Maura Quinn is tucked away in a corner of the Iveagh Hotel on Harcourt Street in Dublin 2 when we met. Over the course of an hour, our conversation ranges from the 2003 invasion of Iraq to the financial regulator Patrick Neary, to the actor Liam Neeson to her plans for the Institute of Directors (IoD), the organisation she has led for the last 13 years.

Quinn has had a fascinating career that has taken her from business consulting to the charity sector to leading UNICEF in Ireland, before building up the IoD into a leader in company director training and networking.

But before we get to those areas, we discuss the biggest corporate governance scandal of the year – the multi-million settlement paid by Davy, Ireland’s biggest stockbroker, to the Central Bank. The scandal triggered a series of senior resignations and the sale of the broker, but it also raised questions for its entire board – not just in relation to what occurred, but in how it was handled afterwards. Quinn has strong views on this unsavoury incident in Irish corporate life. 

“I think it shocked everyone to the core. I think it did huge damage to Ireland Inc,” Quinn said. “Absolutely huge damage and I think the boardroom response to the crisis was very poor.

“I think there was a misunderstanding or a misperception of how big the scandal was and the potential for damage. And I think the board in Davy only started to make decisions when they realised it wasn’t going to go away.” 

I ask Quinn what she thought of the response of its board? “I think I would have preferred to have seen better leadership from the board,” she said.

“It shouldn’t ever have happened [the transaction that led to Davy’s settlement],” she said. “But equally the Central Bank investigation was something that went on over a period of time, so there was a long lead-in time. This didn’t happen overnight. There was plenty of time to make a considered plan about how to deal with it. To me, that appeared not to have happened in this instance.” 

Quinn said the Davy incident reinforced her belief in the need for a strong boardroom culture. “The tone comes from the top,” she said. “If you start to say… okay well we’ll make an exception and allow that to happen this time then you start to cut corners and it happens again.

“Board’s need to be very clear about what’s acceptable and what’s not. If you look back historically at corporate governance failure in Ireland it is clear that the board did not express strongly held views. It’s like Niall FitzGerald said… if people said they didn’t know, they should have known, and if they didn’t understand well then they shouldn’t have been there.”

‘Nothing to see here, it’s all good!’

Maura Quinn will never forget launching the Institute of Directors chartered directors programme, now the gold standard for training directors with over 1,400 people completing it to date of which 434 have become chartered directors. This year there are 180 people on the programme. But 13 years ago, it was a new initiative that she was launching only five months into the job as chief executive. The guest speaker was Patrick Neary, the Financial Regulator during the final years of the Celtic Tiger. The launch of the Chartered Director Programme took place in Fitzwilliam Hall in Dublin 2 in September 2008, just days after Lehman Brothers collapsed.

Quinn recalls the atmosphere as being tense and rumour filled as a crowd of Irish business people gathered to hear Neary speak. “As you walked by people were Anglo, Anglo, Anglo and I’ve heard this and I’ve heard that,” she now recalls. “And then Patrick Neary got up and gave his speech and said to everybody in the room, ‘Nothing to see here, it’s all good!’”

Around two weeks later the state would be forced to guarantee its entire banking system as Ireland headed towards bankruptcy and bail-out. Quinn remembered the room not believing Neary. “‘It’s all good’, we all knew it wasn’t good by then!” Quinn said.

While Neary might have been an unfortunate choice to launch the programme, in retrospect there are few individuals who encapsulated more the need for strong and independent voices around the boardroom table, something that the IoD hopes to help create and support.

The financial crisis and the scale of incompetence and/or wrongdoing at the top of Irish banking – and parts of Irish corporate life – led to a re-evaluation of the importance of training and qualifications for directors in Irish business.

*****

“People lived in fear under Saddam, but it was a different kind of fear.”

Quinn was only new in the job when she launched the Chartered Director Programme. She had left her previous job leading UNICEF in Ireland in March 2007 before after a brief spell in consultancy, Laura Magahy, then managing director of Temple Bar Properties and president of the IoD at the time, helped convince her to join the IoD. The institute at the time was more about networking than qualifications and rigour. Quinn was tasked with changing that.

