Lord Ballyedmond, who has died aged 70 in a helicopter crash near his stately home on the Suffolk-Norfolk border, was a self-made multimillionaire whose business and political influence straddled both sides of the Irish Sea. He was the first person since the Marquess of Lansdowne in the 1920s to sit in both upper houses of the British and Irish parliaments, first as a senator in Dublin and later in the House of Lords.
Unlike other, brasher Irish entrepreneurs such as Ryanair's controversial chief executive, Michael O'Leary, the industrialist managed to maintain a low profile for someone who emerged as Northern Ireland's richest man. Edward (Eddie) Haughey valued his privacy to the extent that he once built a 12ft wall screening off his South Down home from the public, a move that put him in conflict with the county council. When, more than a decade ago, it ordered him to lower the wall by 4ft, he hinted that he might move his factory out of the region. The threatened legal action by the local authority was quietly withdrawn.