The latest Oxfam report should make cheerful reading for some. The Irish billionaire club rose from nine to 11 last year and their combined wealth increased by more than a third to just over €50 billion. Ireland’s richest two Irish billionaires have more wealth than the bottom half of the population. The richest 1 per cent hold an astonishing 35.4 per cent of Irish financial wealth.

Oxfam didn’t name the 11, but Forbes’s rankings suggest that you probably won’t find any living down the road – or ones that you might recognise at any rate. Of the 11, six are foreign born (India, the US, the UK) and became Irish citizens. Only a few are domiciled here.

The richest Irishman is Indian-born Shapoor Mistry, a Mumbai-based engineering tycoon whose Irish citizenship derives from his reclusive father Pallonji’s marriage to Pat “Patsy” Perin Dubash, reportedly born in Hatch Street nursing home in 1939. Shapoor’s two nephews also make the list thanks to inherited shareholdings in Mumbai-based Tata Motors. Generations of Mistry real estate wealth accretion date back to the 1860s.

[ Who are Ireland’s 11 billionaires?Opens in new window ]

The billionaire 11 also include John Grayken, the US-born founder of Dallas-based private equity business Lone Star Funds (aka a vulture fund) and long-time UK resident who reportedly renounced his US citizenship for tax purposes in the 1990s and took up Irish citizenship. John Dorrance, the quiet-living US born grandson of the Campbell soup........

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