We’re thrilled to bring the JFF community into conversation with the community foundation sector, a key part of the philanthropic landscape. Dr James Magowan of the European Community Foundation Initiative helped us understand better what community foundations are, what role they play, what the European sector looks like, and how and why community foundations support journalism.
—–
Sameer Padania (SP): I have an ulterior motive in interviewing you – we know that community foundations have got involved in funding local journalism in the US, but the picture’s not so clear in Europe, and we’d love you to shed some light for us… But before we talk about the relationship between community foundations and journalism, can you please explain what a community foundation is?
James Magowan (JM): The first thing I would say about community foundations: Once you’ve seen one community foundation, you’ve seen one community foundation. There is no single definition of a community foundation – it is critical to highlight the diversity of the community foundation field – just as across Europe there’s not even a definition of a foundation, nor a particular legal entity that is common across Europe.
But community foundations differ again – not only in form, across Europe, but they also differ hugely in function, and both depend a lot on the context within which they were established – both the legal framework, and also the socio-economic and political environment in that country, and how that has evolved over time.
SP: Can you give us an example of what that means practically?
JM: So, if you take the most mature part of the field, which is clearly the UK – which has a movement of 46 community foundations that cover almost the entire geography of the UK and that’s been around since the mid-70s – it’s really well-established, has a good structure of organizations, a very good support organization, they have a combination of endowed, flow-through, unrestricted and donor-advised funds, and they now can do strategic initiatives. They are important in their localities, they are seen as part of the infrastructure within towns and cities or counties, or in the case of Scotland, Northern Ireland, at national level. And they have the resources to be able to act.
On the other hand, where you have newly-emerging community foundations – like in Central and Eastern Europe – the function of a community foundation is quite different. The rationale for its creation is more around community engagement, participation, involvement of citizens in self-determination, rather than being a grant maker or a conduit of funds from donors.
So you’ve got that degree of variety across a scale from those that are really about some form of participative democracy – as in Central and Eastern Europe – through to those that are seriously in the philanthropy field as financial intermediaries – as in the UK. And they lie along that spectrum in various ways and with different mixes of functions.
SP: Do the ones that are principally financial intermediaries still have a wider role?
JM: We are very keen on emphasizing the value of a community foundation as an institution that’s built over time, rather than general community philanthropy – which could be anything from funding a local women’s group, through to even forms of crowdfunding. This is important – they are not merely financial intermediaries or sources of finance, but they also play a critically important role that embraces convening, so they can be an independent, hopefully credible place to go and discuss, to identify priorities, to address issues that are falling between the gaps of the public and private sector – and [as institutions,] they are a bridge between those and the community sector.
That institution is very significant because it builds knowledge, which is important as it enables them to then build the social capital that follows from that. They’ve got to have knowledge of their community, of the issues and how to address them, and then to prove that they can do through their actions – and that builds over time. So community foundations are there for the long haul. They’re not created overnight, and they will not just go away – they are a slow burn over time and they build the various forms of capital over time – notably financial capital, physical assets, but also, critically, intellectual and social capital.
As well as the convening and financing roles, they are important independent connectors. This is a role that is, again, only seen over time. Because of their place within the community, they have fairly diverse boards in the sense that they come from private, volunteer and community, and public sectors – they are connecting within the organization, and also they’re able to connect with corporates, with municipalities, with the voluntary and community sector, in ways that exploits the synergies that are possible.
SP: You mention that some are working at the national level. It’s perhaps counter-intuitive to think of a community foundation as working at that scale….
JM: Well, the other thing that is very different across Europe is the scale. So you have some at the national level – like the Community Foundation for Ireland, a single entity that works to fund across Ireland. But in Germany there’s a proliferation of community foundations, over 400 – the largest number in Europe. But many of these are at a very small scale, at the village level, and those sorts of community foundations are very different – they’re volunteer-run, they don’t have a significant asset base, they’re not building an endowment.
I’m just trying to give a flavour – as I said, there is no single definition of a community foundation, the field is extremely diverse in form and function and in stage of development – but it’s a dynamic and growing field.
SP: So what is it that unites community foundations and makes them a distinct field?
JM: It’s – whether it sounds cheesy or not – the ‘Power of Place’. It’s ‘place’ as the common denominator and that is the single defining factor of a community foundation. It’s not a community of interest, it’s a community of place.
