FOR THE SECOND time in several years, JP McManus has donated a vast amount to the GAA.
In 2018 after the Limerick hurling team the team he bankrolls won their first senior All-Ireland in 45 years, McManus gifted €100,000 to each county board.
He went one better yesterday, and donated €32 million – a million euro for each county board.
The intention is for this money to be distributed between clubs in each county and for the same amount to go to both men’s football and hurling as to ladies’ football and camogie.
JP McManus is tax resident in Switzerland, and some have argued that it would be preferable for McManus to be tax resident in Ireland instead of making these donations.
McManus rarely makes public remarks, but 2011, he addressed the issue and said: “If I was somebody who set up a business abroad and it didn’t go so well I’d be considered an emigrant; if it goes well I’m considered an exile.”
He added that he didn’t leave Ireland “in order to avoid paying a tax, or to avoid paying a future tax that was about to come down the line”.
“I paid my taxes and I set up a business abroad,” said McManus.
McManus is believed to have amassed most of his wealth as a private foreign exchange trader.
This involves anticipating changes in currency prices to profit from a change in currency demand.
Social Democrats TD Jennifer Whitmore noted that the donation is “very generous” and that “GAA clubs all over the country will do great work” with it.
She added: “However, philanthropy cannot be seen as an acceptable replacement for taxation.
“I’m sure many taxpayers would like to be able to cherry pick projects to fund, but it doesn’t work like that for a good reason.
“Taxes pay for the functioning of our country, from sewage systems to hospital beds. Without money for those essential services, our communities would just not operate.”
Also speaking to The Journal, People Before Profit TD Paul Murphy noted that the “money will be very welcome for GAA clubs across the country”.
“However, it would be much preferable if he paid taxes in this country,” said Murphy.
“Ordinary workers do not get to choose what causes their money goes to. Why should billionaires get to choose?
“If billionaires and major corporations were properly taxed in this country, there would be enough money to properly fund grassroots sports and address the housing and health crises.”
And in a post on X, formerly Twitter, Labour TD Aodhán Ó Ríordáin said “tax exiles aren’t heroes” in reference to McManus.
“Picking and choosing what you throw your millions at for good coverage isn’t patriotism,” he added.
“Supporting education, health, pensions, housing, policing, etc through taxation all year round is the measure of true citizenship.”
‘Those who do nothing aren’t criticised’
However, former GAA president and current MEP Seán Kelly told The Journal that the issue is quite straightforward.
“It’s very simple, it’s extremely generous of JP McManus,” Kelly told The Journal.
“It’s not the first time he’s shown generosity either.”
Kelly told The Journal that when he was chair of the Munster GAA Council, McManus donated €5 million for the development of Limerick Stadium, “a huge amount at that time,” added Kelly.
Kelly also points to the JP McManus All Ireland Scholarships, which he said “isn’t mentioned enough”.
“He does a scholarship program every year for students from the 32 counties of Ireland for those who do well in the Leaving Cert but can’t afford to go to college.”
Kelly also welcomed the stipulation that the donation must go to the women’s organisations as well”.
When asked if such a stipulation can be enforced, Kelly said: “They’ll be able to sit down and work out how to divide it.
“There might be a little argument here and there about the sums, but when you’re getting something as generous as that, then the emphasis should be on gratitude and being fair and distributing it equally and I think that’ll happen all right.”
When asked about criticisms of McManus for paying tax elsewhere, Kelly remarked that McManus “isn’t the only multi-millionaire or billionaire in the country”.
“He gives money generously to the community through the GAA and he gets criticised.
“Those who do nothing aren’t criticised at all,” Kelly added.
“They’re all living by the rules. A lot of his income is earned abroad and he makes his money abroad but he’s obviously not breaking any laws.
“If people are that concerned about issues of that nature, why don’t they change the laws and then there’d be no issue.”
Kelly added: “I just find it difficult to understand why when someone gives €32 million to a volunteer organisation, he gets criticised, and if he gave nothing, there wouldn’t be a word about it, so that’s difficult to comprehend really.”
Rather than criticising, Kelly said “maybe what we should be doing is encouraging all the other billionaires out there to do something similar for other communities, be it other sporting bodies or voluntary bodies”.
