Remarkable life and times of Chuck Feeney — the billionaire who gave it all away (2024)

He’d return to his hotel with his pockets full of litter. Just a few months ago, the university named it the “Feeney Way”, in honour of his philosophy. Mr Feeney never wanted buildings named after him. He wasn’t after the glory. But he’s reported to have agreed to accept the honour of having the road named the “Feeney Way” on the understanding that he wasn’t blamed for the litter on it.

“He had a mischievous sense of humour. And I think he loved the kind of excitement of wandering around and managing not to be recognised,” UL founding president Ed Walsh recalled this week.

Mr Feeney, whose Irish-American family were proud Fermanagh people, grew up in post-Depression era New Jersey, a working-class Irish community where “no Catholics need apply”.

As a child, he sold Christmas cards and sandwiches. After serving in the Korean War in the early 1950s, Feeney won a scholarship to study at Cornell Ivy League university, unheard of for Irish-American Catholics at the time.

His entrepreneurial talents blossomed and he made his fortune from Duty Free Shoppers which he set up in 1960 and eventually sold off in 1996.

Mr Feeney was tough, ambitious, and hard-working — but full of contradictions and paradoxes. He wore a $15 Casio watch. When the New York-based publisher Niall O’Dowd first met him in a diner, he “nearly gave him a tip” because he was dressed so shabbily.

He was an avid reader but would rather walk three miles to the local library to read the free newspapers than buy one. At the same time, his company was making $300m a year in profit.

When asked once if Leonardo di Caprio should play him in a movie about his life, Mr Feeney replied: “No — Danny de Vito”.

At some point in his mid-life, Mr Feeney grew uncomfortable with the astronomical wealth he was amassing. He made a secret decision, which wouldn’t emerge for decades, to give it all away before he died.

By the time his firm Atlantic Philanthropies was finally wound up in 2020, it had donated over $8bn (€7.56bn) to education, health and peace initiatives in Ireland, South Africa, Vietnam, Australia and the US.

He left his five children enough to survive and no more. He felt that leaving them vast amounts of money would only burden them. “He really felt that inheriting vast amounts of money probably was more likely to assure them an unhappy life,” Mr Walsh said.

“He grew up in a family where the ethos was centred around not only being hard-working and frugal but also looking after neighbours and others who weren’t as lucky as you were. So I think he just reverted to those values.

“He was also advised that the most satisfying way of doing was to do it anonymously. And he took that to heart,” he added.

“People who knew him before and after he was giving away his money, saw a different, happier gentleman emerging who enjoyed a good joke and who just seemed to be at peace with himself and a happy individual.

“And so people said he was quite transformed himself by the whole process.

He said you get no satisfaction giving away your money when you’re dead. Why not have some satisfaction in seeing good things happen with it while you’re alive?

“I remember at one stage he said: ‘I’ve got a problem spending this money.’ I said: ‘What is it, Chuck?’ He said: ‘I started off with $3.5bn, but we’ve managed the fund so effectively that it’s growing faster than I can spend it.’ So he turned the $3.5bn into $8bn while giving it away,” he said.

To put that into perspective, that’s $1m a day for the next 20 years. Feeney was great at making money but he loved giving it away more.

His generosity to UL made Ed Walsh’s dream of university status come true. But while his contribution to universities around the world is well documented,

Political influence

Mr Walsh points to his lesser-known role in politics on the island of Ireland and the Good Friday Agreement.

“He was going up to the North and meeting with both sides, meeting with both the republicans and the unionists, and he ended up giving money both to Sinn Féin and the DUP. And I feel sure he was acting as an informal intermediary between Dublin and London and played a huge part behind the scenes in setting things up for the Good Friday Agreement,” Mr Walsh said.

Every man and his wife is claiming credit for the Irish peace process now, according to Mr Feeney’s long-time friend and founder of the Irish Voice newspaper in the US, Niall O’Dowd. He knows the people who actually did the work behind the scenes, and “Feeney was definitely one of them.”

Appalled by the Enniskillen bombing of 1987, Mr Feeney came over to Ireland determined to help find a way to peace. He got the idea of “creating wealth, making it prosperous and educating a new generation of young people who would be better informed than their predecessors,” Mr Walsh said.

“There’s tens of thousands of people who probably don’t even realise the man who they can thank for their education and their livelihoods. He saw the potential all those decades ago.”

Mr Feeney was more than happy to come on board after being approached by Mr O’Dowd to join a group of highly successful, wealthy Irish Americans, who used secret back channels of diplomacy and communication between the White House and Ireland to move the peace process forward.

“We wanted to try and influence the next president of the United States and try and bring them in as an important player in the peace process,” Mr O’Dowd said.

“They were former politicians, big business people, trade union activists and Chuck was central to all of that,” former Sinn Féin president Gerry Adams recalled this week.