This is where we run into some linguistic issues – for example, the term “Community Foundation” does not translate well into French at all and it causes all sorts of confusion. Communautaire
mean something completely different to territoire. So they are foundations of territoire – they’re of a locality. In Northern Ireland we obviously had community identity issues – Protestant, Catholic, loyalists or nationalist – whereas we meant ‘community of place’ and that’s what I suppose got over those issues – by having one [community] that was bigger than most of the mosaic community identities. So that is the one absolutely overriding common characteristic – that it is defined by a geographic area, but that can be hugely different in size.
But alongside that, we’re not being absolutely prescriptive. They are clearly like foundations – they’re independent, they’re generalists, so they don’t focus on single issues, they tend to take all of the locality in their perspective, and try to be strategic in that. Within that there are initiatives that might address health, education, young people, older people and so on.
SP: Why is so important to have a category of foundations that are focused on ‘place’ as an organising principle? And presumably if you’re focused on ‘place’, you’re also interested in how information flows in that place?
The ‘Power of Place’ is something that we’ve all rediscovered through this last [2 years], and people are being made very much more conscious of their immediate locality. For health reasons, for all sorts of other informational reasons, people are wanting quality information where they are. The basic tenet is that community foundations want to discover things about what affects people locally and tell them about it.
Now, where’s the connection between community foundations and the interests of the Journalism Funders Forum and its members? Well, communication with their constituency, with their locality is really important for them, because they see themselves as part of civil society. They also see themselves as connectors into the private sector because they can translate private wealth into public good for that locality. And they – some more than others – see themselves also as catalysts for change by bringing issues that are important to the locality to the fore, and being able to address them.
And recognizing that they don’t have the resources and they have to get the resources by liaising with public bodies – it might be municipalities, for example, or health agencies or education authorities and so on. And that in itself, then presents different challenges in different contexts: not easy in countries characterized by illiberal democracies where there is ‘closing space for civil society’, but fine in others where the work of civil society is valued and encouraged.
We [at ECFI] have talked with different people about community foundations and the role that they could and do play in local information ecosystems – because they’re often really in the heart of those discussions and debates, and they’re rooted in the communities and participants from the community. We do talk about broader things to do with public interest information and community information, [but] the most relevant thing for us is journalism. Connecting with independent journalism is important to be able to get the message across of what community foundations do. And so many of them do have those sorts of relationships with journalists, and in particular local media.
SP: It benefits the foundation and the community to tell the story of what the community foundation is doing – but at the local level, local media are facing a huge economic crisis. Are community foundations supporting journalism financially?
JM: Well, that relationship that can lead to and in some cases has led to some form of funding and support for the activities of journalists. The Community Foundation for Northern Ireland was probably one of the first funders of The Detail and this is often [the stage at which a CF would fund] because they don’t have huge resources. So they would have been there right at the start, along with some other funders, [being part of] that sort of risk-taking. I know more recently it funded View Digital to produce and publish journalism on deaf inequalities.
Another slightly different example in the middle would be in Belgium, in Kortrijk, where the Streekfonds or Community Foundation for West Flanders has a very strong relationship with the media and co-funds projects of interest to the media, like a local TV channel that engages young people. In that way they’re not just funding journalism as such, but they are funding media activity that is addressing issues that the Community Foundation has addressed, so it’s a symbiotic relationship and there is resource provision associated with it.
At the other end, very often they have people from the media – more as you move towards Central and Eastern Europe – who are interested in the objectives of the Community Foundation in terms of the community participation and engagement role that they play.
SP: You talked about diversity of sectors within the foundations – there are a lot of different interpretations of diversity, depending on the context – how does that work in the different scales and forms you mention?
JM: Just as the form and function are diverse, the aspiration is that there will be diverse boards. And again it depends on the structure. In Germany there’s a very formal board structure but in the UK, less so and it’s not regulated in any way – but they are scrutinized by their constituencies who are effectively the ones that regulate the governance of the organization. If it’s not right, then that’s where the criticism will come from, and the community foundation will lose its credibility – so it’s in their interest to ensure that they do get their governance right.
