Chuck Feeney’s generosity transformed Irish universities and helped fast-track peace in Northern Ireland (2024)

In October 1997, John Healy, managing director of Tara Consultants in Dublin’s Lower Baggot Street, dropped by Seamus Heaney’s house on Sandymount Strand. He told the Nobel Prize-winning poet that Tara Consultants was in fact the Irish arm of a secretive foundation called Atlantic Philanthropies, set up by an Irish-American philanthropist called Chuck Feeney, which had been anonymously transforming Irish universities with its funding for a number of years. Would Heaney come to a private dinner party and say a few words acknowledging his generosity?

At the dinner, in Heritage House on St Stephen’s Green, the poet duly acknowledged the “epoch-making” intervention of Atlantic Philanthropies’ giving in Ireland. He praised the “great selflessness, the veritable Franciscan renunciation and Renaissance magnificence” of its founder, Chuck Feeney, adding that “ceasefires and velvet revolutions and Atlantic Philanthropies are part of a saving undersong within the music of what happens as our century comes to an end.” Normally reluctant to receive praise and thanks, an embarrassed Feeney was deeply moved.

Heaney had not exaggerated. The philanthropist had by then personally arranged game-changing investment in all nine universities on the island, on condition that his name be kept confidential.

The dinner was also a prelude to a big gamble by Atlantic Philanthropies that was to help launch Ireland into the next century. One of the guests was Don Thornhill, secretary general of the Department of Education and Science. Feeney’s success in persuading university presidents to be tight-lipped about their benefactor meant that Ireland’s top education official was unaware until then of quite who Feeney was. Thornhill had been invited because Atlantic Philanthropies had sweeping new plans for education in Ireland and needed a partner inside government structures.

Feeney always tried to leverage his major giving by getting matching funds from governments. He was now planning to involve the Irish government in what was to become the biggest single act of education philanthropy in modern Europe.

In those years, Ireland was trailing in the fields of information and communications technology. The then-education minister Micheál Martin had asked for £50 million (€63 million) for research and information technology facilities in universities, but the cash-strapped finance department had cut it to a mere £4 million.

Shortly after the dinner, Healy met Thornhill and two other education officials for coffee in the Westbury Hotel. He told the mandarins that he represented a foundation that wished to invest £75 million in third-level research in Ireland. Would the Irish government match that? The shocked officials passed the request to the Department of Finance, which responded with incredulity and foot-dragging.

Only after Feeney, his glasses held together with a paper clip, went to speak to then taoiseach Bertie Ahern and after warnings that the offer would be withdrawn, did the government agree. The result was the investment of £150 million in the Programme for Research and in Third-Level Institutions (PRTLI). The programme grew over the years, the capacity for world-class research in Ireland was substantially increased and the brain drain of the best research talent was reversed.

Feeney’s insight into Ireland’s struggling higher education needs was matched by his political foresight. He had the courage and conviction in the 1990s to invest in Sinn Féin and loyalist groups when he became convinced that they wished to end the violence and then to follow up with programmes to enhance civil society. His intervention, the former Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams told me, brought forward the ceasefires by a year.

Feeney engaged in similar transformative ventures in other countries, such as Australia, Vietnam, South Africa and the United States. His investments in third-level research in Queensland, Australia, for example, transformed it into the “smart state”. He applied the genius of entrepreneurship that made him rich as co-founder of Duty Free Shoppers to his giving. He liked to make big bets, such as the investment in PRTLI. He especially loved bricks and mortar and the dozens of medical and technological research buildings he funded worldwide stand testimony to that.

He hated to be thanked. When a hospital director in Da Nang, Vietnam, praised him for funding a paediatric centre, Feeney responded: “It is you I have to thank for doing good things with the money.”

Travelling with him I saw his face light up with pleasure when he walked around a hospital and saw babies in incubators that actually worked, when he watched an eye doctor restore the sight of a poor person or when he saw poor children working on computer terminals.

What made Feeney unique among philanthropists is that he decided to give away his total fortune in his lifetime, rather than setting up a perpetual foundation limited to spending small amounts each year.

“If I have $10 in my pocket, and I do something with it today, it’s already producing $10 worth of good,” Feeney told me once. Anyway, he said, he identified with the old Irish saying: “There are no pockets in a shroud.”

Feeney travelled economy class and wore off-the-peg clothes and a plastic watch but while frugal to the point of eccentricity, he was not cheap. He liked to give people thoughtful presents, often pictures he commissioned from his friend the artist, Desmond Kinney. In restaurants, Feeney insisted on paying.

He and Heaney met again in 2012. Feeney avoided opening ceremonies but was persuaded to come to see the library he had helped fund at Queen’s University Belfast when invited to tour the building with the Nobel laureate and his wife Marie.

At a small luncheon hosted by the university, Feeney was his usual shy and reticent self, until the conversation came round to the university’s research into cancer treatment at the city hospital. He became fully engaged.

“Let’s go and have a look,” he said.

The result was the biggest single grant — £19 million — in the history of the university. This was what Feeney lived for: finding such encounters to do good things with his money.

• Conor O’Clery is author of the biography of Chuck Feeney, The Billionaire Who Wasn’t