The ad followed the airline's famous 'Look up, it's Aer Lingus' campaign and was designed to convey the comforting familiarity of the flying shamrock at a time of mass emigration. It showed a young, good-looking couple flying to Ireland with happy homecoming smiles as the voiceover reassured them in paternal, honey tones, "you're home".

Unknown to television viewers, the blond, square-jawed male model in the Aer Lingus commercial was, when not posing for the camera, burning the midnight oil in his garret to become a pin-up of the advancing boom times. His name was Geoff Read.

He was Brideshead handsome and just as polished, a native of affluent Foxrock and an old boy of Wesley College. "He was very reliable. A perfect gentleman. Great manners, " remembers his former agent, Geraldine Brand. In other words, he was one of those rare sons of his generation who had it all. But it wasn't enough. While studying business at Trinity College, he worked both as a part-time gardener and as a photographic model with the Brand agency to raise enough money to launch his dream venture: selling water to a people surrounded by it.

A journalist who interviewed him and two other male models in the early 1980s for a lifestyles article remembers Read following her to the door as she was leaving the building and politely requesting a "plug" for a business he was setting up.

"Oh really, what is it?" she enquired.

Water in bottles, explained Adonis. To which the journalist silently enjoined, "There, there, dear, " and left the building, banishing all thoughts of the model flogging his equivalent of ice to the Eskimos until she saw him officially launching it with much hoopla on The Late Late Show a year later.

Ballygowan was born in 1984 to an insular, downtrodden island of dole queues where the moneyed handful asserted their superior status by occasionally ordering Perrier to accompany their Black Forest gateau. It is testament to Read's business confidence that not only did he surmount the innate cultural resistance to his idea but that he managed to raise �15m to develop the Ballygowan plant. By joining forces with the well-established drinks company, Richard Nash & Co in Newcastle West, Co Limerick, he had access to an instant distribution network.

Within two years of launching his iconic product, Ballygowan was locked in a legal challenge against Tipperary Spring Water with a claim that the latter was imitating its product (both brands came in green bottles). Thus Read evinced a propensity for litigation that would emerge as a pattern in his business life.

In 1988, he sued the giant American company Anheuser Busch, which had bought a 50.1% stake in Ballygowan. He also sued Mr Richard Nash and Nash Holdings.

The case was settled out of court. Nash and Read subsequently took over Anheuser Busch's stake and, in 1993, they sold Ballygowan to C&C for �15.6m.

It was a gigantic price for the time but still 10m short of what Ballygowan had been seeking.

After the sale, Read moved to London . . . reputedly to benefit from a tax advantage . . . with his wife, Dublin southsider Wendy Wolfe, who had been working in an advertising agency when the couple first met. He initially kept his link with Ballygowan by staying on as the company's British chairman for four years. At around the same time, he became a shareholder in London Irish rugby club, going on to serve as its unpaid chairman for five years.

The club, which also boasts Ryanair's Declan Ryan as a director, emerged with a very healthy bank balance from an impecunious transition to the professional rugby era. Its shares were floated at 20p each in October 2005, valuing the club at stg�7m.

"He mightn't have had a huge knowledge of rugby but he saved London Irish from going under, " says someone involved in the 110-year-old premiership club. "It was Geoff who spearheaded the merger of London Irish with London Scottish and London Irish got a lot of money from premier rugby as a result of that. He's extremely well liked but not everyone would have approved when he was going around saying that England was the only place for players to be at a time when Irish rugby was really taking off."

According to someone less enamoured:

"He's very patronising."

Meanwhile, for his day job, Read set up a drinks distribution company in England called Carter Short Trading, which ultimately went into liquidation. At another stage, he joined the cybercorporates when he set up a recruitment website.

In around 1995, he joined forces with one of Ireland's biggest independent wine distributors, Febvre & Company, to sell quarter-bottles of wine to British pubs under a joint company, Grape Expectations. That relationship too has become mired in litigation since Read issued proceedings three years ago.

"He's a driven, obsessive, compulsive, impulsive entrepreneur, " says a former colleague. "When he has a target, he'll crash down walls and trees, whatever it takes, to get there. The Ballygowan organisation was hugely based on his personality and his attitude of 'my way or no way'. He had a habit of falling out with people over silly things. Like a lot of people who are very successful, he has an arrogance that has an upside and a downside to it."

In the week that his Ballygowan baby has been bought by Britvic for 250m, Geoff Read's own financial circumstances are described as "very comfortable". He is always immaculately dressed, home is a fine house in Maidenhead and his three gorgeous sons attend Wellington College, a prestigious London co-ed where the day-student annual fees are almost stg�20,000.

"Is he well off? You'd definitely say that, " says an acquaintance. "But he wouldn't be in the super-rich category."

C.V.

Age: Approaching 50
Married to: Wendy Wolfe
In the news: Ballygowan, which he founded 13 years ago, was sold by C&C to Britvic this week for 250m