This man's generosity has transformed the
lives of millions throughout the world and in Ireland. Yet very few people would
recognize him or know what he has done. Astonishing. I can't say I've ever
encountered such an extraordinary individual. Complex. He certainly always wanted to play fair but he wanted to play tough. Odd. A conversation with Chuck Feeney is unlike any other conversation youâll have with anyone on Earth. Paradoxical. When the history comes to be written, it will be shown
that Chuck Feeney did have a significant impact on Ireland. Inspiring. He inspired us to think big. Spiritual. Chuck Feeney, and you probably heard this from a whole lot of other people, is a totally one-off. Compassionate. Heâll know more about you in twenty
minutes than youâd ever know about him. Oh I think I think the man is a saint. This is the remarkable story of a man
who had it all, but realized it wasnât enough. Chuck Feeney has led an extraordinary life. He became one of the wealthiest men on
the planet but throughout his life has chosen to
remain outside the glare of the media spotlight. For over twenty five years his
contribution to Ireland both economically and politically has been
monumental, yet until recently it went undocumented. Now in his late seventies he's telling his
story in the hope that others will be inspired
as he was. It begins in the depression era of
nineteen thirties America. Charles Francis Feeney was born
in nineteen thirty one into a small Irish American community in New
Jersey. This was the time of the great depression and both his parents worked hard to give their kids a good start in life. I went to a school in an Irish American neighborhood, and it was a Catholic School and we felt we were part of that community. Chuckâs mother Madeline had a strong sense of
doing right by the less fortunate. She worked nights as a volunteer red
cross nurse and for her, there was no one quite
like her only son. He could do things with a straight
face and he could get away with it because he was âmy Charlesâ As far as my mother was concerned he could commit no sins.
She was a good woman, clearly and she would just consider it as an obligation to help your neighbors. When you live in a family like that, that she was very very concerned about our neighbors I think that rubs off on you, you are concerned about people. You had already been involved in a few money-making
schemes, I mean you had an eye to making a buck. Yeah, the typical things that kids do, mow the lawns, do odd jobs for neighbors, I particularly recall
a friend of mine whose name was Moose Foley and I partnered with him because he was the
biggest guy in the class. When weâd go out to shovel snow, Iâd be the front
man, Iâd go to sign up the places we had to shovel and Iâd whistle for Moose, and heâd come over and start shoveling and Iâd start selling again. Moose Foley did most of the shoveling, I know that because my father used to say to him
youâre a real conniver, youâre always thinking. After leaving school, he joined the Air Force and was
stationed in Japan as a radio operator during the Korean War. One of the benefits of his military
service as he well knew, was the right to a free education afterwards. âVeteranâs Administration Officers have been
set up in every state, and itâs here the ex-soldier goes if he wants to continue his education under the GI bill of rights.â âYou mean he can get any kind of education he wants?â âNow you're getting the idea.â Chuck Feeney, the kid from a blue-collar
New Jersey town aimed high. He applied, and was accepted into the
respected ivy-league University of Cornell. The first in his family ever to go to
college. The grant from the GI bill didn't leave
Chuck much extra and it wasn't long before he started
looking around for money-making opportunities. I saw this guy coming around selling sandwiches and I saw how the students flocked down to buy a sandwich, and so I said, I can do that, that's
not difficult and so I became a self-made sandwich man. It was at Cornell that he met a group of
men who would later play vital roles in his business life. The most influential of all was a young New Yorker studying law. I thought he was selling sandwiches with too much bread and too little peanut butter. He was clearly an entrepreneur. His Cornell experience was I think
for him transformative and he not only enjoyed the experience
and the people, but tremendously enjoyed the friendships and he always had this sense of
gratitude and therefore as part of his
overall view that it's good to give back. Following his graduation in hotel
management he traveled to France to continue his
education, a decision which would change his life forever. Well, thatâs playing the hands that youâre dealt and I wasnât quite sure which cards I would be dealt but I was always thinking about ways of making a buck by working myself as opposed to working for somebody. In nineteen fifty six there were fifty ships of the US sixth
fleet in the Mediterranean alone each of the thirty thousand servicemen
was entitled to buy liquor tax free and Chuck was quick to spot a good
business opportunity. I was in a bar and I ran into an
Englishman who was just starting up a business of selling liquor to the naval ships.
