Back in his Lord of the Dance heyday, Michael Flatley is said to have been gifted a £10,000 pair of diamond-encrusted tap shoes, complete with gold heels.
He actually favoured a silver heel, the same material used by NASA in its Space Shuttle nose cones but, nevertheless, it was the size 8 feet he placed inside them that held the highest value.
They could tap 35 beats a second and his legs were insured for £25 million. And as they tapped, the coffers swelled.
At one point, the Chicago-born dancer, who’d turned Irish dancing into a global phenomenon courtesy of a seven-minute slot at the 1994 Eurovision Song Contest, was said to have a net worth of £350 million and was raking in as much as £1 million a week.
Having adopted the birthland of his parents, during the early noughties he was regularly named as one of Ireland’s richest men, assembling all the requisite trappings of celebrity: a yacht, a fleet of expensive cars and homes in Monaco, London, Barbados, Co Cork and the US.
But a rather different picture of Flatley was painted in a Belfast courtroom this week, where the 67-year-old former plumber is being sued for an alleged breach of a service agreement he made with a company over the running of operations on the Lord of the Dance tour.
With the 30-year anniversary of his show coming up, Flatley signed a contract with Switzer Consulting Ltd to run the tour.
And it’s the details of that contract – Switzer insisting it has the rights to control the shows, Flatley insisting the company only operates on his behalf – that have been thrown into muddy contention.
Michael Flatley and his wife Niamh O’Brien at ‘Castlehyde House’ on the River Blackwater in County Cork
Adding to the mud fight are further bitter accusations, including the suggestion that Flatley is broke, having been living the life of a Monaco millionaire ‘without the funding to do so’, according to court documents.
The court was told how he’d borrowed £75,000 for his own birthday party and a further £50,000 to join the exclusive Monaco Yacht Club.
The picture of excess beyond means – disputed, it should be said, by Flatley – was laid bare in court in an acerbic letter from the star’s former financial adviser.
It goes on to claim that he’d moved to the millionaires’ playground on the back of a loan, because he ‘did not even have the minimum cash required to open a residency bank account’.
Accusing him of making ‘horrendous business mistakes’, the letter continued: ‘Instead of reining in his spending, adjusting his lifestyle costs and cutting his cloth to suit his measure, Michael simply borrowed more money from more people. It was all about image. All of this borrowing was used to maintain a pretence of wealth.’ Particularly excoriating was this claim: ‘Michael’s appetite for lifestyle cash was insatiable.’
It was all fiery stuff, culminating on Thursday in a partial victory – further battles loom – for Flatley when a judge discharged a temporary injunction blocking him from involvement in the tour, which is due to open in Dublin next week.
With typical bravado Flatley was all smiles as he emerged from court. He headed, the Daily Mail learned, straight to Dublin where he checked into one of its most expensive hotels – the five-star InterContinental.
And so, the question remains, what exactly has happened to the fortunes of the man who once complained that he had ‘become a travelling cash machine, just touring and making money’?
Michael Flatley performs on the stage for his show ‘Lord of the Dance’ in 1996
Certainly, question marks continue to hang over the star’s finances, given that it was a £430,000 deposit from an investment company – not Flatley – that convinced the court he had the money to pay any damages which Switzer could claim.
This week, the Daily Mail spoke to those close to the current court case, as well as friends and former associates of Flatley, and uncovered a picture of a man both lavish and generous in equal measure, who has always enjoyed the trappings of fame.
‘He’s always had a very high-end lifestyle, always liked to go to all the nice places – but it always felt like he was asset rich and cash poor,’ says one former associate.
‘I’m not surprised he’s been in court again, it’s been court case after court case over the years, with troubles following him from one drama to another.’
Certainly, this week’s row, at which Switzer did not escape criticism, is by no means the only financial dispute in which Flatley has been embroiled, nor is it his first business bust-up.
He has a long history of fractious business relationships dating back to his split from the producers of his original Riverdance, only eight months after the show had kicked off in 1995.