There has been criticism of the lack of diversity across the UK in the governance of community foundations, and of foundations generally, and their representative bodies are very well aware of this. In the past, community foundations tended to have the great and the good of the day, including in England people like the Lord Lieutenant, because they have the contacts, the address book, and can get the donors – and that’s well-meaning, well understood. But they now are realizing “in order for us to be credible as organizations we need to involve people that also have lived experience of the issues that we’re trying to address.” The gender balance isn’t so much of an issue any longer, but ethnicity definitely is and age too, so many CFs are trying to get young people involved. It might be in the form of organizational governance or it could be in other ways.
Youth Banks are a classic example of an initiative involving young people – it originated in Northern Ireland as a cross-community Catholic and Protestant thing and once you break down that initial barrier, young people soon find that they’ve got so much more in common than their different religious identities. A youth bank is essentially a way of involving people in determining their own priorities, and using resources towards their own end.
Interestingly, if you look at the profile of Community Foundations in Central and Eastern Europe, you will see a completely different type of operation, driven by young people, activists, from the community. Really diverse, really engaged compared to the traditional older form of board structure in the West.
SP: Are those different models of how community foundations work in dialogue?
JM: When you say ‘in dialogue’, that is part of ECFI’s role. We’re not the umbrella body as such, we are an initiative of the Bundesverband Deutscher Stiftungen (German Association of Foundations) – and in a nutshell, our role is to build and strengthen the community foundation field. In doing so, we support a lot of the national organizations – UKCF in the UK, the Bündnis in Germany, and Assifero in Italy – because their connection to the foundations has to be through their own language, related to the national context and so on. We operate at a supranational level, to encourage learning across borders, like Dafne [or, Philea] does with foundations, and with national associations, but also engage directly with community foundations through activities and social media.
Generally, Central Eastern Europe think that they’re going to learn a lot from the experience of [community foundations in] the West, and yes, people have trodden the path before. But it’s amazing – someone not too long ago from Leeds Community Foundation participated in a study visit to Latvia. And they went home completely refreshed and re-energized around what community foundations should be like in engaging with their communities, because they become so institutionalized, so stuck in their ways of being grantmakers, of their donor servicing orientation that they’d lost a bit of that [freshness and energy] and it was refreshing for them to experience that. And so we facilitate a lot of international exchange that can provide for learning, in different scenarios.
[In respect of how CFs support journalism, we’re asking] what does this actually look like, how widespread is it? [Do we need] to help them think about how to do it, to understand what skills or resources they might need – is there anything at the level of infrastructure organizations that might be provided?
SP: What are the places to watch? Where do you see the most energy and potential in the community foundation sector right now? Where might a closer relationship between community foundations and media work well?
JM: I suppose those where you see the greatest potential and energy will be countries where media is perhaps suppressed or there’s a lack of independence. And then that makes the support for that from community foundations, really, really challenging, because on the one hand they will want to offer support, but on the other hand they do want to put themselves, ultimately, at risk by doing that? Looking at countries where civil society is not trusted and where media is controlled: if a community foundation were to start that, that would be the end of them – they would be closed probably the next day.
The Community Foundation for Northern Ireland was always prepared to be a risk taker and did so through the Peace program by funding, extraordinary projects with ex-prisoners, with former combatants and with victims – things others would not touch. But media then is difficult. In Northern Ireland that could work because, being of regional scale, then something like The Detail could be a valuable product. Most community foundations operate at a scale that is probably below where there is media interest – if it’s a single town or municipality or, in Germany’s case, village, it’s too localized a level to be able to have the capacity then to invest in journalism. But in West Flanders, it’s a big enough regional interest to then build a relationship, whether it’s a funding relationship or a symbiotic relationship with the media.
Where is the vibrancy? A country like Romania is a brilliant example where the community foundation movement is really vibrant, and has grown well. It just had a particular approach to its development that worked well in Romania – whereas it didn’t for example in Bulgaria – and that was down to the structures that were behind it, the investment that went in and the particular people involved. [As a result] you see a dynamic young movement that is really really progressive, and it’s exciting for countries like Spain and Italy, who are also quite new to the field, to learn from that experience in Eastern Europe.
I think Italy is an interesting example. It has had a development of a field, a second wave which occurred more in southern Italy rather than the Northern Italian ones, following an initiative of the Cariplo Foundation. Whenever they move towards this sort of more indigenous development and community interest, there have been extraordinary examples. Messina Community Foundation in Sicily is amazing and Val di Noto near Siracusa too – I think they really have the potential to be able, whether it’s through direct funding or not, I’m not sure – to engage effectively with media.
