Give Denis O’Brien an Ireland shirt and show his critics the red card

I KNOW I’m only supposed to do begrudgery on this page. I’m supposed to get angry about the uneven distribution of wealth in Ireland, the immorality of policies that favour the rich, the injustice and unfairness that so many people suffer from.

I do, often, feel that kind of anger, and to be honest I don’t regard it as begrudgery at all to point out some of the injustices that destroy people’s lives in our rich country.

When you’re trying to do something about some of those injustices, you get help from all sorts of quarters.

There is one person more likely to be willing to put his shoulder to the wheel than a lot of others, and he is just as capable, despite his own wealth, of feeling anger about injustice when he encounters it. His name is Denis O’Brien.

Let me declare an interest where Denis O’Brien is concerned. I have witnessed and been the recipient of his decency, not in a personal way but in a variety of ways that matter, over the last few years.

So I have a certain view of the man. But I cannot understand how, in any terms, he can be criticised for wanting to help the Irish international football team be as good as it can be.

And yet we’ve had to listen to, and read, acres of rubbish in the past week about Denis O’Brien and his gesture to the FAI. To listen to some of it, you’d think there was some kind of sinister conspiracy, not too far removed from the assassination of President Kennedy, about his decision to offer to help fund a top-class manager for the Irish team.

There was even a couple of pages in one of the Sunday papers about how it represented the death of the integrity of the FAI. Mother of God!

The FAI has taken money from sponsors for years and it has been involved in all sorts of political deals in the interests of their sport as they see it.

Now suddenly, taking money from an individual for exactly the same reason has some sort of evil connotation.

Denis O’Brien is not trying to bend any rules or attach any conditions. He’s probably just trying to help recapture those magnificent days when the entire nation was carried along on the shoulders of an Irish team that was doing us proud on the world and European stages.

And wouldn’t it be fantastic if we were all able to get totally wrapped up in the next World Cup instead of the permanent relegation to non-qualifying status that has become our lot in the last few years under a succession of unfortunate or unlucky managers. Of course Denis O’Brien can be criticised, if you want to, because he opted to become a sort of tax exile after he made all that money on the sale of Esat.

He made a lot of money on that deal and avoided paying tax here because he was resident in Portugal for tax purposes at the time.

Would it have been better, in all sorts of ways, if he had paid the tax? Of course it would. It would have been better in principle, better for Ireland – and I reckon it would have been better for him, too.

I don’t suppose he was in any better position than the rest of us are to know what the future might bring, but his subsequent investments have been so enormously successful that the tax due on his first big deal would look like a drop in the ocean now.

I’ve often felt, though, that there is little point in criticising people who take advantage of the tax laws we put in place. It’s our own fault.

It’s the governments we elect, after all, that have designed a tax system over the years that is heavily unbalanced in favour of the wealthy.

It’s so unbalanced, in fact, you’d wonder why anyone would ever want to become a tax exile.

For instance, do you remember that report a few years ago when the statistics branch of the Revenue listed the top 400 earners in Ireland (without naming them, of course) and established what their effective tax rates were.

Fifty-one of those high earners, or just over one in eight, had an effective tax rate of less than 5%. And nearly one-fifth of the top 400 had an effective tax rate of less than 15%.

When the Revenue examined the tax situation of the very top earners in the country — the highest 117 people — they discovered that 29 of them (or one-quarter) had no tax liability at all, while more than half of them had a tax liability of less than 10%.

And it was all because of the enormous number of tax shelters we provided at the time — multi-storey car parks, hotels and a wide variety of property-based capital allowance schemes.

If Denis O’Brien had chosen that route, he would never be criticised for being a tax exile — although he probably would have saved just as much tax.

I’ve no idea why he chose the particular form of tax avoidance he used. The one thing I would be reasonably certain of, however, is that his decision had nothing whatever to do with personal greed.

I have to say the impression I’ve formed of him over a number of years is of someone who is inspired by imaginative ways of doing things, turned on by good ideas, utterly impatient with bureaucracy and driven by a will to win.

I’ve never detected any airs or graces about him, and I’ve seen a sufficient number of examples to know that he is a man who is more motivated by generosity than most people.

AND I suspect if everything he has given away were totted up, it would come to far more — a multiple, probably — of the tax he didn’t pay on the Esat transaction.

Actually, to say he gives it away is probably an exaggeration. Insofar as I can judge, he seems to want to invest in ideas — and they tend to be ideas that are a bit ahead of the posse.

There are a number of organisations I know, doing vital and important things that have good reason to be grateful to Denis O’Brien’s enthusiasm.

Imaginative and brave approaches — the kind of things that governments don’t want to support until they’re already successful — seem to be the kind of things O’Brien is willing to take a risk with.

He expects a return on the investment he makes — not a financial return, but results in terms of lives turned around for the better. That’s as it should be, in my book.

I’m sure Denis O’Brien has made mistakes, like everyone else, and he’s still waiting to find out what the Moriarty Tribunal thinks of him.

He’s a rich man who enjoys his money, takes occasional business risks and is more than willing to give some of it back to people who will never have as much as he does.

And by the way, in giving the FAI a nudge to go after a top-class manager, he did us all a favour.