He was sacked amid a tussle over creative control – just when he thought he had made it, he was out.
At the time he said he was devastated, but he has since said being fired was the best thing that could have happened to him, and within a year he started his own show, Lord of the Dance.
Flatley with the cast onstage during the curtain call for the Broadway dedut of ‘Lord of the Dance: Dangerous Games’ at The Lyric Theatre on November 10, 2015 in New York City
The two creations continued to tour the globe, but only one of them with Flatley’s involvement.
More recently, there have been various wrangles over his palatial home in the Cork countryside, Castlehyde, including an ongoing dispute with builders and insurers over allegedly toxic residue caused by renovations that he says forced him to move out.
Last year, the star, whose son with second wife Niamh recently left Eton to start university, had to fend off lenders who financed his 2018, ill-fated, self-produced spy thriller Blackbird – a film he wrote, directed and starred in, but was panned by critics – from seizing the property.
The wolves were only kept from the door when two wealthy Irish businessmen, construction magnates Maurice Regan and Luke Comer, stepped in to plug the £6 million hole. Flatley bore it all with a smile, flying into Dublin from Monaco with his close friend Prince Albert of Monaco on the royal’s private jet, to attend the Six Nations Championship game between Ireland and England in March, before signing the paperwork.
The pals, who are the same age, stayed at The Shelbourne hotel, where a night in the Princess Grace Suite (named after Albert’s mother) costs upwards of £3,000.
Flatley’s financial affairs certainly appear to have become a bit of a tangled mess, a mess which this week led to him being labelled ‘Lord of the Lawsuits’, a nod to the fact that his experience with courts dates all the way back to 1997, when Flatley fired his then manager John Reid, who had also managed Queen and Elton John.
Reid then successfully sued Flatley, leading to a substantial payout.
Yet, on Instagram, Flatley, who had talked of running for President of Ireland, continues to post pictures of his glamorous jet-setting lifestyle to his 75,000 followers.
Flatley arrives at the High Court in Belfast, Northern Ireland on January 29, 2026 for the judgement in a civil case involving the Lord Of The Dance star
There are snaps with Prince Albert and Edward Walsh, the US ambassador to Ireland, his ‘great mates’ former Formula One drivers David Coulthard and Mika Hakkinen.
Other snaps show him at Monaco Yacht Club and on board the ‘beautiful yacht’ of his late close friend Eddie Jordan, the Irish ex-racing driver and motorsports mogul.
In Monaco this week, a business associate of Prince Albert and Flatley told the Daily Mail: ‘Michael is extremely well established in Monaco, and he prioritised his friendship with the prince from day one. Michael and Albert love each other’s company, and spend quality time together whenever possible.’
Flatley first moved to the Monaco area in 1999, settling in the French resort of Villefranche-sur-Mer.
Moving into Monaco itself was a sensible financial decision, given the high rate of tax in France, and he now lives close to Monte Carlo Casino, with Niamh, 51 – one of his original dancers.
A Monte Carlo resident who often sees Flatley out and about says: ‘This is a place where the rich and famous keep fit, enjoy splendid lunches, and then return to their beautiful homes to worry about their money. Michael is very generous to everyone, and loves all the best things in life, but you wouldn’t describe him as unduly flash nowadays. He’s a happy family man.’
It’s a contrast to earlier in his career, when Flatley had a reputation as a ladies’ man. ‘He was like a fox in a hen house,’ recalls one associate from those early days.
His first wife was make-up artist Beata Dziaba, then there was a six-year romance with model Lisa Murphy, which ended abruptly six months before he married Niamh, after a whirlwind romance, in 2006.
Michael Flatley (centre) leaving Belfast High Court, after a legal order blocking him from engaging with the Lord of the Dance production has been overturned
If not unduly flash, Flatley is certainly well-travelled. His social media photographs show him in the Maldives, Caribbean, Dubai, Tuscany, Lake Como, in the Arctic Circle to see the Northern Lights and at the opera in Vienna in recent years.
