Russell, George Edward (Ted)

by Terry Clavin

Russell, George Edward (Ted) (1912–2004), businessman and politician, was born 9 April 1912 in the family home at 4 Moyola Terrace, Limerick, the eldest of two sons and a daughter of Matthew John Russell and his wife Mary (née Rohan). His grandfather George (d. 1876) established a bakery in Limerick in 1870 and represented Irishtown ward on Limerick city council. His father continued the business and in the 1920s acquired control of Dan O'Connor Ltd, a corn and provisions merchant founded in 1848 by Ted's grand uncle.

Russell was educated at Crescent College, Limerick; Mount St Benedict in Gorey, Co. Wexford; and in England at Stonyhurst College, Lancashire. At Stonyhurst he was a noted athlete and rugby player. In 1929 he began working in Dan O'Connor Ltd, which had by then diversified into animal feed. From 1930 he played rugby for Bohemians RFC as a second‑row forward, being captain for two seasons (1935–7), and maintained a lifelong association with Bohemians, serving as club president in 1967–8. He was selected for Munster during 1936–8. In 1938 he had a final trial for Ireland and might have achieved international honours but for the outbreak of World War II, though he believed that he was too lightweight. His other sporting outlets were rowing with the Limerick Boat Club and hunting with the Limerick Harriers. In 1938, he married Dervilla (Derry) Gleeson, daughter of Joseph and Margaret Gleeson of Nenagh, Co. Tipperary. They lived on the North Circular Road in Limerick and had one son and three daughters. During the Emergency (1939–45) he served in the LDF as an assistant company commander.

Becoming managing director of Dan O'Connor Ltd on his father's death in 1937, he developed a new feed mill on the outskirts of the city and established it as the leading animal feed compound firm in north Munster. During the 1950s he founded with his brother Harry a rusk meal manufacturing company, National Rusks (latterly National Food Ingredients), and with Michael O'Brien Kelly he founded Limerick Dairies, serving as chairman of both firms. In 1950 he was a founding director of the Shield Insurance Company Ltd (latterly Eagle Star Insurance) and was for many years its chairman. He was also director of the family firm, National Bakeries Ltd, and of various other Limerick companies.

Silvermines His most significant business interest was in Silvermines Lead and Zinc plc (later Silvermines Ltd), a mining company that went public in Ireland in 1949. Most of the original subscribers and directors were British. An exception was Russell's aunt who invested £2,000 on condition that her nephew become a director; he was appointed chairman in 1950. Aiming to work lead and zinc deposits in an abandoned mine near Silvermines village in Co. Tipperary, the venture was beset almost immediately by technical problems and by collapsing lead and zinc prices; all operations were suspended by 1953. Its fortunes revived when it sold the bulk of its mining rights to Consolidated Mogul Mines Ltd of Canada in 1962. When this agreement was opposed by a Silvermines director, who thought the Mogul offer unnecessarily harsh and pointed to a counter‑offer, Russell successfully dismissed the objections with the support of other board members and the majority of shareholders.

The Mogul subsidiary company established in Ireland began production in May 1968 on fresh lead and zinc deposits discovered in the Silvermines area and paid its first dividend in 1973, enabling Silvermines (which had a 25 per cent shareholding in the company) to sanction a long‑awaited maiden dividend that February. Having failed as a mining concern, Silvermines flowered as an investment vehicle, averaging profits of £1 million a year during 1974–7. Nonetheless, the board needed fresh sources of income as the Mogul mine was expected to be exhausted by 1982.

Meanwhile, circumstances had enhanced Russell's authority within the company. A minor shareholder, he served initially as watchdog in Ireland for the foreign financiers who controlled the bulk of Silvermines' shares. By 1972, however, the company had a broader shareholding structure with some 70 per cent of shares in Irish hands. This enabled Russell to assert himself as executive chairman, advocating a bold policy of liberal dividends and of investment in Irish natural resource prospects, with particular emphasis on oil and gas exploration ventures in Irish waters. His concurrent promotion of the Shannon estuary as an industrial location (see below) undoubtedly guided his considerations, given that the estuary was the most convenient berth on the west coast for natural resource prospecting and refining activities. In 1972 Silvermines acquired a 50 per cent shareholding in the Irish oil exploration company Aran Energy (of which Russell served for many years as chairman), which subsequently formed a consortium with British Petroleum (BP), holding a 25 per cent stake.

