Terry Clune can’t talk about it. 

In a blue blazer and open collar shirt, he is sitting in the boardroom of 14 St Stephen’s Green, an impeccably restored Georgian townhouse. 

Elaborate cornices cover the vast ceiling and a sash window is open to a chiming Luas slipping by and the shouts of children playing in the park. 

But there is silence in the room. Unexpected pauses follow unexpected questions. 

Years of frustration at the back of Clune’s throat as he tries to quell the desire to open up about Connect Ireland- the ambitious government-backed grassroots scheme he fronted, along with patriotic endorsements from Martin Sheen, Michael O’Leary and John McColgan. 

It tried to mobilise the nation and reward individuals for bringing foreign jobs into Ireland but Connect Ireland ended in 2016 in a sour dispute with the IDA over how many jobs it had actually created and the fees paid out. 

The two sides have been locked in closed arbitration for almost four years, and it will likely be another two before the full story can come out. 

It’s the one thing Clune really wants to talk about, the one thing he could talk about all day and eventually, over the course of 80 minutes, he does. 

*****

The chief executive of CluneTech, a suite of eight businesses which all, bar one, were spun out of Taxback.com, the world’s biggest sales tax refund processor, is one of the most successful Irish entrepreneurs ever. 

There is TransferMate; a rival to SWIFT, Immedis; which handles global payroll, Benamic; a marketing agency, Sprintax; tax filing for non-resident professionals, Visa First; providing business and tourist travel visas, Taxback International; and GradGuide; an online career guidance platform, which the group invested in last year.

His companies are all private and their finances remain out of public view, but an exit or a possible IPO is on the cards for TransferMate, which was recently valued at more than €1 billion following a €70 million investment from Railpen, one of the UK’s largest pension funds. 

Before the Railpen investment, Clune retained 70 per cent of TransferMate, Sinead Fitzmaurice the business’s chief executive owned 15 per cent, AIB its first investor had a 10 per cent stake and ING had 6 per cent.

Typically he has nurtured his businesses to a growth stage, going through the hard yards alone without taking external investment.

“I grew up in an environment of only having our own resources”

His own wealth and the steady and profitable business of Taxback.com, which he started while still in studying in Trinity, have allowed him to repeat this model and keep the cap table of his companies relatively undiluted.  

With a recession now looming and markets seizing, Clune predicts headwinds approaching for the start-ups who have taken on a lot of institutional investment. 

“I grew up in an environment of only having our own resources, so I think the challenge now will be for people who have had so much low-cost money over the last few years,” he tells me.

“They may have to learn the skills of budgeting or cost-cutting or managing their teams, which are skills they may never have experienced before.”

Through the years, as CluneTech has grown to more than 1,800 staff globally, with its headquarters in Kilkenny City, Clune has retained a conscientious attitude towards spending money. 

A trait which may give staff some cause for complaint, but the long-time CEO sees the skill-set of being cost-conscious as “probably the most important one”. 

“One of the only things I learned in college, I did economics, was that the graph goes up and comes down, recessions come about just as quickly as boom times,” he says.

Thinking about the future of the group, Clune draws an analogy between the business and his children; he has five between the ages of five and sixteen. 

“My older kids are probably soon to depart the house and go to college and similarly with the businesses I am involved with, some of them will soon depart either through future transactions over the next few years, or possible IPOs,” he says.

“Some of the businesses are past the teenage stage and are at a stage of maturity now. They will take their own next step.”

Taking on SWIFT

It seems likely that the unicorn TransferMate will be the first to fly the coop.

“We didn’t set out to build a billion euro business, we just set out to solve a problem,” he says.

“In the Taxback business we were sending money to customers, and it would take forever to get there through SWIFT and they would be blaming us for the delay and the bank fees. So we spent a number of years building TransferMate.” 

The company is now licenced in 201 countries, a time-absorbing process but one which gives them years of advantage ahead of any upcoming competitors, and those licences enable them to power payments for any organisation be it a bank or a software company. 

At its most basic, the CluneTech start-up can facilitate same day international payments around the world for businesses and individuals for a fraction of the costs SWIFT, which currently manages around 98 per cent of all cross-border payments would incur. 

TransferMate’s clients are banks, including Wells Fargo, the third largest bank in America, ING, the Dutch multinational and MYOB, the Australian software company, but they are also universities like Oxford and Cambridge, and top-tier football clubs.

“It is nice to have one competitor, who you can look at and target and say we are going to beat them – sorry I mean, go after them,” he says.

While Clune is far from bullish on cryptocurrencies, seeing them only as a distraction from “useful” blockchain technology, he sees the future of money-movement being through government backed stable coins and believes blockchain will be widely used as a ledger to track real-time payments with complete transparency. 

