Jack & Jill founder is on a new mission
After 20 years at the helm of a leading children’s charity, Jonathan Irwin has found a fresh challenge, writes Emily Hourican
TO watch Jonathan Irwin at a Jack & Jill fundraising event — in this case, a very lavish afternoon tea at the Shelbourne Hotel — is to see a much-loved king in his court. Everyone wants a few minutes with him, and he has more than enough charm and bonhomie to go round. There are jokes and quips flying back and forth, as well as very heartfelt acknowledgements of the ways in which he has helped the lives of families in exceptionally difficult situations.
Except that, in reality, this is no longer his court. After 20 years with Jack & Jill — Jonathan set up the charity with his wife, Mary Ann O’Brien, former Senator and founder of Lily O’Brien’s chocolates, in 1997 after the death of their 22-month-old son Jack — he is out. Right out.
“I think it’s an impossible situation for the founder to sit in there with a new CEO,” he tells me. “I just thought, ‘it ain’t gonna work’.” At first, he essayed being something grand but remote — chairman — but “I realised, it’s not me. I’m not a very good chairman. I’m a man who runs my own team. So I let it go. I will always do anything to help, and I do keep in touch; we have a thing called a founders’ meeting every six weeks that I go to.”
But other than that, the reins are in new hands — Hugo Jellett’s — and Jonathan, now 76, is technically retired. Which, being Jonathan, means he’s busy on a brand new and very grand scheme; something related — again, he is trying to improve a small corner of the world for a group of the forgotten and neglected — but totally different.
This time, instead of seriously ill children and their families, it is prisoners he is aiming to help, by linking up with his first love, horses.
Long before Jack & Jill, Jonathan was director of the British Bloodstock Agency (Ireland) and manager of thoroughbred auction house Goffs. He has for years been on the board of the Turf Club, in fact, he laughs, “I think I may be the oldest board member — I’ve reached a thing called ‘emeritus’.”
And now he is leveraging all these connections and ties to bring about what is the first scheme of its kind in Ireland, and, as far as he knows, in Europe — a horse-care project in Castlerea Prison, geared towards the long-term rehabilitation of prisoners.
It is an ambitious idea, one that is both practical and emotional. On the one hand, you teach prisoners the skills and abilities associated with horse-care (which means shoeing and worming as well as riding), which they can then put to use within the industry once they get out of prison, but there are also proven benefits in terms of self-worth, confidence and a notable overall reduction in tension within prisons. The US has 10 or so such projects, while Australia also has a couple.
The idea has been 30 years in the making, and comes at an initial cost of €100,000 — all of which Jonathan needs to raise — for the physical construction of horse boxes and an all-weather exercise arena, before the prison service will get on board. So, how is he doing? “I’ve got over €58,000 already, in the first weeks,” he says, continuing cheerfully “so it’s going well. I was very lucky to get the Turf Club to back me.”
“I hope we’ll start building in the spring,” he adds.
So, €58,000 already in donations, from writing to all the members of the Turf Club. How many members are there? “About 80 to 100.”
Not bad going, then. Where next? “We’re now going to the racing public, the bookmakers, trainers and jockeys. Business people have been showing interest and, in fact, I haven’t had a single negative reaction,” he says. “Not one person has said ‘what are you doing, wasting your time bothering with them?’ I was worried that would happen, but it hasn’t.”
Once the money is raised, Jonathan’s involvement is over. The prison service will take over the administration while the Irish Horse Welfare Trust will do the day-today running of it. The horses themselves will be donated by the industry and will run the gamut from thoroughbreds to coloured ponies.
Where did the idea come from?
“I saw this 30 years ago and always thought it was a brilliant idea. I was at the Saratoga sales, in New York State, somebody said, ‘this is the first of its kind in America, come and see...’, and I was bowled over. It was the lack of tension that really surprised me.”
There is, he says, “always an affinity between animals and humans. And in particular a horse. If you step out of line with a horse, he’ll whack you and you’ ll know all about it! So you’ve got to show a lot of respect, and really concentrate. You become emotionally attached, a horse will be your best friend. The prisoner will be taught how to look after a horse — how to shoe him, feed him, groom him, when to worm him, everything. All this adds to the prisoner’s standing within his own community, but the main thing is he gets a platform that prevents him re-offending. He learns skills that will help him when he’s out. This is for the general good: if we can drop prison numbers, if we can drop re-offending because people are getting jobs in the horse industry, that’s to the good.”