This strategy was resisted by Count Jan Badeni, an investment specialist appointed to the Silvermines board in 1973, who anticipated that the onerous capital commitments attendant on oil exploration would preclude his preferred approach of building a diversified portfolio. The resignations of Badeni and another director in 1974 and the disposal of their shares left the board with a 4 per cent shareholding. This consolidated Russell's dominance of the board, while also leaving it vulnerable to a takeover. A British firm, Slater Walker, promptly began accumulating Silvermines shares, but its bid faltered, vindicating Russell's calculation that shareholders, taking into consideration Silvermines' generous dividends, would not sell cheaply.

Declaring that Silvermines was not a stock for widows and orphans, Russell believed that the move into oil and gas would help preserve the Irish character of the company (and consequently its willingness to contribute towards Ireland's economic development) due to the preference of Irish shareholders for risky propositions. The new look Silvermines captured the imagination of the domestic investment community, and its annual general meetings, for long fraught and acrimonious occasions, became celebratory and boisterous affairs.

Investment analysts were less sanguine about the company's prospects, noting its reliance on finite mining revenues, the concentration of resources in Aran Energy and the lack of any formal management structure (which helped preserve Russell's sway over the company). These fears were seemingly confirmed during 1978–9 as Mogul revenues collapsed and Aran's share price languished disastrously. Russell, however, held his nerve and was rewarded in late 1979 when the Aran Energy/BP consortium struck oil. He exploited the ensuing (and unsustainable) explosion in the share prices of Silvermines and Aran during 1980 by authorising a Silvermines rights issue and disposing of a large chunk of Aran shares. Although the oil find proved uneconomical, the Aran investment yielded an overall profit. In any case, under the influence of two canny advisors, Tim Renton (later a British government junior minister) and Frank Traynor, Russell had from 1977 been moving Silvermines into calmer waters. By the mid 1980s Silvermines had demonstrated that it could survive the expiration of the Mogul mine, becoming a well‑diversified and profitable investment company with acquisitions in Ireland, the UK and North America. It continued in natural resources but also engaged in engineering, technology, property, cold storage and manufacturing.

In 1980, he appointed Traynor as Silvermines' first chief executive and gradually withdrew from company affairs. From 1985, with the company increasingly dominated by British shareholding interests, Silvermines responded to a downturn in the oil and gas sectors by becoming a UK industrial holding company and by acquiring a majority stake in a number of engineering firms, which it managed directly. Russell resigned as chairman in 1988, continuing as life president. In retirement he wrote a history of the company, published in 1990. The amorphous nature of Silvermines for much of his chairmanship makes it difficult to gauge the extent of Russell's influence within it. What can be affirmed is that the company bore his imprint most visibly in the 1970s and that he achieved talismanic status among its shareholders.

Politics Russell sat on the Limerick city council from 1942 to 1979, serving five terms as mayor (1954–7, 1967–8, 1976–7). Initially elected as an independent, he joined the recently founded Clann na Poblachta shortly before 1948. This embrace of a party noted for its radical republicanism was surprising given his family's past support of Cumann na nGaedheal, his decidedly regal forenames (for which he was unflatteringly dubbed 'Rex' in certain circles) and his previously unsympathetic attitude towards those who had been involved in physical force nationalism.

In 1949, the Clann na Poblachta minister for health, Noel Browne (qv), appointed Russell chairman of the newly established Cancer Association of Ireland. He thought highly of Browne, especially for his ability to overcome bureaucratic inertia. Remaining chairman until 1961, Russell presided over the building of St Luke's Hospital in Dublin, the first dedicated cancer treatment and diagnostic unit in the country, as well as of St Agatha's treatment centre in Cork and a number of diagnostic clinics throughout the country. Later, he served as a member of the Limerick Health Authority (1963–71) and of the Mid-Western Health Board (1971–9).

