The directors of InterPacific were taken aback. They pushed against the idea of giving the former runner carte blanche to build a resort. Chris Oechsli sent a note to Chuck saying Clarke needed oversight. Jim Soorley said he told Chuck, “Don’t go there, you will lose your ass.” He believed that Feeney’s anger at the state government over the failed land swap might have been a factor in his deciding to build the resort despite the advice he was getting. “Chuck is a bit like myself, a pigheaded Irishman.” But Feeney saw Clarke as a shirtsleeve kind of operator and a great athlete, and he respected what he had achieved at Cannon’s, recalled Jim Downey.
Fletcher bitterly resented the intrusion of Ron Clarke into his territory. He sensed that Chuck “went cool” toward him because he opposed the Couran Cove development and knew he did not like Clarke. Oechsli was critical of the fact that Clarke “took off on his own, like a solo runner” and began the development without providing InterPacific with a proper business plan. He recalled that there were inadequate feasibility studies, an incremental approach taken to the development, and little accountability. Distracted by the drama over the sale of DFS, Feeney had little time to make his own assessment of what was going on.
The problems of developing an eco-resort on a Pacific island were formidable. Some 225,000 tons of acid sulfate soil had to be shifted and a swamp dredged to create a natural lagoon. As it would be on an island with no power links to the mainland, the resort would have to generate its own power, purify the water, and get rid of waste.
The cost of the resort was originally estimated at AU$30 million, “but the next thing we knew, it was AU$60 million dollars and everything just kept escalating,” said Chris Oechsli. It rose to AU$90 million and then by the time of its completion in September 1998, to a staggering AU$185, making it one of the most expensive holiday resorts ever built in the world. The figures would have broken many developers, but General Atlantic Group Ltd., the parent company of InterPacific, showed a return on investments that year approaching US$1 billion. Fletcher was scathing about the cost overruns. “How Chuck allowed Clarke to run up the expenses, I will never know. Chuck is such a good man.”
“Detailed cost reports during construction were sent back to the U.S.A. on a monthly basis and were controlled by their accounting people, and explanations were provided for all variations,” said Clarke in an e-mail response to questions about how the costs escalated. “The major issue was the acid sulfate soils that inundated the area to a much higher degree than original surveys revealed and resulted in entirely new techniques in dealing with them having to be developed by the local university. Then the local government regulations added considerably to the infrastructure with their insistence on tertiary treatment of all sewerage with new treatment plants and stricter hydrological systems for the daily clearance of the lagoon.”
Couran Cove Island Resort opened in September 1998. More than 400 VIPs, including several Olympic runners and national figures, dined on a boardwalk terrace. The media hailed Clarke as a development visionary. Couran Cove won fifteen national awards for environment, design, architecture, and engineering. It had the greatest range of recreational and sporting facilities of any spa resort in the world. They included a 150-meter three-lane sprint track with advanced laser technology on which runners could race against lights five meters apart and break a laser beam to record their times. It had a heated twenty-five-meter swimming pool, tennis courts, basketball courts, climbing walls, high and low rope courses, bicycle track, outdoor gymnasium, shuffleboard courts, and baseball cage. There were nature cabins integrated into the forest, waterfront lodges, restaurants, an eighty-four-berth marina, a rain-forest boardwalk, an artist’s studio, a store, and even a wedding chapel.
The resort, however, did not make any money. It returned losses year after year, and in May 2006, 100 permanent and casual staff, about one-third of the workforce, were told they would be laid off in a “workplace restructure.” Feeney’s attitude was that they mustn’t expect profit every year and that there would be a right time to sell it. The problem, he said, was that “we have all the costs of a five-star hotel and the income from an eco-resort.”
Feeney remained loyal to Clarke and gave him another project, overseeing the construction of a state-of-the-art sports center to be financed by InterPacific on land Clarke selected at Runaway Bay in Brisbane. The center was equipped with a Mondo running track, gymnasium, swimming pool, sports medicine facilities, and accommodation for athletes. Feeney intended that the profits be shared with the city council for more sports facilities and a charity called Children in Need. The costs similarly went up, from AU$10 million to AU$20 million to AU$30 million, said Oechsli.