Sometimes there’s a cocktail in hand, but he’s also a wine buff (he maintains separate cellars for red and white at his Irish home) and recently launched his own whiskey brand, The Dreamer.
It’s all a long way from his humble roots in Chicago, where he was born to Irish emigres Michael, a plumber and Elizabeth, a talented dancer.
His sister dragged him to an Irish dance class aged 11, and six years later he won the World Irish Dance title.
But it wasn’t until he was 36 that Eurovision catapulted him – and his bare chest – to fame.
After his rise to stardom, Flatley, who retired from dancing in 2016, went through a long list of handlers, including publicist Mark Borkowski.
Borkowski has a wry respect for the former client who left him to take on Hollywood. ‘I have worked with many famous people but Michael was a complete one-off,’ he says. ‘An extraordinary talent who built a phenomenal brand and kept it alive and he has made a huge amount of money from it.’
But he warned: ‘If you are going to work with Michael Flatley, you had better play by his rules. He is tough.’ As regards Flatley’s courtroom battles, Borkowski said: ‘We say in showbiz that where there is a hit, there is a writ. I think he misses the adulation of being on stage, the sense of showmanship and having adoring fans.
Flatley attends The Irish Post Awards 2024 at The Grosvenor House Hotel on November 07, 2024 in London
‘The show is his baby and if you are placing your child under the care of someone else, that is the problem.’
In 2023, Flatley was diagnosed with an ‘aggressive cancer’ and is still being treated, ‘monitoring really’, he said in an interview late last year.
Certainly the sudden diagnosis and surgery shook him but, as he told the Irish Independent, in the wake of initial treatment: ‘I’ve never shied down from a good fight, and I’m a man of faith, so I believe God stands with me.’
And while Flatley loves his life in Monaco, he undoubtedly loves his home in Ireland, too.
Castlehyde is the 18th-century ancestral home of Ireland’s first president, Douglas Hyde, and was derelict when the dancer bought it in 1999 for £3 million, before spending a massive £25 million on renovations.
The mile-long driveway is lined with Parisian street lamps, and inside the house, there are 47 chandeliers, hand-painted wallpaper and 24-carat gold ceiling mouldings.
As well as a cinema, there is a gym, dance rehearsal room and splash pool, a six-car garage (which has variously held a Rolls-Royce, Jaguar and MG, among others) and a library in which Flatley likes to keep his collection of first editions, including a signed copy of Ulysses, by James Joyce.
A showbusiness source, who has visited the home, says: ‘His house is very, very flamboyant. He had a Christmas party every year and it was the most magnificent evening. Champagne everywhere, Christmas trees everywhere, The Chieftains [the Irish band] playing, Niamh standing at the bottom of the stairs to greet everyone.’
At The Chancery Court in the Royal Courts of Justice on Thursday, Mr Justice Simpson discharged a temporary injunction that had been secured against the dancer and choreographer
Like other observers, he points to the widely panned movie Blackbird as being the source of Flatley’s alleged financial woes.
The contact said: ‘He’s got friends who keep bailing him out but you have to hit rock bottom some time. This all feels like a major fall from grace for him and it’s sad because he has been such a great ambassador [for Ireland and Irish dance].’
Another Irish associate remains convinced he’ll bounce back in typical style, however. ‘He’ll be OK,’ he says. ‘I don’t think he’s that strapped.
‘He’s a very down-to-earth guy, a lot of celebrities have their heads up their own backsides, but he’s a decent guy and very good to the people around him.’
As for the Lord of the Dance himself, his lawyers told the court this week that the very fact he could raise nearly half a million euros overnight was ‘proof in the pudding’ of his finances.
His intellectual property rights in the show that has been four decades in the making have been valued close to £150 million, the set and costumes at another £35 million.
Shortly before Christmas, Flatley told an interviewer: ‘There is a racing car in my head that won’t stop and it’s automatically filled with new creative ideas.’
Whatever his financial affairs, the Lord of the Dance isn’t giving up the keys to all he has created just yet.
