EVERY morning, Madaline Feeney would wait for her neighbour Bill Fallon to walk past her front door.
She would get into her car, drive up alongside him and give him a lift to the bus stop.
Bill Fallon had Lou Gehrig’s disease, an incurable neurological condition named after a famous baseball player who died from it.
Madaline wasn’t going anywhere but she pretended that she was. He died not knowing that the purpose of her getting into the car was to prevent him from having to walk.
Madaline Feeney was the mother of Chuck Feeney.
Philanthropy is kindness in the language of the rich.
Chuck had plenty to give away. His mother did not, but she was kind anyway.
That the Irish-American boy with roots in Fermanagh became perhaps the greatest philanthropist in the history of the world owed a lot to the message imparted at home.
He amassed billions and then gave it all away while he was still living, spending the final years of his life in a two-bedroom rented apartment in San Francisco with no car and wearing a $10 watch.
As well as playing a significant part in the brokering of the Good Friday Agreement, his money was given directly to charitable causes the world over.
One quote of his stands out this week, from Conor O’Clery’s biography of his life, The Billionaire Who Wasn’t.
Talking about the first-world problem of the super-rich finding the right causes to donate to, he said: “Spending is not a big problem, but spending it meaningfully is.”
News was broken over the weekend by the Irish Daily Mail’s Philip Lanigan that billionaire JP McManus has gifted €32m to be divided among every GAA, LGFA and camogie club in Ireland.
Each county board will have received a letter in recent days with a cheque attached for €1m.
Opinions remain divided on McManus.
Despite owning a mansion in Limerick, he claims residency in Switzerland.
Because he lives fewer than 183 days of the year in Ireland, he is eligible to declare as a ‘tax exile’, a term McManus took issue with when he addressed the topic in a rare 2011 interview.
He said: “I didn’t leave the country in order to avoid paying a tax, or to avoid paying a future tax that was about to come down the line. I paid my taxes and I set up a business abroad. If I was somebody who set up a business abroad and it didn’t go so well I’d be considered an emigrant; if it goes well I’m considered an exile. Now, what do they want? Do they want you to come back and try and support the local economy, try to earn some money abroad and then put it in the local economy? That’s what I like to do. I consider myself Irish. I’m proud to be Irish and I think I’m doing the country more good by being abroad, trying to earn a few quid. If I bring it back and decide to spend it whatever way I like here, at least I’m improving the economy.”
JP McManus has, for over more than 20 years, tried to find ways to spend his money meaningfully.
You need little more than the ability to conduct a Google search to find the list of projects he has supported financially and otherwise.
His charitable foundation has given over €100m to causes around Ireland since 2000.
It was over €20m last year alone, up from €9m the year before.
His Pro-Am golf tournament brought in all the big names and gathered up €147m that will be put to good use.
The structure of the foundation itself is telling.
It employs just one person, whose salary was reported in 2020 to be just €33,227. No wastage, no fat.
The money distributed by the foundation goes directly to where it’s most needed – to Cuan Mhuire addiction centre, to the ADAPT centre in Limerick to help women and children suffering abuse in the home, to the refit of the Milford Hospice in Ennis, so on and so on.
In May, Tipperary-born billionaire founders of Stripe, Patrick and John Collison, were the primary funders for an €11.6m programme aimed at halving the age at which cerebral palsy is detected.
Their brother Tommy has the condition and their mother Lily has written books about it.
That’s a cause as close to their hearts, and a cause better off because the funding will be injected right where it is needed.
Governments tend not to spend money all that well or wisely.
Say JP McManus rocked up at government buildings like Michael O’Leary did all those years ago with the novelty cheque made out for Dithering Bertie, and gave the €32m there instead.
What would that €32m be spent on?
There’s no way of quantifying it but the reality for governments is that, the world over, 95 per cent of big projects run over budget, according to How Big Things Get Done, a book by Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner.
In Ireland’s recent history alone you have all sorts.
The Bertie Bowl. €200m projection, rising to €880m before the plug was pulled with €200m of costs already incurred.
The motorways that were supposed to come in at €5.6bn and actually ended up costing €16.4bn.
We’re caught in the middle of the Casement Park story ourselves, a £77.5m project a decade old and twice the price without a drop of concrete poured
And then there’s the Children’s Hospital in Dublin which started off at €400m and for which estimates are now above €2bn.
In Helsinki, they built a 150-bed children’s hospital for €160m.
The market has a price but there’s never any great sense of value. You find yourself looking at these sums of money and wondering where exactly it all goes. And nobody is ever that keen to break it down in any great detail, which tells you a lot in itself.
What would €26m have achieved in the hands of the Irish government? Worse still, what would €6m have been used for in Stormont?
JP McManus’ lifestyle is the privilege of the very, very few.
There is undoubtedly an element of good PR in this. The timing of his two major donations to the GAA, €100,000 to each county after Limerick’s first All-Ireland win in late 2018 and now this after they’ve just gone four-in-a-row, could be cynically viewed as offsetting the debate over how valuable his unknown level of funding has been in that success.
Maybe he should just pay tax like everyone else.
But those that just wish him to hand the government a cheque seek to put what he hasn’t done before what he has.
By right, by law, he didn’t have to do any of it. The law might be an ass but it’s still the law.
Yet he has contributed an absolute fortune of money for the betterment of Irish society and he’s tried to put it right to the heart of where it’s needed to go.
If that’s not spending it meaningfully, what is?