When it was completed, Feeney backed Clarke’s proposal to go to his home state of Victoria in southern Australia to set up and run the Council for the Encouragement of Philanthropy in Australia. Atlantic Philanthropies provided an initial AU$2 million of a three-year grant of AU$7.5 million. Clarke moved to the Victoria capital, Melbourne, where he launched the council in September 2001. He became a strong critic of the lack of a culture of philanthropy in Australia. “It is astonishing to me that we are lagging behind any country in our charitable donations,” he said.
Feeney had begun funding major university projects in Victoria, and Clarke recalled the American donor arriving from Brisbane early one morning and spending the day with him visiting a number of major beneficiaries, including the Royal Melbourne Hospital, the Walter & Eliza Institute, the Alfred Hospital, and Melbourne University, which collectively were receiving AU$125 million from Atlantic. “As we walked out of the university I turned right to hail a cab,” Clarke said. “Chuck asked, wasn’t the way to the tram in the opposite direction? It was, and so we went left, jumped on a tram for the cross-city journey. I thought it ironic, $125 million given in gifts and $10 saved by not using a taxi.”
Clarke’s relations with Atlantic Philanthropies frayed after a brief article appeared in the Melbourne Age on Sunday, April 1, 2001, which referred erroneously to Clarke as a “representative for the Atlantic Foundation and Trust” who had “helped raise AU$163 million of anonymous donations for a variety of Australian projects.” Harvey Dale suspected that Clarke was the source. “I was quite insulted, frankly, by him daring to think I had breached any confidences,” recalled Clarke. The relationship wasn’t helped by a similar article on October 6, 2002, in the Queensland Sunday Mail, saying that “when the American altruist wanted advice on grant recipients in Australia, Clarke became his eyes and ears . . . They had arranged close to $200 million in donations in Australia before the latest grants, last month.”
The friendship between Chuck Feeney and Ron Clarke deteriorated in 2003 over a lawsuit Clarke and Runaway Bay lodged against ABC television. In November 1999, ABC claimed in its prime-time 7:30 Report program that Runaway Bay Sports Super Centre had been built on a toxic landfill and was “one of the worst development scandals in Queensland history.” Clarke wanted to initiate a defamation suit in Brisbane, but InterPacific lawyers were opposed on the basis that it was difficult to demonstrate economic loss. Clarke pursued defamation action in Melbourne instead, demanding an apology and legal costs on the grounds that it was untrue. The sixty-four-year-old former runner was reported “close to tears” as he testified in Victoria Supreme Court on June 15, 2001, with trembling voice, that he had been depicted as an environmental vandal. On July 4, the six-person jury awarded the former runner AU$710,700 damages and Runaway Bay Centre AU$386,250 damages, ordering ABC to pay the court costs. It was the biggest defamation award ever granted in the State of Victoria.
ABC appealed, and the case was listed for hearing before a three-judge Victoria appeals court in June 2003. Clarke and Werner Graef, who was representing the sports center, agreed out of court to settle for a lesser sum: AU$405,000 for Clarke and AU$81,000 for Runaway Bay. Chuck Feeney insisted that the damages awarded should be held by the sports club, said Clarke, who initiated another legal action to establish
his right to the compensation. On Chuck’s advice, the suit was settled privately. “I made certain all the cash received went to charity,” said Clarke.
“It was the first time I have ever been sued by anyone in my life,” said Feeney. The episode marked the end of his relationship with the former runner.
Atlantic Philanthropies ceased funding the Council for the Encouragement of Philanthropy in 2003 at the end of the initial three-year contract period. It had attracted donated funds of just AU$1 million a year. There was little evidence that Clarke could persuade Australian philanthropists to match their American counterparts. Feeney was by far Australia’s biggest philanthropist ever. Australia’s richest person, publishing tycoon Kerry Packer, with a net worth of over US$4 billion, did not have a philanthropic foundation at the time of his death in 2006. Ron Clarke blamed a culture of meanness among the rich in Australia. “I hate to say it, but I feel our business community leaders remain as selfish as they have always been despite Chuck’s fantastic example, and the growing number of businesspeople around the world doing more for the community,” he said.