He unsuccessfully contested two general elections (1948 and 1951) and a by-election (1952) as Clann na Poblachta candidate for Limerick East, but by the mid 1950s his authority over the party's constituency machine was being challenged by Stephen Coughlan (qv). In 1955 Russell resigned temporarily from Clann na Poblachta after its local organisation was initially unwilling to approve a rotation of the mayoralty between various political parties (thereby facilitating his re-election as mayor). A year later he left the party for good, following his unanimous re-election as mayor.

Elected for Limerick East as an independent in the 1957 general election, he expressed in his maiden speech a willingness to support the Fianna Fáil government if it pursued its declared intention of adopting a fresh approach to economic policy. Rumour held that Seán Lemass (qv) encouraged him to join Fianna Fáil, but he remained in opposition and lost his seat in 1961. He joined Fine Gael in 1965 and became the party's leader on Limerick city council. He made three unsuccessful attempts as a Fine Gael candidate to re-enter the Dail (1965, 1973 and 1977), but was hindered by rivalry with the constituency's long-serving Fine Gael deputy, Tom O'Donnell. He served two terms as a senator (1969–77), was elected to the Fine Gael national executive in 1972, and later became a vice-president of the party.

His rise within Fine Gael is attributable to his prominence as chairman of Silvermines (his political and business interests were mutually reinforcing), to the similarity of his moderately conservative political views with those of the party leader, Liam Cosgrave, and presumably to his contributions to party funds – vice-presidencies were often granted to wealthy donors. But it owed as much to ability: as both TD and senator he was praised for his frequent, considered and knowledgeable contributions to parliamentary debates. His varied extra-political hinterland enabled him to bring an impressive amount of practical expertise to bear on bills relating to commerce, finance, taxation, agriculture, education, health, regional development, and transport. It was widely assumed (though firmly denied) that his lobbying of the Fine Gael-led coalition government (1973–7) determined the granting in 1975 of oil drilling rights in five territorial blocks off the west coast to the Aran Energy/BP consortium in which Silvermines had invested. Defeat in the 1977 seanad election (he was undone by unseated Fine Gael TDs seeking sanctuary in the upper house) terminated his parliamentary career, about which he had mixed feelings, coming to the view that his business commitments prevented him from engaging sufficiently with legislative and political duties.

Limerick leader He had no regrets about his time on the Limerick city council where his three initial successive terms as mayor (1954–7) were regarded as a success. As mayor he promoted the city's historic identity, most memorably in March 1956 when he staged, amid great fanfare and pageantry, the traditional ceremony asserting the city's admiralty jurisdiction (granted by King James I in 1609) over the Shannon estuary to the mouth of the Atlantic Ocean by casting a silver dart into the waters. In 1957 he toured five cities in the USA to raise funds for a monument to two mayors of Limerick killed by British forces during the war of independence (1919–21).

These initiatives demonstrated his concern to instil civic pride into what the rest of the country regarded as a benighted city, often caricatured as dirty, poverty-stricken, suffocated by catholic triumphalism and rent by a multiplicity of class and political divisions. This impression was borne out by the occasional antics of members of the city council, which arose from a surfeit of colourful figures, foremost among them being Coughlan, Jim Kemmy (qv) and Donogh O'Malley (qv). The three diverged ideologically but were united in embodying the populist and bombastic O'Connellite tradition of Irish politics to which Russell – patrician, lantern-jawed, self-effacing, understated and unfailingly courteous – provided an incongruously dignified contrast. While his attempts as mayor to restrain his colleagues often led to bitter clashes, there was an enduring regard on the council for Russell's efforts on behalf of the Limerick region and for his willingness to work constructively with politicians of all parties. He was to the fore in organising local pressure groups to prod successive governments into devoting more resources to the development of Limerick and the mid-west. In the late 1950s he re-instigated the campaign for a university in Limerick. When eventually the National Institute for Higher Education (NIHE) was established, later becoming the University of Limerick (UL), it was fitting that Bohemians RFC merged with the UL rugby club, a development Russell encouraged.