“The IoD was a nameplate, but there wasn’t much behind the nameplate,” Quinn said. “We did have a big ace however in that the previous year Laura had negotiated with the IoD in the UK to acquire the exclusive franchise to run the chartered director programme in Ireland.”

Quinn felt this programme could form the basis for the IoD really expanding and assisting Irish directors in the boardroom. 

“We knew we had a really good programme. We knew it was an international requirement and that there was a requirement for directors to become more professional,” she said.

The first group that passed through the programme counted just 18 people, but numbers grew each year to today’s figure of 180. At the start, she said it was often people with a background in financial services looking to up-skill to join boards that had been cleared out by the crash or the Central Bank’s fitness and probity cull. These days, there is a much broader group of participants, according to Quinn. “We have CEOs of state companies, lots of people from private companies, partners in professional services firms all going through our programme,” she said. “We also have the CEOs and directors of charities applying too as they can see the importance of being qualified.”

Quinn threw herself into building the IOD up, just as she had in her previous job with UNICEF.

Invasion in Iraq, boobytraps in Kosovo and a terrible Tsunami

The last time Maura Quinn visited Iraq was in February 2003, the month before the country was invaded by a coalition led by America and Britain. Quinn had been going there since around 2000 to oversee water, sanitation and education projects being funded by UNICEF Ireland. By the time of her last trip, Quinn was head of UNICEF Ireland for seven years, after joining it from Barnardos.

Quinn remembered landing in Amman in Jordan and then driving for ten hours to Baghdad with a sense of foreboding that war was on the horizon. She said she felt compelled to travel there even if politically it wasn’t easy. 

“It was a tricky situation as UNICEF was part of the UN (which was imposing sanctions on the country at the time) but we could see the sanctions were having an absolutely extraordinary impact on the people of Iraq,” she said.

Like most foreign visitors, Quinn said she was followed by agents of the regime when she visited. “It was a little bit like Get Smart,” she recalled. “There were lots of cameras, and guys with little fedoras and dark glasses with their collars up watching everything.”

Quinn said she could see remnants of Iraq’s past in its run-down cities. “People all over the Middle East used to flock to Baghdad to go on their holidays… but now the sewers were open, dirty water everywhere on the streets… it was really run down and decrepit. Down south, Basra was totally destroyed from the Iran-Iraq war…we would go there and then North to Erbil, Mosul and Dohuk…Unicef was also doing a lot of work in Kurdistan in the refugee camps where conditions were horrendous,” she said.

Unicef Ireland was spending millions trying to improve living conditions and had helped rehabilitate 500 primary schools in Iraq. “When you look at what is happening now with the Taliban in Afghanistan… Saddam (Hussein) was actually very pro-education. He encouraged girls to be educated,” Quinn said. “He was a despot and a tyrant…but nobody is all bad.” 

In an article published in The Irish Times on her return, Quinn described a once-proud country beaten down by sanctions on the brink of further war. “Iraq has faced a continuing humanitarian crisis as a result of 12 years of sanctions preceded by two highly destructive wars,” she wrote. “Over the past three years, I have witnessed on each visit the continuing decline of this extraordinary country and the devastating impact on lives that have already endured so much.” 

I ask Quinn what she thought about the 2003 invasion. “I had a very good friend who was killed in the bombing, Chris Klein-Beekman,” Quinn said. “He was a really good guy. He was the second in command in UNICEF (when it was bombed.) A number of Iraqi friends were injured too. Quite honestly, a number of Iraqi friends would say to me afterwards life is worse because the security situation is so much worse.

“People lived in fear under Saddam, but it was a different kind of fear. If you kept your head down, you could get on with it. Now conditions are not great, and it has been terrible to see what happened.” 

Quinn never met Hussain but she said she met other Iraqi politicians including his number two Tariq Aziz. “It is kind of funny when you look back how history changes,” Quinn said. “Tariq Aziz at one stage was welcome in the White House and Gerry Adams wasn’t. It is interesting how politics change.”

UNICEF took Quinn all over the world. She was in Pristina, the capital of Kosovo, as the Serbs invaded in 1998 and left as they were entering the city. “I was there to visit schools that UNICEF was funding at the time and I remember reacting like any parent would when you discovered the Serbs had mined some of the wells in the schoolyard so that when kids went to get the water they would be blown apart,” she said. “It was evil. How could you even think about doing that to children?”