The evidence is that such projects work, with demonstrable benefits in terms of re-offence and prisoner rehabilitation, as well as improvements to prison life, and Jonathan’s hope is that, once this is up and running and bringing results, the prison service will build more units.
“This is the first project of its sort in Europe. Which means that, once again, Ireland has done something that no one else has done.”
And why prisoners? “Well,” he says, “either you or I might have made a bad decision in our lives and that would have meant things didn’t go well for us. But for these people, a bad decision landed them in the slammer. This is something to get them back on to the commercial and social ladder.”
When he says the idea took him 30 years to get off the ground, Jonathan doesn’t mean he had the idea 30 years ago and simply sat and waited. In fact, he wrote — “to every Minister for Justice, every year, for 30 years; it’s been like having a baby elephant… They all wrote back ‘we acknowledge your letter…’ and I never heard a single word more”.
Until Frances Fitzgerald. “She was the first Minister for Justice ever to acknowledge I existed,” he laughs. “I never actually talked to her but she put me straight in touch with the prison service and from the moment I walked through the door, they have been prepared to listen to me. And here we are, within 12 months, about to be up and running.”
It’s exactly this kind of amiable tenacity that has made Jonathan such a success in the difficult field of charity work.
Jonathan describes himself, with his usual rather hilarious modesty, as a “broken down old horse dealer”, but in reality, he is a kind of perfect outsider’s insider. He looks and sounds the part — by which I mean horsey, privileged, posh — thanks to his schooling at Eton, but there is a mischievous and anarchic streak to him that is not at all establishment, along with a deep empathy towards those less obviously privileged, that may well be the result of his own family tragedies.
These are many: the death at birth of his son John, a twin, followed by Jack’s death, and then, six years later, his 18-year-old son Sam died in an accident in the Algarve, where he was celebrating the end of his A-level exams.
From each tragedy, Jonathan has managed to pick himself up, and find the good. The Jack & Jill Foundation came about because of Jack, who was born healthy but suffered a terrible brain injury shortly afterwards. As far as Jonathan understands what happened on the awful second night of his son’s life, Jack died and was resuscitated, leaving him with severe brain damage from oxygen starvation. He couldn’t hear or swallow, had constant epileptic fits and was in pain so he cried all the time.
At that stage, Jonathan and Mary Ann discovered there were no services to help parents such as they now were, unless they chose to abandon Jack to State residential care. Instead, they took him home and, after a few nightmarish months in which they tried to care for Jack, and their two other young children, with no sleep, no help and no hope, they found themselves at the end of their tethers. “We were catatonic,” Jonathan recalls.
Bit by bit, and thanks initially to the kindness of strangers who have become friends, they devised a system to care for their son that later became the blueprint for the Jack and Jill Foundation.
When Jack died, after 22 months, Jonathan and Mary Ann “swore to each other that no other family would ever go down the pathway on their own again. And that formula has stood good for 20 years”.
Jonathan and Mary Ann now live in Mount Juliet, in what is a relatively new house, compared with the kind of Georgian places he has been used to — one, in Maynooth, later became Moyglare Manor Hotel, while another, Sandymount, was sold to Rolling Stone Ronnie Wood.
“For the first time in my life I’m missing that wonderful Georgian thing of ‘oh what a lovely draught…!’” he says, adding that Mount Juliet “is very cosy and lovely. Interesting people live in Mount Juliet and outside the walls.”
Some years ago Jonathan had rectal cancer, from which he is fully recovered, although the operation required has left him much immobilised, with limited use of his right leg. “This is a handicap,” he admits. “It has to some extent ruined my life. I can’t even walk to my car. I can drive, but I’ve had to have my car converted to hand controls. It curtails my life. Leaving my glasses upstairs and having to ask someone ‘would you ever...?’ I find that such a drag on the family. It very much restricts what I can do.” But, he insists, “they saved my life”.
But, being Jonathan, he says “life is very good. We’re very lucky. Mary Ann is about to sell our final holding in Lily O’Brien’s, and then I think she wants to come home, to her six dogs and her garden”.
And so, no more schemes and dreams?
“You never know,” he says. “Nothing is the same as it was yesterday. Anything can happen.” All donations to the Horses in Prisons project can be made to the Irish Turf Club, The Curragh, Co Kildare, www.turfclub.ie
‘You become emotionally attached, a horse will be your best friend’