Feeney did not join in any recriminations over the failure of the Council for the Encouragement of Philanthropy. “A failed effort is still an effort,” he said. On a visit to Brisbane in March 2007, he noted that the 200 richest people in Australia had wealth of AU$100 billion in 2006. They had yet to discover the satisfaction of philanthropy, he said, and called on them for leadership.
Ron Clarke returned to Queensland, where in March 2004 he was elected mayor of Gold Coast, a resort city south of Brisbane renowned for its beaches and tourist attractions.
Sitting at a pavement café in Dockside, Brisbane, one sunny morning in November 2005, Ken Fletcher reflected on Chuck’s generosity to Australia and to him personally. Only that morning, Feeney had arranged for Ken to see the top cancer specialist in Brisbane to check out his prostate condition. The specialist hadn’t offered much hope. Fletcher wondered, half seriously, why Chuck had not just written out a check for a million dollars for him so he could have a decent life. “I don’t understand, I am so loyal to him,” he said, adding with a grin, “If he had done that I could have taken all my friends on a cruise!”
Fletcher died three months later, on February 11, 2006. At a memorial service in Brisbane, there were many references to his legendary tennis prowess, but the highest praise given to Ken Fletcher in all the eulogies was that he had brought Chuck Feeney to Australia.
After the funeral, Feeney made a rare exception and gave his first television interview ever to Australian television to honor his friend. By then, despite the anonymity rule, he was becoming something of a cult figure in Australia. On October 23, 2006, he appeared with Queensland premier Peter Beattie at the opening of the Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology. The Brisbane Courier Mail managed to get a photograph of Feeney and Beattie laughing uproariously together. Reporter Tess Livingstone wrote, “Take a look at these two men. One is humble, shy and deserves much of the credit for recasting Queensland as the Smart State. The other is the premier.”
CHAPTER 29
A Nation Transformed
As Chuck Feeney expanded his giving in other countries, he was gearing up for bigger things in Ireland. What would become perhaps his most notable philanthropic endeavor got under way at a dinner organized by John Healy for the board members of Atlantic Philanthropies during a visit they made to Dublin on October 21, 1997.
One of those invited to the dinner was Don Thornhill, Ireland’s top education official. As secretary general of the Department of Education and Science, Thornhill received many invitations to functions, and turned most of them down. He didn’t know much about Atlantic Philanthropies, but he had heard rumors about a mysterious philanthropy that was giving millions of dollars to Irish universities, and his instincts told him that this might be a significant occasion.
On arriving for the dinner at Heritage House, an elegant Georgian building on St. Stephen’s Green owned by General Atlantic Group, the trim, bearded education official found himself placed at the top table with Ireland’s Nobel Prize-winning poet, Seamus Heaney; his wife, the writer Marie Heaney; and two Americans, one tall and bald with a commanding presence who introduced himself as Harvey Dale, a lawyer from New York University, and the other a short and genial businessman who said his name was Chuck Feeney. The name Feeney rang a bell with Thornhill: He had read something about the Irish American’s involvement in the Northern Ireland peace process.
Healy had invited Seamus Heaney to the dinner, as he wanted someone of note in Ireland to grace the occasion of the directors’ visit. He had driven to Heaney’s home on the seafront in Dublin and told him in confidence about the hundreds of millions of dollars that Chuck Feeney had given anonymously to Ireland, north and south.