He sent me down to Athens I got down there and they told me that the visit of the ships
had been canceled. Using my innate intelligence I spotted a couple of hookers and asked them if they knew when the ships were coming
and they knew exactly the day. I stayed on for two weeks and then I started my career selling liquor to the ships. Chuck the ex-GI and his partner had
found the perfect business. No set up capital and cash up front. We were buying something for five
plus the transport cost and selling it for almost fifteen I looked at the market and said if it's good for the military it must be
good for the tourists so we started doing the same thing
selling them gallon packages of liquor I said, if you can sell liquor, why can't you sell perfume and so we sort
of expanded our range of products. As the
sales to the tourists continued Chuck realized that there was a new market
opening up with the military. And then we got so many requests for
automobiles he said well we ought to get into the automobile business and Germany
was a natural because at that time there were about two hundred and fifty thousand military in Germany with dependents and so that was when the business was started
there in Frankfurt in the summer of nineteen sixty four. You had an immediate sense that there was
almost ingenious with this fellow, just his focus on life, his focus on the business definitely what do they say, type A
personality for sure. Walked quickly, talked quickly, worked incessantly things were looking up as the sale of cars,
alcohol and perfumes continued but Chuck and his team were in for a
shock. Back in New York they brought in an old college friend to
advise them on a tax issue. We did reorganize the businesses, and we
reorganized them so that the tax risk was eliminated. The bad news is that they werenât making money but they didn't know it. Well when I arrived in New York it was
clearly a mess. It couldnât be described any other way. There was no accounting systems It took not very long to conclude that the liabilities exceeded the assets by approximately one million six hundred thousand
dollars. We got involved in businesses too quickly, before we knew it we were subject to cutthroat competition. If you fail honestly you donât go to jail, if you fail
dishonestly you do go to jail. Cash flow was tremendous and people paid very early for
the costs so everybody looked at this money in the bank as profit, as it were. There were no expense controls of any sort,
people spent money as they saw fit and it resulted in an enormous deficit we were very lucky if we just
got it out of debt and closed it down and moved on to something else. The business was in serious trouble and the new team of Chuck Feeney Alan Parker Bob Miller and Tony Pillaro had no choice but to pay their debts and
move on but an opportunity was just around the
corner which was soon to make them one of the
most successful business partnerships in the world. The concept of the airport duty free
shops was not new. In fact, the very first duty free shop
was opened in Shannon in nineteen forty six but in the early sixties international
travel was still confined to the privileged few and large profits from
duty free sales were unimagined. Concessions to run the shops were
granted by each government to the highest bidder. A friend of ours wrote to us to tell about a shop that was going to open up at the
Honolulu International Airport and there would be the concession to sell any kind of duty free merchandise you
wanted. We bid about a hundred and twenty five thousand guaranteed over five years and in no time at all we were doing a giant amount of business. Chuck was always the most
optimistic because he was a visionary he could see what was going to
happen I was just looking at the figures
and adding them up, I could see them growing but Chuck clearly was the visionary. With the Olympic games of nineteen sixty
four the Japanese government was keen to
present a more liberal image the world. Japanese citizens were allowed to travel
abroad in greater numbers and the most popular destination was
Honolulu in Hawaii. Chuckâs instincts are sensational and his competitiveness and tenacity are amazing. He's also completely focused so whenever there was an opportunity to
make a change, big or small, to improve the business Chuck would often see it. As we explored the Japanese market we realized that
they were keen to buy bargains and we would sell a bottle of Johnny Walker Black Label
at that stage for about seven dollars a bottle, it cost them in Japan thirty five dollars a bottle, so it was a bargain. So you had this frenzy, the same was true of perfume, the same was
true of cigarettes, they were buying for ten percent of what they
could buy them for in Japan and in many cases you couldnât even find
the product in Japan. It was very obvious then that this was a
business that had great potential and I think the one thing that
should be indicated about Chuck is that he had the foresight and he had
the vision. The best descriptive word for that is lucky because you know if you want to pick an emerging market pick one that people want, need, and get value from and all of things that we did qualified. One of the rules that the business
adopted early on and for which I was appointed the policeman was quiet actually anonymity and at least in Chuckâs case was a
desire to stay out of the limelight the more you advertise your
success and bragged about it the more likely it is that you were going to
attract both jealousy and competition. With the incoming seven forty sevens, it
just changed the business dramatically overnight, the lid literally blew off. Some of the first years I was there I think we're doing like ten million dollars a year at the
airport and the downtown store during its heyday
would do a million dollars a day it was just mind-boggling,
