The family of Lean Scully, a prominent Dublin PR consultant who bequeathed €5.5 million to the Edinburgh Festival, say they are shocked and upset that she left nothing in her will to her brother who is being cared for in a centre for people with intellectual disabilities.
While she never married, Ms Scully left behind a younger sister, Patricia, and a 70-year-old brother who is being cared for in a facility in Co Cork.
Close friends of Ms Scully were astonished to discover after her death last year that she had a brother as she never made any reference to his existence. "It was as if in her mind she had buried him," her sister, Patricia Rooney, told The Irish Times from her home in Connecticut, US, yesterday. "She didn't want anything to do with her extended family."
Mrs Rooney has appealed to festival director Sir Bryan McMaster for a donation to the Co Cork centre which is in need of funds to improve facilities for its ageing residents. In a letter to her Sir Bryan has said that the trustees of the legacy will give full consideration to her request.
Orla Rooney Mays, a doctor and the eldest of Ms Scully's US nieces, claimed in a blog on the Scotsman's website that her aunt had never wanted anything to do with her blood relations.
"This is a woman who blatantly ignored her nieces and her mentally handicapped brother . . . Lean may have hoped this final act of philanthropy may have redeemed her, but my own spiritual beliefs tell me otherwise."
The only other beneficiaries of the will written in August l994 were a friend of Ms Scully's who was left €50,000 and the Carmelite fathers in Dublin's Clarendon Street church who were left €1,000 for Masses.
After Ms Scully's two houses in Leeson Park were sold privately last year (the guide price for the properties was in excess of €7.5 million) their contents were dispersed in accordance with her wishes.
Mrs Rooney's daughter, Fiona Sayer, who was Ms Scully's goddaughter, works in a Boston children's hospital. She said yesterday: "I'm not upset about the will and I know the money is going to be well used, but I just don't understand when you have your own charity right in your family that you don't give one euro.
"Even a token gift would have been something. If she wanted to be remembered by a legacy, as someone who liked to throw a party, she certainly got everybody talking."