Harbour Commissioner His most direct contribution to the Limerick region's economic revival was as member (1946–97) and chairman (1966–92) of the Limerick Harbour Commissioners. In the mid 1960s, the commissioners bought new machinery for the docks, which reduced the need for manual labour and led the Limerick dockers to initiate restrictive work practices. In response, shippers avoided the port, culminating in 1970 in the complete withdrawal of general cargo shipping services to Limerick. Russell was intimately involved in the negotiations that eventually led the dockers to agree in 1973 that their numbers would be reduced from 350 to 60, with those made redundant receiving compensation. Throughout, he was sensitive to the dockers' grievances, declaring that the matter could not be seen in purely economic terms. These rationalisations guaranteed the future of Limerick docks but, because large-tonnage modern ships could not berth there, they could not halt the decline in employment there.

The Limerick Harbour Commissioners had jurisdiction over the sixty-mile Shannon estuary (excepting the harbours at Foynes and Kilrush and some piers), which by virtue of its length, depth and abundance of available industrial sites was identified as a prime location for industries requiring heavy or bulky raw materials, such as oil refining, petrochemicals and steel. Russell sought assiduously to make this aspiration a reality but was hobbled by the lack of a strong, unified port authority for the estuary. During the mid 1970s, at the summit of his political influence, he seemed set to secure his appointment to the position as head of a Shannon estuary port authority, but was thwarted by the Foynes Harbour Trustees who feared being subsumed by the Limerick Harbour Commissioners. (When the government revived this scheme in the late 1980s, Russell opposed it because the proposed semi-state company would have had little or no representation of local authority interests; as a result of these disagreements a unified estuary authority did not emerge until 2000).

Progress was made nonetheless. The commissioners had in the early 1970s constructed an oil jetty at Dernish Island to facilitate the transportation of aviation fuel to Shannon airport, which helped persuade the Soviet airline Aeroflot to use the airport as a refueling depot in the early 1980s; this led to a surge in oil imports. The turning point occurred in the late 1970s with the commencement of two projects in the estuary, representing a combined investment of IR£1.5 billion: the Aughinish Alumina Ltd plant at Aughinish island and the ESB coal burning station at Moneypoint. Both operations imported large quantities of raw materials, while the Aughinish plant also exported alumina for further processing, thereby boosting the Limerick Harbour Commissioners' cargo traffic and revenues. When Russell became chairman of the commissioners in 1966 fewer than 500,000 tons of cargo were moving through the commissioners' jurisdiction each year; by the time Russell resigned in 1992, this figure had risen to nearly 6 million tons.

Last years For many years active in the Society of St Vincent de Paul and generally noted for his philanthropy, in 1972 Russell donated a parcel of land in his possession at Barrington's Pier to Limerick corporation for its subsequent development into a public park. In retirement, he received a number of tributes for his life of community service, having the Limerick docks named after him in 1993, being made freeman of Limerick city in 1995, and receiving an honorary doctorate in economics from the University of Limerick in 2002. He died 28 November 2004.

His son George succeeded him as a Limerick city councillor (1979–85) and as managing proprietor of Dan O'Connor Ltd, which was sold in 1991.

Assessment One theme recurs throughout his career: the nursing of apparently doomed projects to relatively successful fruition. This required limitless reserves of patience, tact, steadfastness, and optimism, grounded in sound judgement and a pronounced sense of noblesse oblige (although he also benefited from inherited social status, luck and sheer longevity). Only his national political career can be considered a failure, which reflects poorly on the political system given his superiority over the bulk of his political peers as a legislator and administrator.

In business and politics he proceeded by consensus, working within existing structures. Arguably this pragmatism led to an excessive willingness to facilitate foreign multi-national corporations. Certainly, his career exemplified the trend whereby Irish business leaders, particularly if they had political connections, achieved eminence not as autonomous entrepreneurs but as enablers of the movement of capital into the country. Having witnessed the disintegration of Limerick's manufacturing base from the 1950s, he was aware of the weakness and inefficiency of native industry and of the challenges the economy faced following entry into the EEC in 1973 and the advent of free trade. Moreover his experiences with Silvermines had impressed upon him the formidable financial and technical obstacles to large-scale industrial activity. He concluded that Ireland's economic survival required the attraction by whatever means necessary of the capital and expertise that only multi-nationals possessed.