The Billionaire Who Wasn't by Conor O'Clery

Author:Conor O'Clery [O'Clery, Conor]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 20

Show Me the Building

As part of his long-term plan to devote himself more to his philanthropy, Chuck Feeney purchased a building on Molesworth Street in the center of Dublin in 1989, which he named Atlantic House. He recruited John Healy, the director general of the American Ireland Partnership, to set up and run the operation, to be called Tara Consultants. Healy recalled being invited to meet Feeney in London, where he had a “typically meandering, obscure conversation” with Chuck in the course of which he inferred he was being offered some sort of a job in a consulting company. Knowing by then that Feeney was no ordinary American businessman, he had accepted.

Only when he said yes and traveled to New York for a briefing from his new boss, Harvey Dale, did the Irishman learn that he would be working for one of the world’s biggest and most secret philanthropic foundations. The lawyer told him that the Atlantic Foundation and the Atlantic Trust were set up so that the money flowed through different “spigots”—a word for “water taps” not used in Ireland—but Healy guessed the meaning. Dale told him that Feeney was about to step up his philanthropy in Ireland, and Chuck had singled him out for his knowledge and contacts. As managing director of Tara Consultants, he would also have responsibility for enforcing a set of rules: Feeney’s name should never appear on any press release or on any plaque; he should not be offered, nor would he accept, any honorary degree; and funding would cease if confidentiality was breached. Healy flew on to Ithaca and was briefed by Ray Handlan on how the Foundation Service Company worked. He learned the scale of the grant making and about Atlantic Foundation’s unique combination of convertible and nonconvertible assets, known as “church” and “state.”

“At that stage we were deep into confidentiality,” explained Feeney. “We would say, ‘We want to do this thing but we don’t want any credits for it—just give the impression that you raised the money.’” If beneficiaries wanted his attention, he said, all they had to do was to show him the completed building.

The success of his philanthropy at Limerick University inspired Feeney to look at the condition of the other half dozen universities in Ireland, which were all state-funded and lacking capital to expand and modernize. His ambitions for the then-struggling country were growing. Lifting one boat would make little difference to Ireland’s higher-education sector as a whole. Helping a number would make a national impact. He set about arranging seemingly accidental meetings with other university presidents across the country, hoping to find the same drive and vision as in Limerick. His opportunistic philanthropy would be most successful if he found the right people to use the funds well. It was not the philanthropist that deserved praise, he believed, but those who had the position, the ability, and the vision to do good things with the funds. He could use the talents that had made him wealthy to identify and help develop worthwhile projects.

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