Quinn said she visited villages that had been torched while with UNICEF, and sometimes couldn’t even get out of the car for fear of boobytraps. Were you frightened? “I suppose I always felt safe, maybe absolutely foolishly,” she replied. “The only time I think I was horrified was on the ground in Asia after the Tsunami, maybe two days afterwards.”

Quinn remembers visiting villages in Thailand in 2004 where fishermen had died after being washed off their poles and drowning. “I remember I met this woman, and she went up on the roof of her house with two small children,” she said. “She was desperately trying to hold onto the two small children, and she had to let one of them go. I’ve never seen somebody who was mad with grief…the guilt of it because she had to let one of them go. She couldn’t save them both.”

Quinn remembers being interviewed by Grainne Seoige on Sky Ireland at the time, and fighting to get through it. “I’ve never seen devastation like that in my life, the dead were everywhere,” she recalled. “I was really upset when I came home.”

When she came home Quinn continued to lead UNICEF Ireland until 2007. “I started to think I’ve done this,” she said. “I had the opportunity to go and work with UNICEF internationally, but my husband didn’t want to go, nor did my kids as they got older.”

Quinn decided it was time to move on, but was unsure to what. “All I knew was I wanted to build something again, but I didn’t know what.”

Liam Neeson and Change for Good

One of Maura Quinn’s biggest achievements with UNICEF Ireland was to put it on a stable financial footing. UNICEF had considered closing its Irish office at one stage, but Quinn managed to reverse that. Since 1986, UNICEF in various countries had been running partnerships with airlines called “Change for Good” which raised millions by collecting spare coins and cash from travellers. Quinn decided to bring the initiative to Ireland, so she met with Aer Lingus management which was then a semi-state. Aer Lingus management at the time felt that the airline’s crew were unlikely to agree to the extra work, but Quinn convinced a contact in the Irish Congress of Trade Unions to allow her present directly to staff.

“I told them this is what we want to and by the eof the meeting they were on board,” Quinn recalled. With cabin crew on board, Quinn then had to think about how to let the public know. Liam Neeson was perhaps the biggest Irish actor in the world at the time after winning the best actor Oscar for Schindler’s List in 1993. Quinn knew that Neeson’s mother-in-law Vanessa Redgrave was a supporter of UNICEF in Britain so she used that connection to try and reach him.

It was early December 1996 when Quinn got an unexpected call from Neeson’s publicist to meet him in the Shelbourne where he was staying for the premiere of Michael Collins. “From the get-go he got it,” Quinn recalled. “I asked him to be the face of ‘Change for Good’ with Aer Lingus, and he said ‘No problem.’” ‘Change for Good’ was launched by Neeson on the Late Late Show on December 11 1997. “It literally snowballed from there,” Quinn recalled. To date, Change for Good, has raised over €25 million for UNICEF in Ireland. “It was huge for us, as we now had sustainable income,” she said. “There was a huge buy-in, and huge loyalty from the cabin crew and everyone in Aer Lingus.”

Quinn grew fundraising income in UNICEF Ireland from about £80,000 annually when she joined to over €4.5 million when she left. At the same time, UNICEF worked on developing its relations with the Irish government which started to give it tens of millions of euros to fund its work overseas. “By the time I left we’d raised about €45/€50 million from the government,” she said. “They became a huge donor.” This experience building partnerships and raising funding would prove invaluable to her in the IoD.

Gender balance, quotas and charities

The issue of a lack of women on Irish boards is a serious one and one that the IoD is acutely aware of. Quinn is a member of the advisory group of Balance for Better Business which has set targets for gender balance on boards. Ireland, she acknowledges, still lags behind many of its European peers. So, should it introduce quotas? “Personally I’m not in favour of quotas,” Quinn said. “I worked within the UN system which is riddled with quotas. Very often what happens is you’re ticking boxes to fill those quotas.”

She said that membership of the IOD is 70 to 75 per cent male, to 25 to 30 per cent female. “The view is, even from the women members, that they would prefer targets rather than quotas,” Quinn said. “I think the pace of change is too slow absolutely and there is no excuse for that.”