“I haven’t invested in crypto. I see less and less use case for it,” Clune says.

“A stable coin backed by the European Central Bank is going to be the way forward, I don’t know why you’d need a volatile unbacked crypto in the middle of it. “

TransferMate is already looking at administering cross-border transactions through a pegged currency, and working with blockchain-based digital payment networks like Ripple and Circle. 

The next big thing

Clune has been talking about TransferMate in interviews for more than ten years, alerting people to the likelihood it would one day be the biggest company in his bundle. It is a prediction that has now come to pass.

So when he brings up his next baby, Comply, as a business with high-growth potential, it is worth noting. 

Comply was sprung out of Taxback International (TBI) which reclaims the VAT for clients like Intel and Bloomberg, when they travel for business. But when the pandemic shut down international travel, TBI was in a potential disaster zone. 

“When they stopped travelling, we didn’t have any revenue. So that was a big shock. What we decided to do was ultimately use our technology team to build a brand new solution into a totally different market,“ he says.

The result was Comply, a global VAT compliance technology that automates the preparation and filing of VAT returns.

“Typically it is an extremely tedious process trying to get that VAT back and you’d have to use a local accountant to sort it out for you,” he says.

“It’s really cumbersome for companies and we were told this by our customers, including Google, when we were asking if there is anything else we can do for them.”

Before Comply, this process was done by multiple people “touching” it along the way, but the new technology allows for a 70 per cent cost saving and eliminates the risk of error, according to Clune. 

It has already been white labelled by Grant Thornton, and has signed Mondelēz International, Inc, the American multinational, as a client. 

“I am confident it will be a significant business in the future. Comply was nothing eighteen months ago and now it is going to be a phenomenal solution,” he says.

This is part of Clune’s skill, the ability to speak to clients, understand what they need and build it. The idea is the one per cent, what comes next is the 99 per cent of hard work and graft and he follows through.

Connect Ireland

Clune is a rich man. He and his wife, Kate Devereux are regulars on the various rich lists produced by Sunday newspapers. The last count in 2020 by The Sunday Independent estimated his personal wealth at €445 million, though this figure has likely risen substantially over the past two years. 

Not a fixture on the start-up circuit in Dublin, he belongs to the upper echelons of Irish entrepreneurs. He is friendly with Denis O’Brien and Michael O’Leary but mostly he just works on his own businesses, eschewing any limelight his status could give him.

He has more money than he will ever need, more than it seems he actually wants, and he continues to grow his businesses and has a voracious appetite for starting new ones. 

Yet the by product of this for Clune doesn’t seem alluring to him. He squirms at the mention of money. 

“I’m not flash. It’s uncomfortable being on the rich lists,” he says, “It’s not something I ever aspired to in my life.

“I enjoy building businesses to be building businesses, money helps in terms of giving flexibility and the opportunity to make mistakes.”

I ask him if it is legacy that is important to him, he has five children, and a global workforce.

“No,” he says. “It’s not about legacy.”

There is a long pause, ten seconds where he considers what he is going to say next. 

“I could talk to you non-stop about Connect Ireland,” he says finally. 

“But it is in closed arbitration and that stops me, or not that it stops me, but I can’t.”

While Clune might make dilettante comments about his adopted home of Kilkenny and its medieval architecture, or the neolithic Dolmens that surround it, or his determination to dominate the payments space with TransferMate, his one passion is Connect Ireland.

It is the subject he keeps coming back to. The itch that can’t be scratched with questions about money, entrepreneurial mindset or businesses that have failed. 

Clune’s ambition with Connect Ireland was for the Irish nation to emulate the spirit of the Lord Mayor of Cork Henry O’Shea, who petitioned Henry Ford to set up a European factory in Cork in 1912, as the motorhead had ancestral roots in Ireland. 

The factory was the largest employer in Cork until it closed in 1984.

Clune came up with the idea of Connect Ireland, an incentivised referral programme for bringing FDI into Ireland, at the global economic forum in 2011. 

A year later Connect Ireland was contracted by the IDA under the government programme, Succeed In Ireland.

Everyone from taxi drivers, to golf caddies to financiers were encouraged to keep their eyes and ears open for international companies that were expanding and send their tip offs into Connect Ireland. 

From there the hub would work on convincing the company to expand into Ireland and create jobs here. The grassroots scheme worked on the basis that you didn’t need to know the chief executive of Google, but you might have a third cousin working in an expanding medical device company in Florida. 

“There are just so many Irish scattered around the world”

If the initiative created a job then a €4,000 reward was paid by the IDA, in general, €2,500 of that went to Connect lreland and €1,500 to the Connector. 