we were just trying to make a buck and that seemed like a good way to make a buck. It was an exciting time, every day it
was like getting up for the kickoff because it was always something very dramatic and very exciting about it. We drank a lot of champagne, we drank a lot of
everything but when you worked hard, you worked hard and when we played, we played hard as well. What was the bonus for you at that stage? Was it the business or the
making money, or both? I guess it was the success of business we started with nothing and now look what
we've got. The money began to grow pretty quickly
and I would say by the early seventies the profits were rolling up very
quickly by that time it was more than a single duty-free shop, they had bid elsewhere, and they were the largest duty-free
retailer in the world. I think by the late seventies they had five or six thousand employees, the
volume by that time was three billion dollars a year or so and because of the structure that
had been put in place virtually all of those profits were tax-free. I grew up with my parents having these parties and
having a grand olâ time, we were the house where people came, and had barbecues and had parties and people always came with their kids, it was always kids and adults parties. I enjoyed what I did, I enjoyed particularly the people that I worked with and I was always thinking that I don't need another million
dollars. But as the profits rolled in and the four
partners reveled in their multi-million-dollar lifestyles Chuck began to realize the effects that great wealth could have, not only on him but also on his family. My dad was kicking us in the butt since we were
fourteen, get out the door, do this yourself, figure it out. He was pushing us to be active and sporty and tough. I felt that they should have the opportunity to see how money is earned and they knew there was a difference between what you make and what youâre given. More than anything he wanted us to have goals and passions and he thought well, how could they have this, theyâre born with
everything already. People have to fight and strive so he made sure we did. I remember having a conversation with
Chuck and quoting to him which I can only do approximately the statement that the Reverend Gates made to John D Rockefeller in which he said to Rockefeller, âYour wealth is
rolling up, rolling up and if you don't do something about it
it will crush you and crush your family.â And Chuck kind of got that. He is uncomfortable with displays of wealth and lavishness and I think that grew over time. I think there were times when he enjoyed
entertaining people at some of the houses that the family then owned so I think there were things about it that he enjoyed but the growth of the disquietude eventually outweighed the pleasure of
being able to entertain and bring people together. There's a halfway mark where we were living a certain life, my dad was fun at a party then I think things got a little bit
more serious with the amount of money and also an awareness, when you travel and see how people suffer really you know it's not just an idea. I think life is a learning process and
you read books, you read stories, you empathize with people Iâd always empathized with people who have it tough in life and the
world is full of people who don't get enough to eat. By nineteen eighty I started to think
where is all this leading, what am I going to do with it like many of the wealthy people today they have the money but wouldnât be able to spend it if they started to spend it. It was the early eighties, and the decade of
greed was well underway. While much of the world was consumed with
making money Chuck Feeney decided he was going to do
something completely different. It was the start of a journey which
was to change his life and the lives of many around him. I think because of his upbringing, a
blue collar New Jersey guy a guy in college who had to sell sandwiches to
get through school is that when he started making these tremendous amounts of money he was almost embarrassed by it. He worked so hard to get there and once he did I think he found, I know he didnât like these fancy dinners, and and he didnât want to go places that they were invited to, he was very low key. Chuck doesn't own a car doesn't own a house has one pair of shoes and a fifteen dollar watch. I would be unhappy with myself if I
was wasting money on anything and that includes living and so I get what I want from life and move on. Heâs happy going out to
dinner and if he can get a good bottle of wine he's happy with that and sometimes even a better bottle of wine it's just that his personal style is not
self-indulgent or lavish. Iâm a guy who has said that I could be happy with a grilled cheese and tomato
sandwich. ecause heâd always insisted on remaining
anonymous very few people had any idea just how much Feeney was worth, not even his family. By now his fortune was estimated at around
a billion dollars and although no one knew he was secretly developing a radical
plan to give everything away. Oh I think it was clear throughout that
there would be a moment when virtually all of the assets would be used for
charitable purposes we were never perfectly clear what virtually
all meant because Chuck didnât want to impoverish his family but it was clear increasingly clear that he didn't want very much for
himself. Did you not at any stage wonder yourself, am I going nuts, am I doing the right thing here? I suppose you always question business decisions and this was in effect a
type of business decision. I warned him, a good lawyer is supposed
to warn clients about risks and I said you canât change your mind on
this, once this is done, if the money is transferred, if the assets are transferred theyâre gone and if you change your mind three days
later you can't get them back and if you think you've made a mistake you canât get them