What’s interesting about the dynamic in Sicily, is that there is still this lack of trust in public institutions, and on the other hand, you’ve got the mafia and the role that they play within society there, and the community foundations are filling and building credibility in this space as a trusted organization. If they can build sufficient resource around that, then there definitely is a story to tell about that, and whether to tell that story journalists need resources from the community foundations is another thing.
SP: Is there a sense in which the key factor for CFs is that story-telling about their work, helping them to build their institutional trust and credibility, and that supporting independent journalism is more of a by-product?
JM: From an ECFI perspective it’s definitely not a by-product – and [it was the same where] I used to work at the Community Foundation for Northern Ireland. I think it’s fundamental and it’s recognized as being fundamental. But as I say the community foundation has to get to a critical mass itself to be able to convene or be able to engage with media.
It is not just about 1) ensuring that there is an appropriate independent media, encouraging that, which is clearly of interest to the locality, and 2) using that to tell the story of the community foundation. It is much more fundamental than that – I think it is around generating or encouraging and promoting this sense of place, and identity associated with place, that can – and this is critical – transcend the other differences that exist in terms of economic and social status, and wellbeing and the diversity that exists within that place. There are examples where media and journalism itself became an integral part of what the Community Foundation was trying to do, and absolutely not a by-product.
So from that perspective – and this is where the example in Belgium is good – that they have recognized this fact. The TV company is on the board of Streekfonds, which has projects that are driven by media, because they see the value of people involved in the media as being a way in which they can actually implement activities, projects and so on, that serve to help people understand each other within that community – particularly young people. Integration of young people from diverse backgrounds, involvement of refugees and migrants, asylum seekers is key, and [Streekfonds understand] they can use the media as being a form of convening, so it actually can deliver an outcome for them.
SP: What about consensus around truth and facts at the community level? How do community foundations relate to misinformation and disinformation?
JM: The only way that Community Foundations can deal with this is they can’t claim to be the owners of truth. In the same way as we deal with something that is absolutely global like the Sustainable Development Goals, or even Covid-19, you see something that is way out there, totally global. But the important thing – and this is the connection between community foundations and local journalism – is that it affects individuals and it affects them in their place. Lockdown really made us have this sense of place because we were very much locked into place, and there was all this mutual aid going on and, so people started to re-engage a bit more with their communities.
The point about disinformation, ultimately, is ‘the truth will come out’ and, and if community foundations don’t work – and work appropriately with journalists – to identify, and in some cases uncover, the truth, they will be found out, and they will lose their credibility – and in a post-conflict environment in Northern Ireland we’ve got a lot of issues around Truth and Reconciliation obviously. So it’s part of that trust-building process to base that trust on at least the endeavour to find the truth, but not to say you are necessarily the owner of the truth.
So, the issue of identifying what is truth… The important thing is what is relevant in how does this affect my life, and what can I do about that? How does this impact on my locality, on me and my life. I can have the externalities of the views of anti vaxxers, or the views of government on policy around Coronavirus but I’ve got to ultimately decide do I feel comfortable wearing a mask, do I feel comfortable going from here to there, how do I live my life in my locality? and that’s where community foundations have to take that stance of encouraging and supporting people to better understand the locality and the environment within which they live and act.
SP: It’s that idea of trust, spanning the whole community in that place in all its variety?
JM: It links to the idea of trust that is based around the relationships that exist in that locality. Then we come back to the issue of scale – so if you take a community foundation at a regional scale like Northern Ireland, it’s hard to build trust at that level, it’s hard to get a common sense of identity. But when you go down to village level, yes, you can have that very tight-knit community. So, it also depends on the scale as to the degree of trust that can work within it.
That’s where I think community foundations are really important because they address this intersectionality as it affects people’s lives in their locality. If I talk to a community foundation about the SDGs and they say “this is not for us… if they can’t even do it at COP 26, what chance have we?” I try to help them look at it from the other way around. I ask them “Well, what do you do?” They might say: “We address health and wellbeing, equality, social inclusion, sustainable cities and so on.” And I can say to them “Yes, you are addressing every single aspect of the SDGs, just from your perspective, and that’s the way those SDGs impact on people’s lives.”