Quinn said proper rotation policies would help refresh Irish boards. “Best practice is nine years as a director is really the maximum somebody should be on the board,” she said. “But you often discover that you’ve had people on the board for 12 or 14 years. If you don’t have proper rotation policies in place, you’re not going to have churn and you’re not going to have the opportunities opening up for women.”

Quinn said she believed boards should target 50 per cent female members, and that the 30 per cent target that is usually mentioned should be only the starting point. “I think everybody around the board table should be there on merit,” she said. “But then I hear the old chestnut that board’s can’t find good women. Well, you’re not looking very hard if you can’t!” Quinn said a different issue for regulated entities was the amount of responsibilities involved versus the renumeration.

“Being on the board of a regulated entity means huge responsibility,” she said.

“There is a lot of work involved, and then there is fitness and probity and Sear (senior executive accountability regime) coming down the track…and people are saying do I want it? Do I want to be in the spotlight if anything goes wrong?”

Quinn said the “bar” has been raised for being a director in Ireland, and the IOD saw its role as in helping their members to stay up to date with the latest requirements and provide them with the qualifications and knowledge to do their job as directors. “The days of a board meeting, and then a boozy lunch and some golf are gone,” she said. “The pace of change has accelerated. ESG is the new big topic for all boards, as is cybersecurity.”

Covid-19 she said brought other issues as directors of businesses in badly impacted sectors had to manage their cash and avoid trading recklessly. “It has never been more challenging to be a director,” Quinn said.

With her background in the charity sector, Quinn is aware of the needs of directors in a sector which has been impacted by various scandals. “Being on a charity’s board is not for the faint hearted,” Quinn said. “In some of the charities that have had major scandals, it is clear that there were really bad controls. Twenty eight or thirty credit cards floating around and nobody checking them and so on.” Going on a charity’s board was about more than just caring about its mission, but also being aware of a directors’ legal and fiduciary duties. “It is very important to know what your duties are,” she said. Quinn is on the board of Rugby Players Ireland, a representative body for professional players, chaired by Rob Kearney. “A lot of rugby players, both men and women, are asked on to charity boards,” Quinn said. “I always tell them to be really careful and check the charity out before agreeing to do so.” 

What’s next for the IoD?

“I’d like to see our footprint in director education continue to grow.”

Participants in the IoD chartered director programme study finance, leadership, strategy and governance and it also runs various topic-specific bespoke courses. Quinn says gaining a qualification wasn’t easy. “You do demanding exams,” she said. “There is a lot of work involved.”

She said participants typically came from senior management so membership of the IoD, as a result, was typically in their 40s, 50s and 60s. It has commercial relationships with many blue-chip Irish companies as well as mature multinationals like Microsoft and Facebook.

But could it do more for start-ups or younger directors? “I think it’s probably too soon for them,” she said. “Over the years I’ve spoken to a lot of high potential start-ups and most of them are owner-managed,” Quinn said. “They’re normally very successful entrepreneurs but very often they don’t have very good business skills.”

These types of companies tended to have experienced directors appointed when they take in external investment, but founders often were too flat out to take on the additional study. The other area the IoD has gone into is preparing board evaluations. “This is a really good litmus test to see how well your board is doing,” Quinn said. “Essentially what you get is a report that will give recommendations and a work plan to take forward.”

The Institute of Directors has 2,900 members. Maura Quinn said Covid-19 had caused membership numbers to fall for the first time ever and the IoD’s income finished its last year down 6 per cent.

She said the IoD had limited this fall by running extensive online programmes featuring leaders like Julie Sinnamon of Enterprise Ireland and Ed Sibley of the Central Bank. She said she was confident that membership numbers would grow again in 2022, and that it was already almost back at its peak. The IoD is a membership organisation that has built up reserves to allow it to invest in improving its services. Quinn said it was in the middle of a strategic review in order to prepare its next plan for growth. “I’d like to see our footprint in director education continue to grow,” she said. “We’ve introduced a new programme on ESG, and we’d like to do more in that area and others. We also plan to do more research and work on policy,” she said. “There is a resource required to do all that but there is also lots of ambition.”