The reward would only be paid if the job was sustainable, with clawback provisions if the job position was not maintained for two years.

The scheme was supported by the government who funded it through the IDA and by a host of well-known faces including Martin Sheen, Saoirse Ronan, Michael O’Leary and Michael Flatley who endorsed it in a rousing promo video. 

O’Leary, who is rare to lend his clout to causes outside of Ryanair, was convinced to get involved by a passing encounter with Clune in the departures of Newark airport. 

For a while it was going well. The entrepreneur stumped up €5 million of his own money, and there were success stories. 

These included Hugh Morris, an auctioneer, who brought more than 70 jobs to Kells, Co Meath and was paid more than €100,000 for his efforts and Niall O’Connor who signed up as a connector in Dublin Airport and brought 21 jobs to Ireland when Chameleon Advertising decided to set up here. 

“It is something that is good for the country, harnessing our diaspora around the world,” Clune says now.

“There are just so many Irish scattered around the world and they are usually very willing and supportive of Ireland and I don’t think in my experience other countries are necessarily as motivated. 

“In Connect Ireland we had a membership of 120,000 people including Irish abroad who were very happy to be participating and using their eyes and ears for opportunities in Ireland.”

Clune’s enterprise was suited to companies that might bring ten jobs or twenty, rather than the bigger numbers the IDA traditionally focuses on – it was designed to be an add-on to the state agency, not a competitor. 

Opportunities lost

By 2016, the IDA cancelled the contract. According to its figures, Connect Ireland had created 544 jobs by then with the promise of a further 398. 

In return Connect Ireland was paid almost €4 million by the state agency. 

The number of jobs created is heavily disputed by Connect Ireland who put the figure at 6,500. 

Connect Ireland then went on to allege that the IDA had been purposefully blocking jobs and FDI. 

The contract between the IDA and Connect Ireland included a clause that the IDA could block Connect Ireland if it was already actively engaged with a company considering locating in Ireland. 

In a letter to the Public Accounts Committee in October 2017, Joanna Murphy, then chief executive of Connect Ireland, wrote that since 2012 there had been 3,000 potential job leads made through the initiative, and that close to 700 of these were blocked by the IDA.

Murphy wrote that Connect Ireland was met with a “stone wall” of cooperation from the IDA and that it refused to cooperate with the initiative or lend its support publicly. 

She continued to say that the IDA had falsely claimed to be in active dialogue with companies when they were not, and the net result of this was that Connect Ireland couldn’t follow up with the business, and in some cases, neither did the IDA.

“This led to many opportunities being lost to Ireland in favour of competing countries,” Murphy wrote. 

She requested a formal investigation into the matter, because of this and because of the “delays and failures in approving qualifying projects and unwieldy and unprecedented barriers to verifying created jobs”.

The IDA has always denied the allegations. The government has previously said it will review the scheme when the legal proceedings between the two organisations have been completed.

The easiest thing would have been to walk away from Connect Ireland, even to run, but Clune decided to fight the IDA and has funded a team of lawyers to do so. 

While it has likely cost him a small fortune in legal fees and personal strife, he is adamant that this is the space he wants to return to. 

“I never thought about it, why do I like it?” 

But when I ask him why, why this is the issue that matters to him, why is bringing jobs to Ireland his raison d’etre, he’s stumped, repeating the question to himself under his breath.

“I never thought about it, why do I like it?” he says.

“Why do I want to do it? I don’t know, I enjoy it, I can. So I’m happy to.”

There’s a pause, before something stirs a memory from long ago. 

*****

Clune grew up on a farm near Avoca, Co Wicklow with his father, a sheep farmer, and his mother, a much beloved teacher in the local national school. 

But his bucolic childhood was also defined by emigration, where long-distance phone calls from America were an early lesson in the meaning of diaspora. 

One of Clune’s favourite uncles, Jim, left Ireland in 1972, aged 16 and trained in metal work in Canada before moving on to California where he set up a one man welding shop. 

“He was always a role model of business in our family,” Clune reflects now.

Jim Clune founded a business in North Hollywood making specialised parts of the wings for space shuttles and for F16 fighter jets. His enterprise, Klune Industries Inc, which he passed down to his son, was generating $200 million revenue in 2012 when it was sold to Precision Castparts Corp. 

“He was a great guy and he would be coming back and always had great stories about business and he helped me on my business path too,” Clune says.

“When I was in college there was 16 per cent unemployment, jobs have always been in short supply in Ireland and I think I can do something there.”

Scraped off the road

A conversation with Clune is a tectonic experience, never certain of a final destination.