back and if things go awry you can't get them back it's irrevocable. Are you sure you want to do this? There was no going back. No going back once we decided. I think he actually was impatient with that
because heâd made up his mind and thought it was fine, he said, yeah, letâs get on with it. Chuck Feeney, the man who had worked his whole life to
build a business empire was about to change everything with the stroke of a pen. In November nineteen eighty two having made a relatively modest
provision for his family, he signed over his entire fortune to his new foundation The Atlantic Philanthropies. I got a phone call one day from him and he said I have a big announcement, and he said I just wanted you to know that I've given everything away and I said you mean every penny and he said Iâve given it all away to a
foundation and I said Oh, well thatâs good if thatâs what you want to do! I mean I'm really proud of my dad I think he's just really an
extraordinary man I mean honestly, who does this? I was surprised I will admit, but I knew that he didnât do it without having given a lot of thought to it
and the Irish expression âthere's no pockets in shrouds,â well I think he just came to that
realization said, OK, I'm going to change what I'm doing. Well I guess it gets down to a realization that it doesn't add anything to your life as they say, it may make life a bit more comfortable for you but Iâm not uncomfortable today. From now on all of Chuck Feeneyâs multi-million dollar
profits from the duty-free business would be paid directly into Atlantic Philanthropies. His next destination was a small poor, underdeveloped country on the edge of Europe. Iâm kind of a plastic paddy. An Irish-American is a person whose
origins are Irish and my grandmother was from Fermanagh I guess I qualify as an Irish-American because
Iâve been involved in a number of things that were to do with Ireland in my adult years. When Feeney arrived in Ireland in the
early nineteen eighties the country was in the grip of a desperate recession. Unemployment and immigration were at record levels there was little investment in industry our
education things were bleak. He had begun routinely spending time in
Ireland and doing what he always does, he goes to someplace and he walks around and he sniffs around and he talks to people and itâs this entrepreneurial seeking mode. Feeney had had firsthand experience of
the benefits of education and he quickly spotted a real need in Ireland. Irish education had not kept pace and I just had the experience in my life of realizing that it's with educated
people that you can achieve more and so we wanted to reinforce the the structures of the universities. One of the cities in Ireland in most
need of investment in third level education was Limerick. The people of Limerick had been campaigning for
a university for years. Ed Walsh, the young head of
Limerickâs existing National Institute had big ambitions to convert it from a
small campus into a top-level university. The odds were stacked against him. The thing about Chuck Feeney is that he
likes the underdog and Limerick was the underdog. First of all, Limerick is physically a little bit separate from other places and the institution was a new
institution which was bucking the trend, Ed Walsh was introducing new thinking
into a rather stultified higher education system in Ireland and was not welcomed for
that. Those are the sort of people that Chuck Feeney likes. Mavericks. A very unassuming man on a first encounter just because he dressed so badly and was so self-effacing a very ordinary kind of guy he could
have stepped off a tractor in County Clare and when he came into my office in Limerick,
most Americans would have a quick encounter and someone would take them away and see the building, this man had read and he was
profoundly knowledgeable about Ireland and itâs predicament
and the trouble and the potential so something clicked. We did a lot of bricks and mortar at the very
beginning because some of the things that we wanted to do
for example here in Ireland were going to require buildings at universities, student accommodation libraries and that sort of stuff Chuck says, look, youâve got one chance to do something extremely well the country does not have a purpose designed concert hall why don't we bring in the best
designer we can, I know one in New York he flew in and weâll design a world class concert
hall that Ireland can be proud of and the university can be proud of by the way you can design it in such a
way that it will meet the needs of students and conferrings
and everything else so this was the first major project. The anonymity which had been crucial
to the success of his business became an obsession with Feeney. As the buildings went up maintaining the veil of secrecy became
the condition of any grants the foundation made. The joke used to be in the trade that A_P was synonymous with anonymous. He explained to me that if we revealed who was
providing the funding it would cease. It was very strange trying to explain
to faculty and staff here where the money was
coming from, was I involved in the drugs
businesses something like that, because these magnificent buildings were
rising out of the ground and we couldn't explain really who was doing it. In nineteen eighty nine Limerick finally
got its university and as the campus grew so too did jobs and opportunities in the
city and beyond. No matter where you look on campus you can find Chuck Feeneyâs mark. The thing he liked about the university
program was that there were buildings, there was bricks and mortar, you could kick them,
you could touch them, you could feel them they were there. Those who knew him before said that heâd been transformed, he was much happier and he was really enjoying life the more he gave the more he enjoyed it
it was quite amazing. The effect of Feeneyâs donations to Limerick and other universities was slowly transforming the country but these investments would be dwarfed
