the man.

To O’Gorman it felt like as big a success as he had ever had. He hopes that maybe the young man will now begin to look others in the eye too. A small step out of some lonely prison. 

“To communicate with that person, who has no friends, who doesn’t communicate, that is real friendship.”

O’Gorman was the youngest of a family of four in the village of Bessbrook. His father, who worked on the ships, died when he was seven and his mother died when he was 14. When his mother died there was no one to look after him and he left school.

“I stayed with friends, sleeping here and there. I had a sister and two brothers and we all went our own ways. In those days there was no social care or welfare system. I was on my own. Neighbours always meant well, but nobody would really give you any help – and I didn’t ask for it.

“For a year or so it was very rough. I suppose ‘no fixed abode’ would be the way I’d describe it. It was pretty tough, a solo journey for a few years.”

Over the next few years he went through at least 12 jobs. “I got sacked from them all. To be fair, every time I got sacked I deserved to get sacked. I was unemployable.”

His first job, in a hotel kitchen, ended when he burnt a batch of 90 chickens he was in charge of for a function.

He was then employed to oversee a team of female factory workers. A director – an Englishman – walked in one Saturday and found him reading the newspaper as the women worked away in the next room.

“What are you doing?” the director asked. “Would you not brush the floor or something?”

“To be honest with you, if I’m supervisor and I start brushing the floor, would I not lose the respect of the workers I’m trying to supervise?”

He was soon redundant again.

Working in a pub, a rough customer grabbed him by his tie and reached for a bottle to hit him. “I hit him first before he hit me. It was self-defence, but it was another job gone.”

He was struggling. “I used to smoke a hundred fags a day, when I got them. I drank until I fell. I would have just generally been sort of… useless.”

“I wasn’t a bad person. I’ve never injured anybody. I’ve never been in a police cell. But the way I was going, it was obviously going to get worse.”

He was taken in by his Aunt Patsy and he credits her with saving him. She had a large family herself and times were tough, but she gave him the stability he so badly needed.

“If it wasn’t for her there was a very high chance I was going to end up in prison. She was the making of me. I never got a chance to tell her that before she died of cancer.“

He met a girl, Philomena, when he was 15. Five years later they married. He settled down, worked the night shift at a chipper in a tough part of town. After three years he had £6,000 saved, enough to buy a house. He renovated it and sold it for £8,000 and bought two more houses.

“Unintentionally I had adopted a model of reinvestment,” he said. He had also begun buying and selling furniture. A furniture seller on the border advised him to get into the stock market, tipping a sure thing called Atlantic Resources, Tony O’Reilly’s oil exploration firm. He bought £1,000 worth and it almost immediately crashed. But he was hooked.

“That was my introduction to shares. My next one, Kenmare Resources, made me money. I traded penny shares and quickly figured out how to work the market. You have to be streetwise. I’m not intelligent or educated, but I am streetwise.”

Avoca Resources made him good money and then Petroceltic made him his first fortune.

“Davy Stockbrokers came out with a buy recommendation for Petroceltic. On the same day I sold my entire holding. Davy was wrong, and I made £4m.”

Over time he built up probably the biggest portfolio in Ireland of exploration and resource sector stocks.

“I didn’t even have a computer and still don’t. Instead of me watching the shares I went around Dublin having lunch with the exploration analysts from the different stockbrokers. I’d give them a list of my holdings.”

He would tell them: “If any of those move, ring me. First one to ring me gets the business.”

They never failed to call. He would sell a large holding before other investors even realised what was happening, the shares would fall and he would buy them back at a lower price.

He would buy controlling stakes in small explorers to force changes at AGMs and appoint directors.

“It was the tail wagging the dog. When I went into a board room I could identify the weak links. So I knew who to get rid of when I would take a major stake in a company. They were scared of me.”

On his 55th birthday he was sitting having a cup of tea in the Canal Court Hotel and realised nobody had wished him a happy birthday. He decided to buy himself a company, and called mining firm Minmet to ask them to sell him a shell company called Lapp Plats. It subsequently became Cove Energy and made him very wealthy.

O’Gorman and his wife have no children, and he has been trying to plan for some time where his fortune will go when eventually he is gone.

“The will is sitting on the breakfast bar these last three years. There is huge responsibility in that. Say I gave a million pound to someone who never had more than a couple of hundred pound in their pocket at any time in their life… Do they buy a fast car that kills them? Do they drink more?”