“I think maybe that’s the line we should be going down, rather than criticising a man who’s proven his generosity over and over and over again, unlike anyone else,” Kelly told The Journal.
Fianna Fáil and Limerick TD Willie O’Dea is in agreement, posting on X: “JP McManus employs hundreds, pays tax on what he earns here, set up a company abroad and pays tax there.
“Nothing wrong with that. He voluntarily donates millions of his own money to good causes. Let’s leave the envy to one side and celebrate what’s being done!”
‘Vast bureaucracy’
Meanwhile, the JP McManus All Ireland Scholarship was also referenced by Tommy Conlon, an author and sportswriter with the Sunday Independent.
“I happen to know a young student to a single mother who got one of the JP McManus scholarships,” Conlon told The Journal.
“He ended up studying law at Trinity and is now a lawyer.
“He was very incredibly talented academically, a really hard worker, but his mother would not have been able to afford to pay for accommodation in Dublin and four years in college but for the scholarship fund.”
Conlon said that he can “recognise the argument about everyone paying their taxes”.
“Anyone has to acknowledge it’s a bedrock of our society that everyone pays into the communal pot,” said Conlon.
However, he said McManus is “cutting out the middleman, the revenue commissioners, and going straight to the source with vast sums of his own money”.
“There is the counter-argument about taxation and the spending of public money,” said Conlon.
“I think it’s generally accepted in Ireland that a huge amount of public money is wasted somewhere in the vast labyrinth of the public service.
“How much of the tax that everyone pays ends up at the front line and how much of it just disappears into the vast bureaucracy, and that frustrates everyone, that waste of money.”
Conlon also pointed to McManus’ funding for University Hospital Limerick, the addiction service Cuan Mhuire, and the Milford Care Centre in Limerick among other donations.
McManus also funded a mobile outreach unit for Ana Liffey Drug Project in Limerick.
While Conlon has never met McManus, he told The Journal that the Limerick businessman “has not lost that sort of umbilical cord to his roots”.
“All the money in the world has not separated him from the people in the community and society,” said Conlon.
“Healthcare in particular, and education, and all those things that matter to every citizen, they matter to him as well as far as I can see.”
Referencing how McManus built his fortune, Conlon remarked: “Apparently he makes these vast amounts of money trading currencies on the foreign exchange currency market.”
Conlon added: “As far as I can see, it’s a vast gambling eco-system – a place of hedge funds and the City of London and Wall Street – played by this elite team on the money markets.
“I’m romanticising it a bit, but he’s making these sums on the money market and coming back with all of these millions and pouring it into all sorts of community organisations and charities in the Midwest region and in Limerick.
“It’s extraordinary what he’s doing, I think.”
On the Tonight Show on Virgin Media, Fine Gael Senator John McGahon claimed that criticism of McManus for his tax status is “plain old begrudgery”.
“Where were people questioning JP McManus when he was putting 100 million quid into hospice services?” said McGahon.
WATCH: @John_McGahon reacts to the donation of €1 million to each GAA county board by JP McManus#TonightVMTV pic.twitter.com/pQO6yM0Hmh
— TonightVMTV (@TonightVMTV) December 14, 2023
“Where were people questioning where he pays his taxes when he is pumping more and more money into healthcare and community facilities?”
McGahon added that the donations are “not a PR stunt” and he “couldn’t understand” the criticisms.
However, Conlon told The Journal that he “wouldn’t characterise the objection as begrudgery”.
“I think they’re arguing for the principle of everyone paying their fair share of taxation,” said Conlon, “and I don’t think McManus has ever come out and actually defended what he does and why he does it.
“But we know for a fact that he’s paying vast amounts of money into the local economy and society in the Midwest region, far in excess of what he’d ever have to pay in tax.
“He’s pouring in incredible amounts of money, all of his own volition, when he could be buying a super yacht in the Mediterranean if he wanted to.”
Conlon added: “McManus himself is not under any obligation to do what he does but he does it and I rate him as arguably the greatest philanthropist Ireland has had since Chuck Feeney.”
Written by Diarmuid Pepper and posted on TheJournal.ie
