The first prayer of the faithful at the funeral of Walter O’Hara Jr, which took place last Wednesday in the Church of St. Ignatius Loyola, 980 Park Avenue, New York, was read by Tom DiBenedetto. 

The seventy-one year old Italian-American entrepreneur is best known for being a partner in Fenway Sports Group, owner of Liverpool Football Club, the Boston Red Sox and a string of other business interests. He was closely followed by Herbert Allen III. 

Allen III is the chief executive of Allen & Co, a legendary New York boutique investment bank founded in 1922. Allen’s father Herb Allen Jr, a former president of Allen & Co, was also there. The three men and hundreds of people were there to remember a gentleman called Walter O’Hara Jr. 

Pupils from All Hallows, a New York Catholic boys school attended by O’Hara Jr, greeted mourners who came from all backgrounds. George Tenet, a former head of the CIA, Eamonn Coghlan, a three-time Irish Olympian, and a who’s who of Irish-American business were all in attendance, as were many ordinary people who he had helped over the decades.

O’Hara Jr died peacefully at the age of 85 last week. He worked alongside three generations of the Allen family on some of the biggest deals in American history. 

He was also quietly a great friend of Ireland and Irish people. Just how much so is not widely known. 

Forging relationships

Walter O’Hara Jr was born in the Bronx in 1935. He attended All Hallows Grammar and High School graduating in 1952. The all-boys Catholic school was famous at that time for educating the sons of Irish immigrants. 

O’Hara Jr stayed close to the school in the decades ahead and he was later the chairman of its board and foundation. 

All Hallows, despite being in one of the poorest congressional districts, is notable for the high number of its graduates, today mainly black and Latino pupils, who make it to third-level education. It is one of the best schools not just in New York, but in America.

Walter O'Hara Jr
Walter O’Hara Jr. Photo: All Hallows High School

O’Hara Jr, who was for a few years a Latin teacher and basketball and football coach, is undoubtedly one secret behind the school’s success. 

O’Hara Jr served two years in the army before graduating from Fordham University. By the late 1950s he had joined Allen & Company where he spent his entire career. His later success allowed him to co-found the Frank McGuire Foundation in 1999 to support high school coaches in the five boroughs of New York, Southern Connecticut and Northern New Jersey. This was just one of numerous charitable initiatives O’Hara Jr supported. 

A modest tribute placed in The New York Times marked O’Hara Jr’s death. 

It said: “Walter served Allen & Company, his family, his friends, and his country with total devotion.

“Walter’s life was devoted to bringing people together and forging relationships. He was known for the size of his heart and his generosity toward all people, especially those in need.”

Backing good people

When John Conroy launched Merrion Stockbrokers in 2000, he pulled off a coup by landing Allen & Co as a minority investor. Allen & Co put about £2 million into the business for a 30 per cent stake that instantly gave Merrion international credibility. 

Allen & Co had worked on deals like AT&T’s acquisition of a cable company for $58bn and Disney’s $19bn acquisition of ABC. It was a top-drawer firm for a fledgling Irish firm to attract. 

Ray Curran, chief executive of Smurfit Stone Container, Smurfit’s US paper and packaging interests, was reported at the time to have made the initial introduction to the prestigious firm. 

The investment initially brought Paul Gould, managing director of Allen & Co, and Clarke Keough, a director of Allen & Co, onto the Merrion board. 

Gould sits on the board of Liberty Global, where John Malone, one of America’s richest men, is the largest shareholder. Malone is known in Ireland for acquiring Castlemartin, the former estate of Tony O’Reilly, as well as a string of hotels and media interests. 

Clarke Keough is the son of former Coca Cola president Don Keough, a legendary Irish-American. Don Keough, who died in 2015, was chairman of Allen & Co. O’Hara Jr himself joined the board of Merrion Stockbrokers in November 2010.

Don Keough was a champion of American investment in Ireland and a long-term Trustee of the University of Notre Dame. He was instrumental in bringing the college’s famous American football team to Dublin along with 35,000 fans to Dublin in 2012 at a time when the economy badly needed a lift. 

He was also influential in encouraging Notre Dame to put down physical roots here. 

O’Hara Jr was a close friend of Keough. Behind the scenes, he helped his friends with his endeavours to promote Ireland as the location of choice for American investment as well as helping build academic bridges between the two countries. 