When I ask him about other legal battles that he has been involved in, he mentions two cases Taxback successfully took against the Australian government on behalf of backpackers, and a long running fight with The Little Museum of Dublin who tried and failed to take over the building we’re sitting inside on Stephen’s Green.

He mumbles as he considers whether there are other cases he’s been involved in, makes a joke about having good lawyers in Arthur Cox who keep him out of trouble, a mother who always kept him in check and his “phenomenal” wife, Kate. 

And then he tells me about a car crash. 

Clune founded Taxback after a college summer working in a factory in Berlin, where his manager admired his work ethic enough that she asked him to come back the next year and to bring more students like him. 

Clune isn’t a typical salesperson, he speaks in a syncopated pattern and operates without the kind of wheeling dealing charisma that one might expect necessary to convince a hoard of college students in the 1990s to hand over £200 each for nothing, but the promise of a job and accommodation.

But throughout his life people have followed Clune, and have trusted him with their time and money. 

That next summer, with work and accommodation sorted for 100 Trinity and UCD students, Clune barely broke even but worse was to come when his customers started coming for his head as they realised a large chunk of their wages had been deducted by the German taxman. 

It was 1996 and through perseverance with the tax-office and the aid of a Guinness loving official named Horst, Clune’s unlikely success was the making of him and charging students a fee for getting their tax back became his business. 

“We started off getting German tax back, but I didn’t speak any German. My girlfriend and now my wife, Kate, was learning German so I asked her if she could join to speak to the German tax office,“ Clune recalls. 

“When we started setting it up as a real process, we needed to talk to the German tax offices all across Germany, so Kate was phenomenal at that and she ended up doing lots of things in the business. She was my first employee really.”

Less than two years after establishing Taxback Clune rented a two-room office on Aston Quay in Dublin, next door to USIT, the student travel agents. 

Before then he had employed a hotchpotch system of using the computer rooms in Trinity and his mother’s telephone in Avoca, to run the business which was growing quickly. 

With a steady stream of business coming from USIT and by word of mouth, Taxback was doing well. A loan from his mother had kicked it off, but it was profitable from the get go and Clune was fastidious. 

A single day working in Burger King and a week working in PWC after graduating, had shown him that he didn’t want, maybe couldn’t, work for anyone else. 

Taxback was Clune’s first business to really have legs and watching it take off, was cause to let loose a little- he started to celebrate with his friends.

Clune was driving with his friend Andrew along a windy country road near Drogheda, before the M1 was laid, when a “ditch hit him”. 

Unconscious and unresponsive, he was scraped off the road.

“What do you call it when you’re not dead?” 

In interviews Clune tends to rely on a few favourite stories to get his message across, that he is a life-long entrepreneur with a lot of hard work and a bit of luck on the side. 

The story of his first business, selling fertiliser bags to wood merchants for a pound when he was seven years old comes easy to him. As does the parable of its downfall, after growing “complacent” and enjoying the high life of snickers bars and BMX’s too much he was snookered by another child mogul, who improved the product and left Clune without any customers.

The description of his seven year old self as “complacent”, is earnest and a more important failure in his life, than when he failed the Leaving Cert a decade later. 

This barely gets a mention, other than how he used the year he spent repeating to strike up a club night venture in McGonagle’s,  pairing the “posh” kids of the Institute on Leeson Street with his lot of repeaters in Ringsend College on Pigeon House Road. 

But the story of his car crash, and how it became a turning point in his approach to business isn’t worn, it crackles out of the past. 

“I was scraped off the road and I ended up… I was in that thing, what do you call it when you’re not dead?” 

Clune searches for the word, I ask him if he was in a coma?

“A coma! Yes I was in a coma. Ultimately I was in the Lourdes hospital, in Drogheda for a while.

“I had ribs broken and my leg was broken and lots of broken things. But when I got through it, all I could think about when I was locked up in Lourdes Hospital was; how’s the business?”

Taxback had been up and running for two years at that point and Clune was convinced it would have imploded without him. 

“I just thought jaysis, it’s going to be all falling apart. So I checked out of the hospital early, way early.

“I don’t know how I got down to Aston Quay where our office was at the time, and crawled up the stairs. I wasn’t able to walk. I was expecting the walls to have fallen down.

“I burst in the door and I found everything going perfectly smoothly. Kate had everything under control and she told me to take my medicine and get out.”

He laughs at the memory.

It was a turning point for him, until then he had been possessive. Certain he was the only person who could actually do anything, he kept his businesses in a kind of chokehold, hiring people but not enabling them to do any work. 

“Up until the car crash, I used to hire people but I was the only person doing any work, I wouldn’t trust that anyone else could do it. 

“A lot of companies stay smaller for that very reason. The car crash was a big learning experience. I now know to get out of the way and to enable or empower other people to have authority.”