The Billionaire Who Wasn't (44 page)

CHAPTER 29

A Nation Transformed

As Chuck Feeney expanded his giving in other countries, he was gearing up for bigger things in Ireland. What would become perhaps his most notable philanthropic endeavor got under way at a dinner organized by John Healy for the board members of Atlantic Philanthropies during a visit they made to Dublin on October 21, 1997.

One of those invited to the dinner was Don Thornhill, Ireland's top education official. As secretary general of the Department of Education and Science, Thornhill received many invitations to functions, and turned most of them down. He didn't know much about Atlantic Philanthropies, but he had heard rumors about a mysterious philanthropy that was giving millions of dollars to Irish universities, and his instincts told him that this might be a significant occasion.

On arriving for the dinner at Heritage House, an elegant Georgian building on St. Stephen's Green owned by General Atlantic Group, the trim, bearded education official found himself placed at the top table with Ireland's Nobel Prize-winning poet, Seamus Heaney; his wife, the writer Marie Heaney; and two Americans, one tall and bald with a commanding presence who introduced himself as Harvey Dale, a lawyer from New York University, and the other a short and genial businessman who said his name was Chuck Feeney. The name Feeney rang a bell with Thornhill: He had read something about the Irish American's involvement in the Northern Ireland peace process.

Healy had invited Seamus Heaney to the dinner, as he wanted someone of note in Ireland to grace the occasion of the directors' visit. He had driven to Heaney's home on the seafront in Dublin and told him in confidence about the hundreds of millions of dollars that Chuck Feeney had given anonymously to Ireland, north and south.

Seamus Heaney stood up to speak to the fifty or so guests. After a few digressions, the Nobel laureate said, “Ladies and gentlemen, you will understand by now that I am approaching my subject by stealth, and I do so in order to imitate the methods by which the Atlantic Foundation has for years been doing its own legendary work of philanthropy.” He was there, he said, “to acknowledge the magnificence of its activities and the reticence of its directors, the most legendary of whom, Mr. Chuck Feeney, will have to pardon me for overdoing things this evening to the point of mentioning his name.” The intervention of the Atlantic Foundation in Ireland had been “epoch-making,” Heaney went on, and came not just from the great traditions of philanthropy but “as a result of the great selflessness, the veritable Franciscan renunciation and Renaissance magnificence of one man in particular, Mr. Chuck Feeney.” The poet finished with a reference to how “cease-fires, and Velvet Revolutions and the Atlantic Foundation are parts of a saving under-song within the music of what happens as our century comes to an end.” He ended with some moving lines from his play
The Cure at Troy
⁷
that had been quoted in several speeches by President Bill Clinton on Ireland.

 

It was a masterly performance. Chuck Feeney, normally most reluctant about receiving praise and thanks, was deeply moved. As the diners thundered out their applause, he was heard to say quietly, “My cup runneth over.”

Don Thornhill found Chuck Feeney to be a “very modest, very pleasant man.” He felt that the placing was no accident, and that he was being
put under scrutiny. “I was flying blind,” he recalled. “Like one of Elizabeth Taylor's later husbands, I had only a vague idea of what was expected from me.”

Thornhill was correct in his assumption. “He
was
under scrutiny,” said John Healy. “We were courting him.” Chuck, Harvey, and John, in the subtle ways they had developed over years, were doing due diligence on the important bureaucrat, because they had sweeping new plans for education in Ireland, and they needed a reliable partner inside the government structures.

“Chuck was really keen to do really big things,” said Healy. With Atlantic Philanthropies in a much stronger financial position, Feeney was looking to move beyond buildings and do something that would have a real impact on the growing tiger economy of Ireland. He wanted to shift gears, to move to a new level and fund postgraduate research on a scale unimagined by Ireland's government. Ireland's future prosperity depended on creating new knowledge, but the government had failed to invest public money in postgraduate research. The economy was heating up after decades of mismanagement and protectionism, while the research landscape remained bleak. Some noncommercial funding was coming from the European Union, but Ireland's spending on research was just 11 percent of the European average. On top of that, the university sector was disjointed, with little intercollegial cooperation.