by the sheer scale of the next phase of the project meanwhile events in his home country of
Fermanagh were drawing him into the complex world
of Northern Irish politics. Well I think the terminal event was certainly the bombing in Enniskillen. It just seemed so gross and there were just people who unfortunately happened to be in the wrong
place at the wrong time. It struck me that this is not a good Irish thing, we're not that kind of people that want to make people disappear from the
Earth because of their views. I met Chuck one night at P_J Clarkeâs sat him down and said I was considering putting together a group to go to Northern Ireland to become involved and try and bring an American dimension to solving the Irish issue and Chuck instantly said yes, I want to do it which was remarkable given who he was and
given the fact that this was really kind of a
fool's errand in many peopleâs eyes. At the time there was no solution in
sight to the violence in Northern Ireland Sinn Fein was censored under section
thirty one and had become political pariahs but there was a feeling that if the party
could be brought into the political mainstream it could help move the peace process forward. At that time I sort of felt that the business of bringing a solution to the problem was as good a business as you could get into. In early ninety three OâDowd suggested that Chuck Feeney
should meet the head of Sinn Fein Gerry Adams. Well the first time I met him was at a safe house in Dublin and he struck the right away as being
open, straightforward and I thought that this is the kind of
person who can talk to both sides. What Chuck brought to it was a confidence, or a trust, or an acceptance that we were genuinely trying to do something to get the whole process together which would build a bridge out of conflict. Feeney joined OâDowd and a group of well
respected businessmen who were planning a landmark trip to
Northern Ireland. We had conducted negotiations with the Clinton White House before we
left because we had become involved with the Clinton people and we said look we're going to go over
there and while weâre there there will be a
cease-fire for the IRA, it will be unannounced, it will be for ten days and it will send a signal that the Republican movement want to move this issue forward. âThe U_S delegation arrived for their meeting
to a frenzy of media attention. The American group of businessmen and
trade unionists then got down to three hours of talks.â He had a very incisive sense of people and I could see how he was remarkably
successful in business and he was a great man to kind of size-up a
situation. As he was in his financial business as he was in trying to make sure things
were done in a fair deal he was as sharp as any razor and when you said something to him, as complicated as Northern Ireland was he understood what you were saying. Chuck Feeney works in a
very intuitive way he doesn't have a very structured approach to things he goes by gut and by feel and in
particular he's always very concerned to get a sense of the people he's dealing
with and particularly the leader of the organization that he might be looking at. Feeney the anonymous billionaire was now
at the center of a major world news story. He felt that real progress could only
be made if the delegation met representatives of all sides. We talked with paramilitaries and some of the stuff was that they were concerned the war that the Republicans had carried out had been funded by Irish America, and for the move forward the Americans were going to play a big role in terms of the whole peace process, how Northern Ireland was designed, developed and all the rest of it, so we needed to actually talk to Irish America to find out where they stood on all of this. From my point of view, I think that that part of the process was very easy because Irish America were open to hearing what was going on and they were very open, they actually I suppose in many ways helped loyalism move on. The visit was a success but the next challenge was to try to convince a
hostile U_S State Department that it should support a radical proposal. Well we had a very basic plan that we would go
back to the White House and we would explain that our visit had coincided with a ten-day IRA
cease-fire it showed that the good will on the part of the Republican movement
was there and that now the White House needed to make a
gesture. We believed after discussing it at the Congressional level with some of the representatives that there was
support out there for a way to get people
together and that culminated in the visa for Gerry Adams which seems perfectly logical today but they didn't think so at the time. How difficult was it for your group to
persuade Clinton to give Adams that visa in the face of
pretty stiff opposition from the British? I think in fairness Bill Clinton he thought it through himself and and thought that talking was a better answer than killing. It was around
this time that Feeney made a controversial decision to fund the establishment of a Sinn Fein
office in Washington. My rationale was straightforward I wanted to see an end to the problem and the idea of having an office where people could meet and see each other seemed to be right. There were a lot of people counseling him not to get involved, I know for a fact that many people in his own organization called him and I had a few calls myself from people in his organization who were frantically saying, what the hell are you doing? I wish he had not decided to give it
money that I think was not a good idea and Chuck disagrees on that but it was his money, it was certainly never
the foundationâs money, that's an important issue the foundation never did and never
would give money to a political cause. The concern at the time was that the
IRA were not fully committed to the cease-fire and
