Charities have long benefited from being remembered in wills, whether it’s the bequest of a two-bedroom apartment or €50,000, but why has it always been so low-key in Ireland?
WHEN TIMES are tough, being remembered in a relative’s or friend’s estate can alleviate financial stress and even be life-changing. Not being remembered can lead to resentment, family rows and legal battles. You can imagine the reaction you might have should that wealthy relative choose to leave their money to strangers, or to a personal passion, an institution, animals or even plants.
The Irish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, the Abbey Theatre, Dublin Institute of Technology and the Irish Seed Savers Association are among approximately 40 charities and NGOs that are now assertively seeking legacies. They are all members of Legacy Promotion Ireland (LPI), the organisation behind a recent advertising campaign on RTÉ Radio 1 for mylegacy.ie, asking you to remember your favourite charity in your will, “after your family has been looked after”.
They’re not asking your great-aunt Moneybags to leave you out of her will, but the ad still made some people feel uncomfortable, perhaps because most of us don’t like even thinking about wills, considering that 55 per cent of us haven’t made one.
If the ad was enough to make you log on to the website, you will have found that mylegacy.ie includes sample wording for making a will or changing a will to include a legacy, with helpful links to Law Society members.
Mylegacy.ie does not collect money directly and is an information site with links to its 40 charity members, who hope to benefit in the next seven to 10 years. Its target audience for its ads are the over-50s currently making wills. With a particular focus on Marian Finucane’s RTÉ Radio 1 programme on Saturdays and Sundays, the €42,000 ad campaign ran up to seven times a day.
The intention of this aural bombardment was to “create an attitude shift”, says Nichola Mullen, chairwoman of LPI and corporate development manager of Arthritis Ireland, which is a member of LPI. Only 25 per cent of Irish people believe that it is “very acceptable” for a charity to ask people for legacies and just 12 per cent of wills include a legacy to a charity, compared to 16 per cent in the UK, according to research commissioned by LPI. So given that 75 per cent of us don’t think it’s “very acceptable” and 88 per cent of us don’t include legacies to charity in our wills, perhaps that’s another reason why the ads may be off-putting for some.
“Here at the Irish Cancer Society (ICS), we have not received any negative feedback on the campaign whatever. We are just hoping that it will reap the rewards and get people thinking more about legacies, giving to their favourite charities – after, of course, their family has been looked after,” says the society’s Jane Curtin. She describes the radio campaign as “very intensive” and “very pervasive”. The campaign was paid for by the fees given to LPI by its members, each of which pays according to its means. The ICS pays €5,000 annually, while the smaller of the 40 charities pay as little as €400.
The ICS has recently appointed its first donor development and legacies manager to recruit a team and “establish a system of donor development to increase income from individual supporters and to ensure that donors become long-term and high-level supporters”, according to the job description. One of the main duties of the job is to “develop a donor/ supporter journey”.
In the US, some charities cultivate and pursue donors, maintaining relationships over many years. When Mona Webster, a lighthouse-keeper’s daughter from Edinburgh, died in August at the age of 96, one of her last visitors – just four days before she died – was a representative of the Metropolitan Opera in New York. Webster fell in love with “the Met” by listening to it on the radio, and visited this grand institution in the US, hinting that she was thinking of leaving money.
The Met kept in touch with her, sent her gifts (including her favourite Met operas on LP because she didn't own a DVD or CD player) and brought her to an opening night in 2000, which she told the Met's director of planned and special gifts was "the best night of her life". Last month the New York Timesreported that Webster had bequeathed the Met $7.5 million (€4.97 million), nearly half of her fortune. Most of the rest went to the UK's Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust, with the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, receiving a modest €169,000.
“In Ireland, traditionally, we are very low-key. Now there’s a marketing science behind donor development,” says Curtin.
Last year, legacies accounted for just 11 per cent of the ICS’s overall income, compared with a figure of 47 per cent for Cancer Research UK, “which, of course, is where we would like to get to”, says Curtin.
Traditionally, World Missions Ireland (also known as Pontifical Mission Societies), another LPI member , benefited from people “leaving money to the missions”, but, in its case, legacy-giving began to decrease 10 years ago. “In the last three years we haven’t got a single major legacy, whereas in the past we always had between one and three legacies each year of over €50,000 each,” says Fr Ed Grimes, the organisation’s national director.