Seamus Heaney stood up to speak to the fifty or so guests. After a few digressions, the Nobel laureate said, “Ladies and gentlemen, you will understand by now that I am approaching my subject by stealth, and I do so in order to imitate the methods by which the Atlantic Foundation has for years been doing its own legendary work of philanthropy.” He was there, he said, “to acknowledge the magnificence of its activities and the reticence of its directors, the most legendary of whom, Mr. Chuck Feeney, will have to pardon me for overdoing things this evening to the point of mentioning his name.” The intervention of the Atlantic Foundation in Ireland had been “epoch-making,” Heaney went on, and came not just from the great traditions of philanthropy but “as a result of the great selflessness, the veritable Franciscan renunciation and Renaissance magnificence of one man in particular, Mr. Chuck Feeney.” The poet finished with a reference to how “cease-fires, and Velvet Revolutions and the Atlantic Foundation are parts of a saving under-song within the music of what happens as our century comes to an end.” He ended with some moving lines from his play The Cure at Troy 7 that had been quoted in several speeches by President Bill Clinton on Ireland.
History says, don’t hope
On this side of the grave,
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up
And hope and history rhyme.
It was a masterly performance. Chuck Feeney, normally most reluctant about receiving praise and thanks, was deeply moved. As the diners thundered out their applause, he was heard to say quietly, “My cup runneth over.”
Don Thornhill found Chuck Feeney to be a “very modest, very pleasant man.” He felt that the placing was no accident, and that he was being put under scrutiny. “I was flying blind,” he recalled. “Like one of Elizabeth Taylor’s later husbands, I had only a vague idea of what was expected from me.”
Thornhill was correct in his assumption. “He was under scrutiny,” said John Healy. “We were courting him.” Chuck, Harvey, and John, in the subtle ways they had developed over years, were doing due diligence on the important bureaucrat, because they had sweeping new plans for education in Ireland, and they needed a reliable partner inside the government structures.
“Chuck was really keen to do really big things,” said Healy. With Atlantic Philanthropies in a much stronger financial position, Feeney was looking to move beyond buildings and do something that would have a real impact on the growing tiger economy of Ireland. He wanted to shift gears, to move to a new level and fund postgraduate research on a scale unimagined by Ireland’s government. Ireland’s future prosperity depended on creating new knowledge, but the government had failed to invest public money in postgraduate research. The economy was heating up after decades of mismanagement and protectionism, while the research landscape remained bleak. Some noncommercial funding was coming from the European Union, but Ireland’s spending on research was just 11 percent of the European average. On top of that, the university sector was disjointed, with little intercollegial cooperation.
For the first time in its history, Atlantic was aiming to enter direct negotiations with a sovereign gover
nment, to do a matching deal “where we put some money on the table, and force them to put some money on the table,” said Healy.
Astonishingly, the secretary general of the Department of Education and Science was not really aware of the role Feeney had played in funding Irish universities during the previous ten years. After the dinner he asked one of his top officials, Paddy McDonagh, to make some inquiries about Atlantic Philanthropies. McDonagh spoke to contacts in the Department of Foreign Affairs and reported back, “It’s highly secretive, and if you make any approach to them at all, that’s it, all communications are finished, are dead.”
It was a measure of the effectiveness of Harvey Dale’s strictures that the education department was in the dark. It was, moreover, not in the interest of university presidents to let the world know anything about their friend Chuck, as they feared it could mean less funding from the Higher Education Authority. New libraries, science buildings, and student villages were going up on every campus, and there were jokes going around the system about the “edifice complex” of university presidents, but no one in the education department had connected the dots. Donations from wealthy Irish like Michael Smurfit, Anthony O’Reilly, Tim O’Mahony, Lochlan Quinn, and Tony Ryan had played a part, but their contributions didn’t come close to what the universities were mysteriously raising elsewhere. University presidents seemed to have developed an extraordinary talent for raising money in America. Some complained with a straight face about the exhausting trips they had to make across the Atlantic to hustle up money, when in fact it was Feeney who came to them.
John Healy made the initial approach for what would become possibly the biggest single act of education philanthropy in modern Europe. Some weeks after the Heritage House dinner, he invited Don Thornhill, who had since then been made executive chairman of the Higher Education Authority, to join him for breakfast in the dining room of the Westbury Hotel, just off Grafton Street in Dublin. He also invited John Dennehy, Thornhill’s successor as head of the Department of Education and Science, and Paddy McDonagh, adviser to the minister for education.
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