in fact broke the cease-fire during that time. Were you not concerned
that your money was going to go to the wrong place? I suppose there was a concern but as they say knowing the people and seeing them on a regular basis reinforced the belief that the IRA and Sinn Fein we're looking for a solution. Do you feel that there was any lasting damage done to
your good name? Not that I know of. Just over a year after Chuck Feeney and his
delegation visited Belfast another famous American would follow. It was to be an historic turning point if the
President of the United States could walk down the Falls Road surely anything was possible. âAs he went into McErleanâs bakery the crowds had already broken through the barriers providing a
real security headache for the Secret Service.â I think one of the most glorious moments for us was President Clinton coming to Ireland for the first time to Belfast and I also think one of the greatest things for Ireland was this incredible situation where the President of
the United States was walking up the Falls Road walking down the Shankill Road which a couple of years previous to that could never even have been considered. I think that Chuck and others like him and he's the one that strikes me most vividly as wanting to return the favor in
some way the place that his people couldnât live in that he has been part of the energy of making it a better place for the people who do live here. Clintonâs nineteen ninety five visit to Belfast is now widely recognized as one of the
key to turning points in the history of Northern politics. Chuck was such a huge part of that I would go so far as to say I donât think it wouldâve happened without him. I think he was central to the American role and the American role was central to the process. Aside from Feeneyâs personal involvement, Atlantic Philanthropies continues to
invest millions in projects in Northern Ireland on all sides of the political
divide. Chuck, I suppose in many ways through Atlantic Philanthropies put his money where his mouth is and it put money in struggling loyalist communities and he hasnât asked are you a Republican, are you a Loyalist, are you a Jew are you a Muslim, he hasnât asked that what he has done, is he says these people need a leg up and Iâve got money that can help do that, and thatâs what heâs done. âThroughout the morning at his hotel the Taoiseach met a number of
chief executives representing health care, electronics and
the service sector of the telecommunications industry. Twenty of these companies are already in Ireland
fifteen others are looking for a base to service their companyâs European operations.â In the nineteen nineties Ireland with its low corporation tax and ready workforce was beginning to attract more and more
multinational business. What the country didn't have was the educational
infrastructure required to sustain the economic upturn. Ireland ranked very poorly in the
international tables in terms of expenditure and research and development and here we were presenting ourselves as a future major
knowledge economy and we weren't spending money on the knowledge. The reality was That in nineteen ninety seven the government made an announcement that
they would make one million available to meet the equipment needs of all of the
Irish universities so that was nonsense. After the success in Limerick Feeney was thinking big. He knew that a colossal investment in education would create a generation of highly skilled
graduates, and that they would attract big name employers and create opportunities for others.
There were people out there who rationalized that helping universities is helping the economy, is helping yourself,
is helping your neighbors. But in order to fund the plans on the
scale that he envisaged he needed more money, a lot more money so in nineteen ninety seven he sold
Atlanticâs share in D_F_S as a result almost overnight the foundation was flooded with over one point six billion dollars. Chuck canât stand having money
around, he just likes to see it spent so he said to me one day in the summer
of nineteen ninety seven, he said look I really like these building
projects we've been doing with these universities but they're not moving fast
enough and Iâd really like to up the tempo. Funding from the government didnât have that much of structure
to it, we were the first ones that came along and said if you put up the money let's do a three-year
five-year plan and you put up your money weâll put up our
money and weâll move it forward. In the early years when he knew that
the capital program wouldnât be able to do that he
didn't put on that pressure we he then realized in ninety seven, ninety
eight, ninety nine that things were better for the country he then put the
pressure on to make sure that the states lived up to
what he believed was his personal standard. A breakfast meeting was arranged
between the higher education authority and officials from the Department of
Education. Over breakfast John said if we put up seventy five million
pounds for research funding would you match it? Weâll put seventy five million pounds on the table but you've got to come up with a matching
seventy five million, and they kind of almost fell off their chairs. There was a moment's hesitation, so I
said I think we could write a paper on how we might spend
this. Atlanticâs revolutionary funding plan
was presented to the Department of Finance. Their reaction to any proposal is to say
no and that was the reaction that we instantly met. The resistance was that if you took this money that was bringing the capital program for third level education to certain level,
therefore what would happened next year? What held the country back for
years we just didn't have the money for capital we always had to put our money into day to day issues but he had a broader view of things and a correct view of things. So we started working on the political
