Fergus Clancy left St Paul’s College in Raheny after scraping through the Leaving Certificate. He was “never a candidate for third-level education”, he later recalled in an insightful interview with Greg Dilger on the Renatus podcast two years ago. Clancy got a job as a postboy in an insurance company, which was then called Church & General (today part of Allianz). 

From basic admin, he worked his way up to the claims department where he worked on the toughest cases. Many involved medical malpractice. This exposed him to Ireland’s hospitals, where he developed a love of healthcare – both as a business and for the impact it could have on people’s lives. From Church & General, Clancy set up a specialist healthcare division for Marsh, the insurance broking giant. 

He then set up his own consultancy business, Circa Healthcare Consulting. Clancy wrote a paper proposing an enterprise liability scheme where all doctors were centrally insured by the state. Brian Cowen, then the health minister, liked the idea and implemented it. “It has saved tens of millions of euros,” Clancy told Gavin Daly in an interview with The Sunday Times in 2014. “There are no more profits for insurers and no multiple sets of legal costs.”

Clancy later sold Circa to Aon. From his consultancy work, he knew the Mater Private, which was founded in 1986 at Number 7 Eccles Street in North Dublin, the fictional address of Leopold Bloom, the central character in the James Joyces novel, Ulysses. 

Its first chief executive was Sister Gemma Byrne, but it was taken over by hospital consultants and others in 2000 after an MBO. The Mater Private approached Clancy in 2004 to see if he would join the hospital, then chaired by the experienced Brian Joyce, a former chief executive of Bord Bainne.

Clancy started as deputy chief executive before becoming chief executive in 2005. He was tasked with making the hospital better and preparing it for sale. In early 2007 he led the sale of the Mater Private to Seamus FitzPatrick’s Capvest for €350 million. 

Within a year the Irish economy went off a cliff as its banks crashed, unemployment spiked and the state itself had to be bailed out by the European Union, the ECB and the IMF. Wisely, Capvest convinced Clancy to stay on as chief executive and despite the crash, the private equity firm invested in growing the hospital and expanding its range of services. 

In the next decade, the Mater Private opened a new hospital in Cork, developed a cancer centre in Limerick jointly with the HSE, and another cancer centre in Liverpool with the NHS. It also built two day hospitals in Cherrywood and Northern Cross on either side of the city and outreach centres in Drogheda, Mullingar and Navan. There was also a big investment in digital transformation. 

“It was a hard slog,” Clancy admitted. Ireland was in a deep recession so private health insurance was dropped by many people or scaled back as people switched to cheaper plans. But Clancy said Capvest had the vision “to look beyond the cycle”, and create a network that is an important contributor to Irish healthcare. 

Capvest held onto the Mater much longer than expected and waited for better times. “There were never any high fives on the good days, and never banging of desks on the bad days… Capvest are superb owners,” Clancy told Dilger. 

A new chapter

In 2016, Clancy stepped down as chief executive of the Mater Private. John Hurley, a cardiac transplant surgeon, took over and Clancy supported him in this role. Capvest had now held the Mater Private for a long time so the idea of a sale came back on the cards. There were a few false dawns as various parties circled the hospital but ultimately didn’t do a deal. 

Clancy was now advising Infravia Capital Partners, a Paris-headquartered long-term private equity investor. Behind the scenes, bilateral talks started with Infravia to see if a deal could be reached. Clancy was trusted by both sides and he helped steer the business to a sale at a €500 million valuation in April 2018. 

The year before Infravia bought nursing home group Carechoice for €70 million. It put Clancy on the board and he helped it grow from six nursing homes to the 14 it has today. 

Clancy also got involved in Ashdale Care, an important business which provides therapeutic residential services to young people with complex emotional and behavioural needs. 

This business wanted to grow so it raised capital from Irish private equity fund Cardinal Capital who asked Clancy to help it with due diligence. Clancy believed in the business so he ended up co-investing in it with Cardinal. He became its chair and he helped it to expand to help more children. 

Clancy set up Tricastle Healthcare Partners to invest in innovative healthcare start-ups that needed not just capital, but expertise.

In 2017, Clancy, a Dublin GAA fan who lived in Co Meath, became chair of the Gaelic Players Association. He became friends with Paul Flynn, a six-time All-Ireland winner and columnist with The Currency, who led the GPA from 2018 until 2021. 

The two men went into business together along with Sean Tierney when they bought Mobile Medical Diagnostics from Mary Jones in 2020. Jones had realised how traumatic it was to bring elderly patients into hospitals for procedures like X-Rays so she started a business bringing the X-Ray to patients. 

From his experience in nursing homes, Clancy could see how this business improved the lives of residents, so he decided to back the business with Flynn becoming chief executive. 

“We spent a year building the infrastructure around what was already a brilliant service. We looked at what was happening in the States with similar services,” Flynn told The Sunday Independent last month. “We could see it worked, we could see it was scalable. And we were keen to grow the service nationwide.”

MMD now has a fleet of nine vans and is delivering its services nationwide, and it is working with the HSE to keep people out of hospitals and serve them in the community. 

It is partnering with Cardinal Capital and John Dolan to expand the business into Britain and Northern Ireland and add other diagnostic, therapeutic and clinical services. 

Clancy also gave back, notably becoming chairman of Pieta, which provides help to people who are experiencing thoughts of suicide or have been bereaved by suicide. He got involved in Pieta in memory of a close friend. He also served on the fitness to practise committee of the Irish Medical Council, an important role in ensuring high standards for Irish doctors. 

I’ve known Fergus Clancy for over a decade. We were not close friends, but he was always warm and funny. He often declined to comment when I contacted him about some rumoured deal or other, but he did it in a professional and kind way where we often ended up chatting about entirely unrelated matters. 

He believed in the Mater Private and saw it as more than a business. In April 2008 in the middle of the financial crisis, I remember how excited he was that the Mater Private was going to perform Ireland’s first deep brain stimulation (DBS) operation that summer, in a development that could transform the lives of patients who suffer from Parkinson’s disease. “It is a complex procedure that can be life-changing. If we achieve it, it will be something we will be very proud of,” he said.

A great legacy

Fergus Clancy made a serious contribution to Irish business and healthcare in Ireland. 

His friend Brendan Lenihan, managing director of Navigo Consulting, described Clancy in a post online as “a quiet and gentle giant of a person, his stature confirmed not because of his undeniable success in business, but principally for his exceptional integrity, decency and humanity. This rare combination (and so much more) was Fergus.”

The GPA described him as a “firm friend and ally of players.” Pieta House said he was an “exceptional leader” whose “legacy will live on through his contributions to Pieta and many other organisations that had the privilege of working with him”.

Fergus Clancy died peacefully recently, at his beloved Mater hospital surrounded by his loving family. He will be missed.