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Born: February 22nd, 1933
Died: November 10th 2021
Martin Rafferty, who has died aged 88, was a leading figure in Irish business. His career straddled the private and public sectors, and saw him play a quiet but hugely significant role in the economic success of modern Ireland.
During a 40-year career, he was associated with a range of household-name businesses, including Allied Irish Banks, Ulster Bank, Aer Lingus, the Brooks Watson Group (BWG), Jefferson Smurfit, Greencore, Readymix and United Drug.
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He played a leading role at the Industrial Development Authority at a time when foreign direct investment (FDI) became a main driver of economic growth in Ireland. He was also an esteemed teacher, lecturing at the Irish Management Institute, where be brought to Ireland many of the executive training and business management skills to which he himself had been introduced while on scholarship at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).
Widely respected across the business world, Rafferty eschewed the limelight and the baubles that come with stellar success. He was remembered at his funeral as a man of sometimes few words but that when he spoke, what he said mattered and was listened to.
Martin Rafferty was born in Glenamaddy, Co Galway, in 1933, to Martin Rafferty and Mary (nee Connolly). He was the eldest of six children, his five siblings being Kevin and Jim (both of whom became priests with the Vincentians), Malachy, Mary and Margaret.
At the time, the east Galway village of Glenamaddy had a population of some 150, set in a wider parish that numbered around 500. Notwithstanding the small population, the village had no fewer than 12 pubs, one of which was run by the Raffertys.
Rafferty’s was typical of its time and location in a rural community. The business was much more than a mere pub, functioning also as a grocery, selling household provisions, sweets and ice cream, supplying local farmers with pollard (a mix of bran and flour used as animal feed), buying wool from them, and operating the local undertaking service as well.
Good instincts
Rafferty senior left school at 14 but had an instinct for business as well as for innovation. At one stage, he spent time with his first-born son calling to the homes of neighbours, seeking to persuade them of the benefits of electrification.
The young Martin was introduced to business early, working part time in his parents’ pub and shop from the age of about 10.
“I remember standing behind the counter,” Martin wrote many years later, “and being a little bit lax in my attention to a customer and getting a kick in the arse. I was quickly told that customers were my life blood and my job was to serve their needs and to do that better than anyone else in town.”
The Raffertys were ambitious for their children, with Mary investing great faith in the benefits of a good education.
Martin was sent to Kilkerrin National School and then as a boarder to Castleknock College in Dublin, as were his brothers. He went on to University College Dublin, where he studied commerce and qualified as both a chartered accountant and a cost and management accountant. As a benchmark of those times, Rafferty noted many years later that of the 70 pupils in the national school, no more than 10 went on the secondary school and the aspiration of most was to emigrate and find work in Manchester, Birmingham, Boston or New York.
What was almost certainly the seminal event of his early life, and from which much flowed thereafter, occurred in 1958 when Rafferty’s parents died within months of each other. Their deaths placed upon him responsibility for the business and made him, aged just 24, in loco parentis to his younger siblings.
For three years he took on the responsibility of running the business, earning the money that facilitated him in shepherding them through their education. When this was done, he sold the business to the man then managing it.
The acceptance of such weighty responsibility, and of quietly but effectively doing what needed to be done, were to be hallmarks of his later career.
American training
A scholarship in the early 1960s saw him spend about eight months at UCLA studying and visiting California enterprises, exposing him to American business and management practices, then largely unknown in Ireland.
Rafferty, contributing to Ivor Kenny’s Out on Their Own, a volume of entrepreneur reminiscences published in 1991, recalled the impact this US experience had on him.
“What it did for me was to broaden totally my vision of the world, in particular the world of business,” he told Kenny. “At UCLA, my fellow students were all working for very large businesses and most of them international. The fact that they were looking outside their own national boundaries at growing their businesses was a major influence . . .
“That was a hell of a jump from a small town in the west of Ireland or even Dublin to the attitudes and thinking of the people of California at that time. I found the directness of my classmates very hard to take at first. Even yet in Ireland there is often a tendency to fudge the direct question or avoid giving a direct answer. It was at times a painful but a useful experience to hear others tell you straight how they saw you.”
Rafferty brought this penchant for straight-talking into his own business style. At his funeral, he was remembered by his friend, Gary McGann, former chief executive of Smurfit Kappa and Aer Lingus, as a silent influencer.
“A man of few words and certainly no superfluous words, he would often not speak at all at a board meeting, because he had nothing incremental to add,” said McGann.