channel and we started playing all the sort of, blackmail and violence that one uses in these intense inter-departmental debates
so Atlantic played their part as well they sprung an ultimatum they said unless itâs fixed by such and such a date, which was a Saturday morning, weâre off. But in terms of making a decision
they dragged their feet, and you had to put them on a clock. Yeah I guess so but that's the way it it works out sometimes. We had quite frankly, I can say it now
we had the academic debate within government and within the department who said this hasnât got value and I believe it was a bit of a stupid argument that you were going to turn away the best gift horse that youâd ever get. After weeks of hard negotiations it was
finally agreed that if Atlantic put up seventy five million pounds the Irish government would match it. The Program for Research in Third Level
Institutions or P_R_T_L_I was born. âThese funds represent a major advance for
the country's research community and the representatives looked pleased at
today's announcement in Dublin.â It will mean that weâll be in a position to attract the best staff to our universities and our institutes of technology in the research areas which will improve quality, it will mean very significant capital investment in terms of new buildings and new equipment. And this transformed the nature of
higher education and the nature of Irelandâs attempt to attract foreign
direct investment so the multinationals, the Intels, and the
Microsofts, and the Hewlett Packards could be convinced that they could move upwards and put
sophisticated research and development into Ireland. Chuck was behind what triggered this whole
thing and I doubt that the Department of
Education would have put a euro upon a euro to do this
were it not for Chuckâs initiative. What I think he did for many of us
who came in touch with him was that he inspired us to think big. If we aspire to being a leading
knowledge-based economy and society in the world we needed to behave like one. This was typical of how Chuck worked, there was the visionary part which was probably more
important than the funding but he followed through with funding to help others turn a good vision into reality. This he did with government, this he did with Ireland. The idea was, we showed them the light. To date, Atlantic has invested one point two
billion dollars in Ireland alone over seven hundred and fifty million of
that has gone into third level education and the resulting new population of
highly qualified post-graduates was undoubtedly a key driver of the
Celtic tiger economy. As with all his grants there was no publicity no names on buildings only a desire to promote opportunity
through education all the more necessary in troubled economic times. Ireland is subject to good times and bad times and tougher times are coming and that just requires more support. âThe Irish public have often proven
their interest in seeing wrongdoing in corporate and political life being
exposed up to now tribunals set up by the state
have been the way it's done but now a private group is about to
begin its investigations too with retired judge Fergis Flood at the head of
its board.â Feeney's involvement in Irish politics
continued when in two thousand and five Atlantic funded the establishment of
a Center for Public Inquiry an independent watchdog charged with
uncovering corruption in public life. Well the concept of citizen
watchdog organizations is kind of unexceptional in a country like the United
States in many other countries as well in what you would say are mature
Democratic societies. I think the idea of the Center was to hold government accountable for things that happened because they call the shots. The person they hired to head up the center seemed
a logical choice Frank Connolly was an established journalist
whose work on corruption had contributed to the establishment of the Flood and
Morris Tribunals. We had a fellow, Frank Connelly who I think was recognized as this one of
the very good investigative journalists here in Ireland. I think quite frankly this was
seen as a strange group to be watching ourselves and I suppose if in Paris an organization funded by a group of
Irish people was set up to start investigating them, what would the French think? You felt you were entitled to fund
such an operation in Ireland and you felt it was worthwhile. Yes if the Center was ever able to carry out the goals that we had set out than it
would have been worthwhile. I think it was mentioned that we were planning
to target individuals in our investigations which of course is
absolutely absurd, we have never suggested any such thing, we never did any such thing
what we said we were going to do is examine matters of public importance. This was the Centerâs first report and
many more they say are on the way on a range of controversies. In the beginning the Center produced two
well-received reports on planning problems in Trim and on the Corrib gas controversy but soon there were allegations emerging that seriously threatened to undermine
the independence of the Center. Frank Connolly, brother of Niall Connelly
one of the so-called âColombia threeâ was alleged to have traveled to Colombia on
a false passport. The Taoiseach met with Feeney. I and Mike McDowell asked a question, what was this
really about we werenât attacking or lecturing him because he wasnât that kind of a person, he could do whatever he wanted with his money but I think we gave him at an honest assessment of the view in Leinster
House and no more than that âUndoubtedly The Center for Public Inquiry
aspires to be an organ of public opinion but equally it is one
which in subversive hands has the capacity to gravely undermine
the authority of the state.â The way we saw it in Leinster House was that they were going to investigate decisions that were made and planned and undertaken. Well we see that the courts are the places you should do
