When the IRA announced its first ceasefire in August 1994, I was a junior reporter on The Irish Times business desk and was tasked with ringing around well-known business figures to get their reaction.
One of them was the late Martin Naughton. His response was markedly different from the carefully calibrated but rather bland quotes from other businessmen I contacted – they were all men – including Richard Burrows of Irish Distillers and George Quigley of Ulster Bank.
“It is the most exciting day of my life ... we started in Newry 21 years ago and I never thought the Troubles would last this long ... It is up to all of us to do everything we can to make sure that the peace works,” Naughton told me.
It was clear that, for Dundalk-born Naughton, the ceasefire was personal and not just a welcome change in the business environment. The behind-the-scenes role he played in the run up to the ceasefire by trying to foster greater North-South business links and his subsequent chairmanship of InterTradeIreland – the cross-Border trade body established under the 1998 Belfast Agreement – have been well covered in the days since his death last week.
READ MORE
What has been less noted, and perhaps it’s a little too early for such things, is how his role in the wider peace process is an example of how those with wealth – and the influence that comes with it – can use it in the wider public interest.
It is something that the current crop of apparently public-spirited but foreign-based Irish millionaires and billionaires might study. Naughton did not use his platform to slag off politicians or fund think tanks that come up with simplistic solutions to complex multilayered problems for others to implement.
Rather than stand on the sidelines saying Ireland was broken – which it really was in 1973 when he mortgaged his family home to set up Glen Dimplex – he got on the pitch and did something.
Naughton deserves the praise he has received for his public service in recent days, but he is probably not a candidate for canonisation.
The bones of the Glen Dimplex story are well known. Starting from the small factory making heaters in Dundalk, Co Louth, it grew into an international conglomerate by buying and turning around underperforming rivals. It was not a business for those without a ruthless side.
The details of the Glen Dimplex story are much less clear as the company used – and still uses – a range of legal structures to limit the amount of financial information it has to disclose. It’s easy to understand for a company operating on the Border during the height of the Troubles but less so some 25 years after the Belfast Agreement.
One of the consequences of this was that the extent of Naughton’s wealth only became apparent through his philanthropy and the Naughton Foundation.
The Naughton family gave €25 million to Trinity College Dublin in 2018 to fund a research institute focusing on engineering, energy and the environment. It remains the largest such gift in the history of the State.
It has also funded fellowships and scholarships to the University of Notre Dame in Indiana focused on science, technology, engineering and mathematics (Stem). In addition, the foundation funds a chair in Stem at DCU’s Institute of Education which seeks to shape how these subjects are taught in Irish schools.
There have also been numerous donations in the area of the arts and culture, but the focus has been firmly on increasing the supply of Irish engineers and scientists.
Naughton set out his rationale for this at the time of the Trinity donation. “Ireland will need increasing numbers of engineers, scientists, IT specialists among other Stem graduates who will be able to work together to tackle the big global challenges we face today,” he said.
“Throughout my life in business, I have been fortunate to have been able to play my part in effecting positive societal change. Education has a central role in effecting such change.”
Large philanthropic donations to a particular cause of issue are common in the United States and not without flaws; why not just pay more tax and let the State decide how to spend the money?
It has reached a sort of nadir with the “philanthrocapitalism” practised by some, bringing the rigour of investment banking to the act of giving.
But it is the focused nature of Naughton’s donations in the area of Stem that his peers should pay attention to. No amount of exasperated commentary about how hard it is “to get things done” in a complex democracy such as Ireland is going to achieve as much as focusing on a bottleneck and putting your money to work trying to clear it.