“However, when he cleared his throat by way of an indication that he was going to speak, everyone stopped, sat up and paid attention – from chair to non-executive directors to management. No matter how many questions we were prepared for as a management, there was always the one which we would have to take away and get the answer – sensibly not having the temerity to bluff him as he looked you between the two eyes.”
Rafferty’s first steps into a business career were with two semi-States: Gaeltarra Éireann and the Irish Sugar Company. But shortly after returning to Ireland from UCLA, he began teaching at Kenny’s Irish Management Institute, which he did for four years until he came to the attention of Allied Irish Banks for his qualities of leadership, strategising and ability to motivate others.
In 1968, the bank set up Allied Irish Investment Bank (AIIB) and made 34-year-old Rafferty, who had no banking experience, its managing director. The move thrust him into the company of many of the established and rising stars of Irish business, including Jefferson Smurfit and his son Michael, Tony O’Reilly, Nicholas Leonard, Vincent Ferguson, Tom Toner, John Hartnett, Jim Flavin, Pat Ryan, Michael Murphy and Diarmuid Moore, to name but a few.
Malting company
In 1972, he left merchant banking and, with Hartnett and Toner, bought Joshua Watson, a Carlow malting company with 12 employees. With further acquisitions, including Mahon & McPhillips, a construction company, and Brooks Thomas, the building supplies company, they formed the Brooks Watson Group (or BWG) and, over the succeeding 12 years, created an enterprise with 1,200 employees and a turnover of IR£140 million.
In 1984 they sold it to Irish Distillers.
The following year, Rafferty together with five members of the management team* put together a management buy-out, for £3.35 million, of United Drug, a purchasing and distribution company set up in 1948 by Ballina pharmacists disgruntled at the service they were getting from Dublin-based suppliers. The company, which Rafferty chaired until 2005 and retained a shareholder interest in thereafter, changed hands recently for €3.15 billion.
For many years he was associated with the Industrial Development Authority, serving for a time as its chairman and pioneering much of the organisation’s efforts to secure foreign direct investment. According to Gary McGann, he was “one of the prime movers in the industrialisation of Ireland in the late ’60s, ’70s and ’80s and one of the most understated contributors to its progress”.
“As chair of the IDA, he saw the significant potential of FDI and when the IDA was split in 1994, he only agreed to stay on if he remained as chair of the FDI-facing organisation,” said McGann.
Rafferty served on several boards in a non-executive capacity, including Lombard and Ulster, Ulster Bank, Allianz, Greencore, Readymix, Aer Lingus and Jefferson Smurfit.
Outside of work, he wore his success lightly and was not given to ostentatious displays. He drove a car that was 20 years old.
He was an avid sports enthusiast, having a passion for GAA and rugby. He travelled the world to attend Rugby World Cup tournaments and was a devotee of Lansdowne Rugby Club. He was closely involved in giving financial advice to the GAA during the major construction period of the modern Croke Park stadium and served on the association’s last three commissions.
He played tennis for much of his life – doubles on Friday evenings at Fitzwilliam LTC – and, after tennis in Glenageary LTC on Sundays, he enjoyed a drink with friends at McCormack’s Pub in Monkstown.
Serious man
He was sociable but did not hog the limelight in company. A serious man but not intellectual, he was interested in current events and the world around him but steered clear of politicians.
“He didn’t believe that he was any different to any other guy,” said his son Martin. “He was incredibly smart. Anything he did, he did it 110 per cent in terms of his ability and commitment.”
Martin Rafferty met his future wife, Elizabeth (Betty) Walsh of Terenure, Co Dublin, at the Arcadia Ballroom in Bray, Co Wicklow, in 1953 and they married in 1961. They had five sons whom they raised in Glenageary, Co Dublin. She was a homemaker and, devoted to each other, they were together for 60 years until her death in June.
He cared for her in their later years and revelled in the company of his 11 grandchildren. At his funeral, several recalled his abiding interest in their lives, his love of learning, of the west of Ireland and the Irish language, how he warmed to their company and how they looked up to him.
And there was mention of “the vast collection of teddy bears” in his house and of his weakness for jelly beans.
Martin Rafferty is survived by his sons Jim, Kevin, Martin, Paul and David, his daughters-in-law, and grandchildren Victoria, James, Andrew, Thomas, Lily, Maeve, Emer, Róisín, Ellen, Conor and Dylan, and by his brother Fr Jim Rafferty.
* This article was ammended on December 10th, 2021