that not ad hoc committees. Citing the interests of national
security Minister for Justice Michael McDowell released the documents to the Irish
newspapers claiming to prove that Connelly had
traveled to Colombia. âAll I have done is to give to the Irish Independent at its request a copy of the
forgery so that people in this country can determine where the truth lies.â Even though the D_P_P found no evidence against him, pressure intensified on Connelly to say where he had been at the time
in question. Did you ask him where he was for those couple
of weeks? Probably, if not myself I said found out where Frank was for those
couple of weeks. You got no answer to that. He didnât answer that. It then became a matter of credibility for the
organization, that was a very painful and difficult episode that I think upset Chuck Feeney a lot. We hadnât researched back far enough and we were surprised by what we discovered and then we tried to carry the can for that because what you donât discover is your fault too. Are you in a position now or do you think you would be in a position ever to say where you were at the time and
finally end all that speculation I don't think it's my position Iâve already said to you that the investigation for what it was is finished so it's nonsense in my view that for me to be trying to explain things based on an
investigation that was never justified in the first place. If Chuck Feeney had stood up at any stage and articulated what he wanted this for people would have accepted that, he
never did that my view is that is he never had researched this through. In a way could it be said that he was railroaded out, not by you but perhaps by the government or individuals within the
government? Well, that certainly is an assessment someone could make. Elements in power not only that but including the former Taoiseach I think didnât like the idea of where this was going
to go and where it potentially could go, and if you look back now at what's happened in
the last couple of years weâve discovered corruption on a scale none of us ever envisaged would emerge or even existed at the time and I think that's partly the tragedy of all of this. Atlantic withdrew its funding and the center was closed in December two
thousand and five. The sad thing about this is that because the watchdog organization was
setback as a result of what happened and it could be some years I think before it can be
revived. Chuck Feeneyâs philosophy of giving while living is central to everything he does. His belief that it's better to give
money away now has changed the lives of millions and his work isn't over yet. Feeney, an extremely shy man recently made
the difficult decision to sacrifice his anonymity and cooperate on a biography with Conor OâClery, he did it because he wants his message of
giving while living to inspire others my sense is that he's getting
to a stage in his life now where as I think all of us do when we get a
little bit older you ask yourself what is the meaning of your life been and what have you been able to contribute.
I sense that the most important thing for him now is to spread the gospel of giving while living and to influence more people who have money to give it away and to give it away wisely. We are a spend-down foundation which
means that we are going to over the next nine years or thereabouts spend down the assets of the foundation which would be in
excess of three billion dollars. In order to meet
the deadline of spending our endowment out of existence by two thousand and sixteen we have to give
away a million dollars every day of the year three hundred and sixty five days a
year. Thereâs logic in making things happen now especially if now there are things out there that are
necessary nowadays Chuck Feeney still travels to see the
work that Atlantic Philanthropies supports in seven countries around the
world, in projects on aging, children and youth, population health and reconciliation and human rights. I'm not here to tell anybody what they should do with their money, if you
make your money you do what you want with it but I think there is an
obligation certainly for the âhavesâ to reach out and to look
and see what they can do. Any money that people give to any good cause as long as it's
well-managed is worthwhile. I just hope that people will sort of try it
you'll like it. Today with the same relentless drive and
attention to detail that made him one of the world's richest men Chuck Feeney is now giving away the last of his billions. I wouldn't put him happy in the sense of content, I would say he's happy with what he's
been able to do and wishes there would be more and he's probably just as restless
and consumed with trying to make it better now as he was in nineteen sixty two. He wants to be in the center of things. He wants to be where the
action is and if he has to get on an airplane and fly to five
different airports heâll go. My husband said to him one time, why donât you just have a conference call instead of spending a day and a half in the
airport to get wherever. I think my dad would wish he could live âtil heâs
a hundred and sixty, if not more, to keep involved and he tells me how pissed he is that heâs not going to be able to see how things turn out here or There. He wants to keep going. Heâll never retire. I doubt it. He couldn't, he canât. Maybe the Lordâs word is the decider on that. The poor are always with us you know, youâll never run out of people you
can help.
bonus points: I actually learned this today because I had to watch it for a class I'm taking. I thought it was so interesting I shared it. I know three others have previously posted about Chuck Feeney but they only mentioned the money he gave away. I thought his story was much more interesting than just that one part.