It will not be just education, or inequality, or employment prospects – they are all completely connected and community foundations get that and that’s what they do.
—–
If you’d like to read or hear more about community foundations, take a look at ECFI’s Knowledge Centre, listen to this interview with James on the Giving Thought podcast, and here’s ECFI’s latest State of the Field report (the 2022 edition is coming out soon, and we’ll update this post with the link).
Deirdre Mortell is the founding CEO of Rethink Ireland. After roles in high-growth NGOs like Oxfam Ireland and Barnardos Ireland, Deirdre co-founded ONE Foundation with philanthropist Declan Ryan. After the planned closure of ONE, Deirdre became CEO of the Social Innovation Fund of Ireland, which was renamed as Rethink Ireland. She has also served on the board of the European Venture Philanthropy Association.
—
In this part of the interview, Deirdre talks about how philanthropy in Ireland has changed over the course of the last 15 years. (Read Part 2 here.)
—
Sameer Padania (SP): How did Rethink Ireland get established and what was your role in that?
Deirdre Mortell (DM): My previous philanthropy role was as CEO of ONE Foundation, which was a private philanthropic foundation of one individual called Declan Ryan – he’s linked to the Ryanair family. I co-founded his foundation with him, and we opened and closed that foundation over 10 years. As we moved towards closing it, we were very focused on planning successful exit for our grantees. But we opened it in 2004 during the Celtic Tiger, and we closed it in 2013 in a huge economic crash. So all the exit plans we had made had to be “re-thunk” big time from 2010 onwards, and we had to completely change strategy around exit as a result, because all the assumptions we had made no longer held.
What we were seeing was that the IMF were taking control of our country and our economy, and so there was lots of cutting going on around social spending. But at the same time, philanthropy was also falling because the economy was falling. So, whether it was endowed philanthropies whose returns were falling or whether it was live philanthropists who were losing money, or whatever else, philanthropy was just falling. It was a perfect storm for the grantees that we were supporting.
The government set up a task force called the Forum on Philanthropy and Fundraising to look at how to stimulate philanthropy during a recession – and in my role as CEO of ONE Foundation, I was one of the task force members. Through ONE, I had been monitoring what was going on in other countries to see how [they] were responding to this and I saw a number of patterns in the successful initiatives. And so I was able to draw all draw out those patterns and kick some ideas into the Forum, [which] ultimately became a policy recommendation called ‘Create a National Social Innovation Fund’. I have been CEO of Rethink Ireland [originally called the Social Innovation Fund of Ireland] since the beginning. And I was involved for a couple of years before that, getting it going.
SP: How has the philanthropic environment in Ireland changed? What was the picture when you started, what’s the picture now and where’s it heading?
DM: ONE foundation was established in 2004, that’s 17 years ago, now – that’s a generation! At that time, the Celtic Tiger was roaring. And we were not seeing philanthropy go up at the same pace as we were seeing wealth go up in Ireland at all. And that was one of our concerns. Now, I should emphasize that the data on philanthropy generally is quite weak in Ireland. So it’s very hard to produce a really strong case on anything and a lot of our data is not internationally comparable either.
While we did talk to a lot of budding philanthropists who, as they were making a lot of money, were really starting to think about what they might do with it other than, you know, buy homes and yachts or give it to their children. And it was wonderful to see that, but I think the crash came too soon, and so a lot of those budding philanthropists didn’t really turn into philanthropists during that period. That crash lasted 10 years, and we’re really only pulling back out [of that economic crash] now.
We’re all watching very closely to see how some of those international trends in philanthropy translate into Ireland. So, for example, the Next Gen movement that you’re seeing in the US and throughout Europe, we’re not seeing that yet in Ireland, but at the same time the pattern of our wealth is very different. We were a colonized country, not a colonial country, so pretty much all our wealth is new wealth, 20th or 21st century wealth – there really is not a lot of old wealth in Ireland. So the traditional patterns or philanthropy that you’ll see [with] the Dutch or the Swedish or the Germans or the UK or US, we don’t have those kinds of patterns. I think the psychology of philanthropists is just ‘we’re at an earlier stage’. We don’t have fifth-generation wealth – we have second-, maybe third-generation wealth. So I think some of those trends we’re just not seeing yet but I kind of wouldn’t really expect to see them yet either.