The Irish Council for Civil Liberties, another member of LPI listed on the website, refused to comment on whether it had received legacies, while the Alzheimer’s Society, which is also a member, said that it receives “a small number” of legacies every year. “From our perspective, it’s been very low-key,” said a spokeswoman.
The Irish Seed Savers Association received one large gift as the result of a legacy, though not through mylegacy.ie, and technically it was a grant because it came through a foundation, according to a spokeswoman.
Focus Ireland, another LPI member, received the legacy of a two-bedroom apartment valued at €250,000 this year, and while the original intention was to sell it, Focus was unable to and it has since become home for a previously homeless family.
There are two kinds of legacies, according to mylegacy.ie: a “residuary bequest”, whereby you “make provisions for your nearest and dearest first, then leave the remainder, or part of the remainder to one or more preferred charities”, and a “pecuniary request”, whereby you “state in your will that a specific sum of money will go to a particular charity, or charities”.
Mylegacy.ie indicates how specific sums of money could be used by particular organisations. For example, at the Abbey Theatre, €4,500 could go towards readers to assess its pile of 100 unsolicited manuscripts. Mountain Rescue Ireland’s wish-list includes €250,000 to €500,000 to buy a site for a rescue base, plus the same again to build the base. At Dublin Institute of Technology, €10,000 would enable a student from a disadvantaged background to get a third-level education, while Carelocal would like €4,500 to fund its annual Christmas party.
John Gill, a partner in the private client department of Matheson Ormsby Prentice, hasn’t seen a trend towards people leaving charitable legacies. When a widow or widower who has inherited a deceased spouse’s entire estate chooses to make a new will, the adult children have no fixed entitlement but “it would be rare to leave an entire estate to a charity, church or foundation”. If an individual whose spouse has died wants to leave all his or her money to someone who has been caring for them in their latter years, rather than to their children, they can do so as long as the individual’s independent decision-making capacity is sound and the benefactor cannot be proved to have exercised undue influence. Children in this case would have a “right to apply”, but it would be difficult for them to prove their case.
Anyone can go to the National Archives and while away the hours reading eccentric wills that hint at complex family issues. These include the following, by a Galway parent, quoted in Eamonn G Mongey’s book, The Weird and Wonderful World of Wills (Fort Publications, 1997): “That my daughter shall for a period of 10 years after my death, or until her marriage, have the right to reside in my residence and also, free of charge, to be kept supported and maintained but not clothed.” Mongey also uncovered this gem: “My daughter shall have the right to use the outdoor toilet, with right of ingress thereto and egress therefrom by the back passage.”
It’s never too late to make a will. Cecil George Harris, a Canadian farmer, wrote his will in blood on the side of his tractor, under which he lay trapped for hours before he bled to death. “In case I die in this mess, I leave all to the wife.”
Rest easy: why it's a good idea to make a will
More than half of Irish people haven’t made wills, perhaps because they don’t fully understand the family chaos they may leave behind if they don’t. John Gill, of Matheson Ormsby Prentice, explains: “The most obvious advantage of executing a will is that it allows a person determine how their assets should be divided. If a person dies without making a will , rules enshrined in the 1965 Succession Act will determine how a person’s estate is divided. If a person dies intestate leaving a spouse and children, the spouse takes two-thirds of the estate and the children share the remaining one-third. If there are no children, the spouse takes the entire of the deceased’s estate. In the absence of a will therefore, if a person intended somebody else to benefit, be it a legacy to a charity or a dependent relative, then such benefit would not be fulfilled.
“A will allows a person to deal with the differing circumstances of potential beneficiaries. For example, a trust might be used in the case of incapacitated beneficiaries or beneficiaries under the age of 18, and a will can provide for the appointment of testamentary guardians for minor children.
“Alternatively, a trust might be included in a will if the testator requires flexibility as to which members of a specified class will benefit or it the circumstances of the beneficiaries change over time such that one beneficiary should be favoured more than others. The will would appoint trustees to take on this role. Trusts can also be used to affect tax planning.