John Conroy was among the Irish attendees at O’Hara Jr’s funeral.

“All walks of life were there,” he told me. “Walter made a deep lasting impression on so many people for his friendship and his integrity. He was a gentleman who worked tirelessly behind the scenes for Ireland.”

Conroy said Don Keough and O’Hara Jr were the ones who had championed Allen & Co’s investment in Merrion internally. 

O’Hara Jr came to Ireland for Merrion board meetings about four times a year. “He ploughed his own furrow, and he believed in good relationships,” Conroy recalled. 

“Walter was drawn to good people,” Conroy said. “He was a great ambassador for Ireland abroad and a quiet hero working on Ireland’s behalf.”

He said that O’Hara Jr befriended Tim O’Connor, a renowned Irish diplomat and peacemaker, as well as Niall Burgess, the talented secretary general of the Department of Foreign Affairs. 

Burgess told The Currency he first got to know O’Hara Jr when he was Irish consul general in New York. “I met him in the offices of Allen & Co shortly after I arrived. All he wanted to do was offer me any assistance he could. He made it clear he was there for Ireland,” Burgess said.

“Walter never made an ask, of me, in all the time I knew him. He only made offers. He was incredibly well connected and plugged in.

“If I was grappling with an issue where I didn’t know the dramatic personae or the answer he would help you find it. He was an incredibly kind, caring, background presence.” 

“There was another dimension to Walter. It had to do with his own upbringing in the Bronx. He came from a modest background: a classic Irish-American from the upper Bronx community.”

“When the make-up of that community changed dramatically he always kept a connection with his old school,” Burgess said.

“Particularly during the aftermath of the financial crisis I could see a step up in Walter’s connection and engagement in Ireland.”

Niall Burgess

O’Hara Jr invited Burgess several times to visit All Hallows, and on one occasion brought former Taoiseach Bertie Ahern there.  

“He wanted us to see how education could transform kids’ lives,” Burgess explained. 

“Walter’s fundamental belief was a good education and a job can transform lives. The motive for a lot of Walter’s engagement with Ireland was to bring more prosperity into our communities.

“Particularly during the aftermath of the financial crisis I could see a step up in Walter’s connection and engagement in Ireland. He could access a high-powered network to bring a positivity and optimism back to how people viewed Ireland in America.” 

“Walter was from the Bronx,” Burgess said. “His connection with Ireland was as much through his former teachers in All Hallows as his own background. His school formed him and his sense of Irish America and Ireland being two parts of the same thing. All his teachers had Irish accents and spoke about Ireland every day… those two worlds blended very easily for him.”

From Sun Valley to the Summit

Paddy Cosgrave, the founder of Web Summit, was friendly with O’Hara Jr too. The Irish-American took him under his wing and introduced him to people like Don Keough. O’Hara Jr opened up doors in New York and shared war stories of his time helping set up the Sun Valley Conference in Idaho. 

“I am saddened to learn that the wonderful Irish-American Walter O’Hara of Allen & Company, who also created Sun Valley nearly 50 years ago has passed,” Cosgrave said last week. “Over many lunches and dinners, he shared so much wisdom and warmth.” 

Sun Valley is an invite-only conference frequented by media and tech moguls like Rupert Murdoch, Tim Cook and Facebook’s Cheryl Sandberg. It is where Jeff Bezos first got the idea to buy The Washington Post, Disney decided to merge with ABC and so on. It is that sort of place.

“He was a modest man who was a very experienced investment banker and who was held in very high esteem.”

John Corrigan

High powered, intense and fun, Sun Valley is the event that cements Allen & Co’s position as the go-to investment bank for advising on mega-deals like LinkedIn’s $26 billion sale to Microsoft and Time Warner’s $108 billion sale to AT&T. 

Web Summit itself is a broader church. Tens of thousands of people – ranging from cash-short new founders to mega-corporations – all attend it. It does have a more bespoke element called f.ounders, however, which brings together a smaller number of the biggest people in world technology. Undoubtedly, O’Hara Jr’s Sun Valley success was an influence on an Irish-Portuguese success story. 

Making introductions for Ireland

Walter O’Hara Jr was also a founding external member of the Private Equity Investment Committee of the National Pension Reserve Fund, the sovereign wealth fund linked to the National Treasury Management Agency (NTMA) which has evolved into the Ireland Strategic Investment Fund.