We’re just beginning to work with high-net-worth families and individuals now, and what we offer to them is very different. They are interested in match-funding but they’re also interested in capacity-building – which includes a specific module around a successful exit. I think all the donors we work with are interested in the fact that we provide a successful exit and that we’re supporting the grantees on exit from the very beginning, so they don’t have to worry that if they choose to exit after three years, that it’s all going to crash and burn at the end. I think that provides a little bit of a safety net for donors psychologically as well.
SP: Is there more engagement from other kinds of philanthropic actors in Ireland?
What we are seeing is more engagement with corporate
philanthropy, both in the multinationals and more local Irish companies as well, and that’s encouraging. The role we’ve played as Rethink Ireland has been important in bringing some of those companies to the table – and with some of the multinationals that we have worked with, we competed internationally to bring that philanthropic money to Ireland. That wasn’t money that was coming to Ireland, we would have been pitching against other countries because [the multinationals] were going to do one big philanthropic initiative in Europe this year, and which country will it go to? And we’ve been successful at bringing that in. There are ways that we’ve been able to stimulate philanthropy – because of the particular model we have – that have been really important and that become showcases for others. Like our State Street initiative – a big American Boston-based bank made a very significant donation €750,000 over three years, matched by government, which is focused on supporting with people with disabilities into employment – decent employment, I might add – through innovative programs. We did pitch internationally to bring that [funding] to Ireland, [without which] that would not have happened.
SP: How about your engagement with Big Tech companies, many of which have based their European operations out of Ireland?
DM: We’ve worked with Google [through Google.org, its philanthropic arm] now twice in the last five years. We had a €0.5m donation in 2016 for ThinkTech and now we’ve a further donation this year for the Rural Recovery Fund; we had a small donation from Twitter for our COVID-19 fund. But the other tech firms we haven’t successfully engaged with to date.
I think that a lot of the tech firms in Ireland are interested in donating their employees’ time as volunteers and various other ways of giving, but they wouldn’t be as big on philanthropy in the Irish market as they would be in their home market of the US. And I think some of that comes down to the culture – both as consumers and as a government – that we don’t demand philanthropy as a norm from multinationals based here in the way that that, in the US, would be an absolutely basic assumption of what would be expected of a corporate citizen. Other sectors, for example, financial services, would have a different culture.
SP: I understand that you have a richer connection with the US in some ways in that your mother is American – does that inform the success that Rethink Ireland has had in bringing US funds in particularly?
DM: Exactly – I’d have a good understanding of the philanthropic culture in the US as well. Through that, and also we had an American board member at ONE Foundation who I would have learned a lot from too – we became very good friends as well as professional peers! So I’ve been able to really build networks in the US, particularly in the Boston and New York area, and that means I can really keep up with the trends and what’s going on. But does it matter if I’m American or not? I think it’s helpful, but it’s not critical. I think I’m able to work cross-culturally, and that makes everybody feel more comfortable – and being comfortable is very important to decision-making and to trust. But if the next CEO of Rethink is simply Irish, they be able to do just as good a job as I can.
SP: Does the fact that the funds they donate are going to be matched by government and the bang for their buck is effectively doubled work as a factor in your favour? Is it an unfamiliar thing for the donors you’re approaching in the US to encounter?
DM: It’s not that unfamiliar in the US – there are models, but I think they’re perhaps being forgotten. One of our models for developing this fund was actually the Obama Social Innovation Fund, which he set up in his first 100 days – that involved not a 1:1 match, but a 3:1 match, i.e. for every $3 raised philanthropically you got $1 from the federal government. It was a very powerful model that ran for the eight years he was president, but it was it was gone pretty quickly. When Trump came in, he shut it all down. So not everybody remembers that, and not everybody participated in it either.
SP: I was living there at the time, so I should have known about it. Maybe I’ve forgotten too… What about diasporic funding?
DM: The Ireland Funds – they work between Ireland and the US, and other countries as well – play an absolutely critical role there. We work very closely with them – and they have been a tremendously supportive partner to us. They work particularly with Irish-American individuals and families who may be wanting to do something philanthropic in Ireland, so we are not traveling to the US to pitch cold. We’re either doing it with American companies through their Irish EMEA headquarters here in Ireland, or else we’re working with the Ireland Funds where perhaps they know a donor who’d like to give and they think the way Rethink Ireland operates might be a good fit.