For the first time in its history, Atlantic was aiming to enter direct negotiations with a sovereign government, to do a matching deal “where we put some money on the table, and force them to put some money on the table,” said Healy.

Astonishingly, the secretary general of the Department of Education and Science was not really aware of the role Feeney had played in funding Irish universities during the previous ten years. After the dinner he asked one of his top officials, Paddy McDonagh, to make some inquiries about Atlantic Philanthropies. McDonagh spoke to contacts in the Department of Foreign Affairs and reported back, “It's highly secretive, and if you make any approach to them at all, that's it, all communications are finished, are dead.”

It was a measure of the effectiveness of Harvey Dale's strictures that the education department was in the dark. It was, moreover, not in the interest of university presidents to let the world know anything about their friend Chuck, as they feared it could mean less funding from the Higher Education Authority. New libraries, science buildings, and student villages were
going up on every campus, and there were jokes going around the system about the “edifice complex” of university presidents, but no one in the education department had connected the dots. Donations from wealthy Irish like Michael Smurfit, Anthony O'Reilly, Tim O'Mahony, Lochlan Quinn, and Tony Ryan had played a part, but their contributions didn't come close to what the universities were mysteriously raising elsewhere. University presidents seemed to have developed an extraordinary talent for raising money in America. Some complained with a straight face about the exhausting trips they had to make across the Atlantic to hustle up money, when in fact it was Feeney who came to them.

John Healy made the initial approach for what would become possibly the biggest single act of education philanthropy in modern Europe. Some weeks after the Heritage House dinner, he invited Don Thornhill, who had since then been made executive chairman of the Higher Education Authority, to join him for breakfast in the dining room of the Westbury Hotel, just off Grafton Street in Dublin. He also invited John Dennehy, Thornhill's successor as head of the Department of Education and Science, and Paddy McDonagh, adviser to the minister for education.

As they sipped their coffee, Healy told them, “You should understand our credibility because you know now through the grapevine what we are doing at a number of universities. We now think research capacity in Ireland is pathetically small and should be strengthened. You guys need to invest more. Why don't we do something together?”

How would they respond, he asked, if Atlantic put up IR£75 million (US$125 million)? Would the Irish government put up the same amount? There was a shocked silence. “They looked at me as if I were mad,” recalled Healy.

“Think about it,” Healy went on. “We don't have to spend our money in Ireland, we are working in lots of places, in the United States, Australia, Vietnam. In fact Colin McCrea, my collaborator, cannot be with me today because as we speak he is on his way to the airport to fly to Australia, where there is a very interesting opportunity in the University of Queensland.”

Thornhill quickly recovered the initiative. “Right, OK, I'll do a paper,” he said. Thornhill was naturally eager to get greater funding for research. “The economy was at that point beginning to turn from the situation where we were exporting our university graduates to one where shortages were developing in the information and communications technology area,” he recalled.
When a new government had come into office in June 1997, he had persuaded the incoming minister for education, thirty-seven-year-old Micheál Martin, to “have a row” with the minister for finance over his department's recent veto of IR£50 million for information technology facilities in universities. But the sympathetic minister for education had come back shaken from an encounter with the finance minister. He had asked for IR£50 million and had got IR£5 million. The allocation was even then whittled down to IR£4 million.