This was set up in 2006 to monitor the state’s private equity strategy with Paul Carty, a former managing partner of Deloitte, as chair. It included businessman Brian Hillery and Maurice O’Connell, a former governor of the Central Bank of Ireland, among its members. 

“We would do due diligence on each of these companies every year to see how they were doing and they would let us use their offices to meet some of these firms.”

Michael Somers

John Corrigan, a former chief executive of the NTMA who now chairs Davy stockbrokers, told The Currency: “I am sorry to hear of Walter O’Hara’s passing. He was a very good friend to Ireland and was a frequent visitor here.

“He was a modest man who was a very experienced investment banker and who was held in very high esteem as a senior member of the management team of Allen & Co, the New York-based boutique private investment firm, famous for its annual Sun Valley media finance conference.” 

“Walter provided invaluable help to the NPRF in setting up contacts with, for example, prestigious endowment funds in the US, which as long term investors, had investment objectives similar to the NPRF and in that context had successful track records of investing in private equity,” he added.

“Walter also provided introductions to successful private equity funds which otherwise would not have been easily accessed.”

Michael Somers, a former chief executive of the NTMA, said he got to know O’Hara Jr via Don Keough. “The Taoiseach Charles Haughey was very anxious to get Coca Cola to set up in Ireland so he sent us out to meet Don,” he recalled.

Through that meeting, Somers got to know O’Hara Jr and others, like Bill Bradley, in Allen & Co. Bill Bradley is a former senator and basketball Hall of Fame star, who in 2000, was beaten by Al Gore in the race to be the Democratic nominee for President of the United States.

“Allen & Co were very helpful to us. We had shares in about 3,500 companies,” Somers explained. “We would do due diligence on each of these companies every year to see how they were doing and they would let us use their offices to meet some of these firms.”

“One of the reasons we [Somers and Corrigan] were both out of the country when the bank guarantee was given was we were using Allen & Co offices to meet US companies to talk about their performance.”

O’Hara Jr’s fee for attending and dialling into years of meetings was minuscule, if he ever collected it. 

He was part of a team who wanted Ireland to invest long-term, both broadly and wisely. 

“He had a perceptive mind who could see above the minutiae and see the vision in a deal. He had a huge level of decency but also a very astute business brain.”

John Conroy

Unfortunately, Ireland’s private banks thought differently and ploughed everything into property. 

It was however lucky for Ireland that it had built up billions in the reserves of the NPRF to keep us going in our darkest economic hour. 

A mentor to many

Thomas Ennis is a former boxer turned self-made retailer who employs 250 people, primarily in his Spar shops in Dublin 2 and Dublin 4. Last December, I interviewed him, and asked him who his business hero was. “My personal mentor has been Walter O’Hara Jr,” he said. I had never heard of O’Hara Jr until then.

Ennis said that he had first met O’Hara Jr when he got talking to him in one of his shops.

“Even now 14 years later I would ring him for advice. I can bounce things off him,” Ennis explained. O’Hara Jr was that type of person.

“Walter was a very private person,” Ennis said. “He used to say things like never look down on people, unless it is to help them up. He was an incredibly ethical and kind man.”   

Ennis flew to New York last week to attend his friend’s funeral. Conroy was there too, as were others like John Matson from Arthur Cox and Maurice Buckley, founder of The Ireland Chamber of Commerce in the United States. Leaders of Fortune 500 companies were also dotted among the mourners.

“There is a tradition in the States of playing hard and giving back…Walter did so in a quiet way,” Conroy reflected. “People talk about greed on Wall Street – but he was the complete opposite.”

“He was a relationship banker who loved people. If everyone behaved like Walter there would never be a need for any SEC investigations, or a Me Too movement. He just knew how to behave and treated everyone he met with respect.”

“He had a perceptive mind who could see above the minutiae and see the vision in a deal. He had a huge level of decency but also a very astute business brain.”

*****

The final words in Walter O’Hara Jr’s funeral mass booklet are from Nelson Mandela: “A winner is a dreamer who never gives up.” O’Hara Jr inspired so many to do the same.

He is survived by his beloved sister Kate O’Hara Hickey, his niece Katherine Margot and nephew Kevin, and his brother-in-law Kevin Hickey.