Ireland's richest are being encouraged to get more involved in philanthropic activities, writes Colm Keena, Public Affairs Correspondent
The level of philanthropic giving in the Republic is estimated by Philanthropy Ireland to be about half that of the UK and considerably lower than in the US, something an annual series of lectures promoted by that organisation and being inaugurated today is hoping to affect.
The 10-year series of annual lectures, commemorating the late Ray Murphy of Atlantic Philanthropies, is to be launched by Bill White, president and chief executive of the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, a major US philanthropic body based in Flint, Michigan, and founded in 1926.
The Mott foundation had assets of $2.7 billion (€1.83 billion) at the end of 2007, and it issued grants totalling $107 million during the year. At one stage it was one of the top four such foundations in the US, but the number of foundations set up in the past decade, by dotcom entrepreneurs and others, may mean it is not even in the top 20 anymore, according to White. In particular, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, to which Warren Buffett has pledged some $37 billion of his fortune, "probably swamps the next top 40 put together".
"There is a lot of new wealth [ in the US] and there is going to be a great transfer of wealth from one generation to the next [ in the coming years]," he says.
While the scale is hugely different, there are also many newly rich individuals in Ireland, enjoying levels of wealth that were a lot less common before the boom began in the 1990s. Philanthropy Ireland is hoping more such people will think of making substantial, planned donations to the philanthropic sector.
One of the issues White has been asked to address at today's talk in Cork, is what can be done to increase philanthropic giving in Ireland.
He believes philanthropic giving should involve the rich making substantial donations, as well as ordinary people funding "community-based" philanthropy. "Everyone has some sort of charitable impulse," says White. "With economic growth you should expect philanthropy and charity to grow . . . I believe there is a lot of power in enabling ordinary people to give."
The late Charles Stewart Mott, founder of the eponymous foundation, was on the board of General Motors for 60 years and was once its largest individual shareholder.
White, a business graduate and former Wall Street consultant, has married into the Mott family. His father-in-law was the late CS Harding Mott, son of Charles Stewart Mott.
White says CS Harding Mott asked his father in the early 1960s: "Why are you leaving all this money to the kids?" CS Harding Mott went on, with his siblings' consent, to encourage his father to give the bulk of his fortune to the foundation.
The 1963 donation increased the foundation's value from approximately $100 million to about $400 million. "It wasn't the tax laws that encouraged him to give most of his money to charity," says White. "He enjoyed seeing the good results the money produced."
White is a believer in the good that carefully managed philanthropic expenditure can achieve. He also believes private philanthropy can be more flexible than publicly funded efforts.
"Philanthropy can test ways of solving social problems. It can be difficult for government to experiment. It finds it difficult to say, we spent the money but it didn't work out."
He believes in partnership between foundations and between foundations and government. "There isn't enough private wealth to provide the needs of society. There never has been . . . Poverty, social welfare, etc, there just isn't enough money to meet the need."
The existence of myriad philanthropic organisations pursuing different goals, often in partnership with government, is a good thing, he says. "Because there is no one solution."