What became known as the Connolly House Group persuaded president Bill Clinton to give Adams a visa to travel to the US if he was elected.

To keep president Clinton to his word, Mr Feeney organised a conference not long after the election and invited all the political leaders from Ireland, including Adams. “It was putting it up to president Clinton,” Mr Adams said. He got the visa.

Part of the deal was that Sinn Féin wanted an office in Washington to enlist the support of the powerful Irish-American diaspora. They needed $1m to set it up but had no one they could ask.

Mr O’Dowd knew Mr Feeney could help but had always valued his friendship for its own sake and made a point of never asking him for money. But this time, it was different. “I said to Chuck, can you give me $1m? He immediately said: ‘Yes I can’, and so they got a guarantee for the office,” he recalls.

The $1m from Mr Feeney’s Atlantic Philanthropies meant Sinn Féin could now argue, with some accuracy, that they had the support of a powerful lobby in the US.

“What Chuck did, he came forward voluntarily of his own volition and said he would fund the establishment of a Sinn Féin office in Washington and all that went with that, potentially the involvement of the White House and a progressive role in peacemaking and a Sinn Féin representative being there in the heart of Washington,” Mr Adams said.

Mr Feeney didn’t just hand over money to anybody though. He never took anyone’s word for anything. He insisted on meeting Mr Adams himself, to “get the measure of the man before he committed to working with him,” Mr O’Dowd, who organised the meeting, said.

It took place in 1993 in a stranger’s living room in Northern Ireland. “We hit it off right away,” Mr Adams told the Irish Examiner. “He was very unassuming. Very understated. And good craic.”

Mr O’Dowd knew the two men would have had a lot in common in terms of their work ethic, Catholic roots and a “fierce determination to achieve things.”

“He just had a presence when he was in these meetings,”Mr O’Dowd said. “He sort of sized people up in seconds, figured out what was going to happen. He was very smart in terms of his attention to detail.”

Mr Feeney didn’t stop at helping Sinn Féin. He tried to bridge the divide between traditions by funding many loyalist groups to get them politically involved. He took risks for peace that very few people did.

He often accompanied Mr O’Dowd into loyalist neighbourhoods. “We had the wrong address,” Mr O’Dowd said of one occasion.

“The guy says ‘youse must be debt collectors’ and chased us down the street. And luckily for us, totally coincidentally, Gerry Adams happened to be driving by in his black armoured car and we just jumped in.

One to one, Mr Adams found Mr Feeney was “good craic”.

“We all got on extremely well. He usually travelled on his own if he wasn’t with a delegation. He would meet with you and would fish out of his pockets packets of custard creams from his hotel. He always brought me clippings of articles he thought may have been of interest. He was a ferocious reader.

“He was among the greatest humanitarians that I ever met. But he was also at the big anti-war protest against Iraq in London. He knew the value of friendship, decency, of helping people, of giving them a leg up.

“He understood that everybody deserves a chance. A great guy,” Mr Adams said.

Would peace have happened without Chuck Feeney?

“It wouldn’t have happened when it happened. We would have kept battling on but it wouldn’t have happened. The Peace Process certainly wouldn’t have happened when it happened without him,” he said firmly.

On one of his many visits to Belfast, Mr Adams brought Mr Feeney to a voluntary Irish-language school on the Falls Road that the British government had refused to fund. If they had hoped for funding from Mr Feeney they were disappointed.

“He said to me he wasn’t going to fund it because there was such a powerful spirit in the place. He felt the whole sense of positivity and momentum. He said it’d be an awful sin to destroy that,” Mr Adams said.

“He knew this was something special in the community between the kids, parents, and teachers. And he didn’t want to let the Government off the hook,” he said.

Ed Walsh is 83 now. He’s met extraordinary people in his lifetime. But no one like Mr Feeney.

“I know I’ve met no one who exuded goodness and made such an impact on making Ireland a better place. And of course, the University of Limerick a better place. So his legacy is enormous and long-lasting.”

Former CEO of UL Foundations David Cronin told the Irish Examiner that Feeney’s philanthropy “not only encourages us, but challenges us to give whilst we live.”

“He gave away his entire fortune during his lifetime and his strategic, low-key, understated approach made his generosity even more special.

“It was an immense privilege to spend some time with Chuck, a humble hero, who transformed so many people’s lives.”

The last time Mr Cronin met Mr Feeney, he brought with him one of the Limerick Collison brothers, Patrick. The world’s youngest billionaire meeting one of the world’s oldest — and former — billionaires.

When Bill Gates invited him to speak at his Giving Pledge event where, along with Ted Turner and Warren Buffet, they committed to donating a mere $1bn, Mr Feeney told them that they weren’t doing enough. He said that to understand philanthropy “you have to give it all away. Then you’ll understand. Don’t do a lap of honour giving away $1bn when you have $100bn”.