Harvey Dale arrived in Ireland shortly after the high-drama breakfast, and he and Healy set up a formal meeting with officials at the Department of Education and Science headquarters on Marlborough Street. When they detailed their proposal, Dennehy asked them if Atlantic Philanthropies could be trusted to come up with the IR£75 million. “Look at our record,” said Healy, as Dale fixed Dennehy with a cold stare. The foundation president in turn asked the civil servants how Atlantic could trust the Irish government. The foundation had never done a matching grant with a government: What would happen if there were a change of government? What would happen if someone asked the prime minister or minister for education a question about the anonymous donor? What if the Irish government failed to deliver on a pledge? “We can't sue the government, it is sovereign,” Dale told them. Thornhill retorted, “You, too, are sovereign!” Thornhill understood that Atlantic's undertaking was just as revocable as the Irish government's and the foundation could not be sued for failing to deliver on a pledge. Dale came to admire and respect Thornhill. “But for him, we might not have done the deal,” he said.

Thornhill became the key architect of the plan. It was fraught with problems. There had to be absolute secrecy. The seven universities in the Republic were fiercely independent and guarded their privileges and autonomy. Healy made it clear that the proposal depended on an open, genuine, competitive program for grants, to be reviewed by international experts. University presidents would not be able to rely on across-the-board handouts: The funding would only be for proposals that fit with the overall strategic plan of the institution.

Thornhill quietly slipped out of his office on a few occasions to meet Healy and his deputy Colin McCrea in the Atlantic Philanthropies office on a leafy Dublin boulevard. “I always made it my business to meet them there,” said Thornhill, who became as secretive about his dealings with
Atlantic as any university president. “If people were coming into my office for a meeting there would be a record.” He was also the keeper of the government's secrets and had to be careful what he told outsiders. Thornhill never kept notes of these meetings, nor did he make entries in his desk diary, as he might be forced one day to make them public under the Freedom of Information Act.

On a visit to Dublin, Chuck Feeney pushed the proposal along by dropping in to see Micheál Martin and telling him he believed Ireland should be spending more money on research. Thornhill heard about the encounter and mischievously remarked at the next departmental meeting with the seven university presidents, “Oh, by the way, the minister was talking recently to Chuck Feeney.” The temperature in the room dropped by about twelve degrees, he recalled with a delighted laugh. “They were seriously uncomfortable with this notion of politicians and officialdom moving into their zone, and understandably.”

The proposal was moved along inside the bureaucracy by senior education department official Paddy McDonagh, and the minister's political adviser, Peter McDonagh (no relation). Faced with an unprecedented, even outlandish, request for IR£75 million in matching funds, Department of Finance officials dragged their heels. As the delay lengthened, Feeney used an encounter with the new prime minister, Bertie Ahern, to get across the message that there was a very exciting proposal being developed but the Atlantic money wasn't going to sit around forever. “Basically we were unhappy with the fact that the government was not investing the kind of money that they should be investing,” recalled Feeney. “We said, ‘Look, frankly you've got to invest in research, and now we've put buildings in, you've got laboratories and classrooms.'” After this, said Thornhill, the Department of Finance officials became a good deal more amenable.

Still the interdepartmental negotiations dragged on. “It was excruciating,” said Thornhill. Healy was getting more and more impatient. On Tuesday, November 10, 1998, he issued an ultimatum to the officials. He said he was going to South Africa on Saturday and had to leave for the airport at 1:00 PM. If there was no approval by then, there was no deal.

Paddy McDonagh informed the Finance Department what was at stake. At 4:30 on Friday, November 13, as people were preparing to leave their offices for the weekend, a document summarizing the proposal that McDonagh had sent to the Finance Department was returned with a scribbled
amendment. The addendum turned out to be the authorization they were seeking. Seventy-five million pounds of taxpayers' money would be put up to match the anonymous IR£75 million from Atlantic. Bertie Ahern would announce the IR£150-million fund the following Thursday and would describe Feeney's half as private funding.

The university heads had to be told in confidence that Atlantic Philanthropies would be the source of the private money being put up, so they would not panic about having to raise it themselves. Don Thornhill invited Danny O'Hare, who was chairman of the Conference of Heads of Irish Universities, to meet him at his office in Ballsbridge on Saturday morning, November 14, and to keep quiet about it. When O'Hare saw John Healy with Thornhill, he knew it was something to do with Atlantic.