“People say to me all the time ‘you’ve plenty of money, when are you going to go off and enjoy yourself?’. But Newry is the centre of the universe for me. If I want to have a meal I know where to go; if I want to be on my own I know where to go; if I want company I know where to sit.

“I’ve a house I bought for £110k we’re living in these last 27 years and my wife loves it. Should I go and buy a mansion that’s so big I’d need to get in cleaners, and next thing you’ve lost your privacy?”

And yet he retains the urge to make more money. Underlying inflation, he says, is running at 5pc so the purchasing power of every million is falling.

“To me it is almost an offence not to work the money. Say you have a £100m and it loses £5m buying power, well that £5m could have gone to some charitable organisation.”

God, he says, has given him the money to allow him to help others.

“So I have a duty to maintain the value of that or increase it and to use it to do good for people who can’t help themselves. That gives me purpose in life, a reason to exist.”

But this can make his life difficult at times and people regularly stop him on the street asking for his help.

He began a programme with the Northern Ireland Science Park to promote young entrepreneurs. The prize for the best business idea was £25,000 and he put up £1m investment to help get the company off the ground.

“On the back of that I was contacted by a young prisoner who had just been released from Hydebank, a young offender centre in Northern Ireland, after being in for four years from the age of 18.

“When you come out of prison you can’t get a job or a bank account, but he said he wanted to get into the stock market and asked me to mentor him.”

O’Gorman called to his home one evening at 7pm. He was there until 1am teaching him the tricks of the trade. “That was three years ago. He’s now a millionaire, trading stocks, vintage cars and cryptocurrencies. Him and I do projects together. In fact, I’ve just given him a property deal that will make him very wealthy.”

When the probation board and prison governor heard what he had done for the young man they asked to meet the businessman. He agreed to begin mentoring other young prisoners and set up Phoenix Resources to establish a programme. He now regularly goes to meet young prisoners.

“When I meet them I do the same as I do in a boardroom. I’m scanning them, trying to see what their interest is, what they’re not saying, what they really want. It can take a few conversations to find someone I genuinely believe I can help.”

He teases out ideas with them, sets them up with equipment they need and advises them. He has so far helped about 30 young prisoners. One of the first – a car enthusiast – showed him a car for sale in England for £7,000. “I reckon I can sell that for £9,000,” he told O’Gorman.

O’Gorman went to the bank and withdrew £7,000 in £20 notes.

“I could have given him a bank draft, but it’s about respect and dignity. I’m trusting him. If I’m wrong, the seven grand is gone.”

The teenager bought the car and sold it on for £9,000. 

“He gave me £8,000 back and kept £1,000. It was his first business deal and he’d agreed to split the profit. He said he didn’t want charity.

“That was three years ago and he’s now trading cars very successfully. On occasion, when a lorry or something big comes up, he rings me and I partner with him.”

People come to him all the time looking for help. He says he knows when they are genuine and never refuses when there is a real need.

“I don’t want to be the richest person in the graveyard,” he says. “There’s probably not one person in that graveyard wouldn’t change something about their life. But they can’t. It’s gone. But I can change it in my life.”

CURRICULUM VITAE

Name: Tom O’Gorman

Age: 69

Position: Investor in exploration and resources companies, as well as in property such as hotels. Director of Westmount Energy

Previous experience: Former chairman of Cove Energy PLC

Family: Married to Philomena for almost 50 years

Education: St Malachy’s Primary School, Camlough, Co Down

Lives: Bessbrook, Co Down until he was 15, and Newry ever since

Favourite movie: Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ. “It’s the only movie that ever affected me. It’s very emotional.”

Favourite book: Faith’s Checkbook by CH Spurgeon. “It was given to me by the moderator of the Presbyterian church and there was a time I used to read it every day.”

Favourite holiday destination: “My own home.”

BUSINESS LESSONS

What are you currently working on?

“I’m actively looking for opportunities to be part of the successful creation of a business.

"I’d love someone to come to me, who has a business idea but not the funding or the connections to open the doors to the people that matter.

"I’ve been offered all sorts of investment ideas in recent times, including one newspaper that was up for sale, but the right opportunity hasn’t come up.”

What qualities have stood you in good stead in business?

“If I say something, I mean what I say. There’s no bulls**t. I do the odd loan for builders to buy property and I give them an answer almost immediately. If I shake their hand there doesn’t need to be a contract. It’s cast in stone.”

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