BILLY VINCENT:BILLY VINCENT, who has died aged 93, made an outstanding contribution and a real difference to the lives of many in Ireland, North and South.
A former president and chairman of the American Irish Foundation, following its merger with The Ireland Funds in 1987, he became vice-chairman of the The American Ireland Fund. Resident in Monaco in recent decades, he was proud of his Kerry roots and Irish heritage.
Minister for Heritage Jimmy Deenihan said: “Two lines from the poem by Séamus Heaney capture the essence of the man himself: ‘Prince of giving, saoi, ard-rí, His Kerry court around him’.”
Maurice Hayes wrote in a tribute some years ago that Vincent embodied for him the core values of The Ireland Funds: “Compassion, real charity, honesty and integrity, concern for others, a sense of justice and fair play, and abhorrence of violence and concern for the victim”.
Born in London in 1919, Arthur William Bourn Vincent was one of two children of an Irish father, Arthur Rose Vincent, and an American mother, Maud Bourn of San Francisco.
His boyhood home was Muckross House, Killarney, although he and his sister joined their parents for lengthy stays at his maternal grandparents’ home in California.
His father, a barrister, had served in the foreign office judicial service, and later was a member of the Seanad.
Following his mother’s death in 1929 his father and grandfather gave Muckross to the people of Ireland, and the estate’s 11,000 acres are now incorporated into the Killarney National Park.
Vincent was educated at Bryanston school in Dorset, after which he spent a year at the University of Munich, where he learned German.
He obtained a BA degree from Magdalene College, Cambridge.
At the start of the second World War he enlisted as a guardsman in the Irish Guards. He was later commissioned in the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers, once commanded by his uncle, Gen Sir Berkeley Vincent. He served in India, Persia and Iraq, the Middle East and Italy.
He first saw action in the invasion of the Vichy French island of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean in May 1942.
He also took part in the bitterly fought invasion of Sicily, his first wartime encounter with the formidable German army.
The Inniskillings’ fiercest battle in the long slog through Italy was the crossing of the Gariglanio, at which Vincent was second-in-command of B company.
After crossing the river and minefields under fire, the Inniskillings took their objectives in the first breaching of the Gustav line before fighting off massive German counterattacks.
Vincent was wounded, and 43 of his comrades were killed. He had a memorial erected to honour the dead.
Sent to convalesce in Rome, he became a close friend of the famous “Scarlet Pimpernel of the Vatican”, Msgr Hugh O’Flaherty.
After the war, and now based in California, Vincent joined United Helicopters (later Hiller Aircraft Corporation), and soon became a director.
Appointed vice-president in charge of sales in 1949, in this capacity he oversaw the sale of helicopters to many countries, including Egypt, India and Vietnam, as well as many European and Latin American states.
He left Hiller in 1962 to team up with the Carver-Dodge oil company, which made discoveries of oil, first in Indonesia and later in Alberta, Canada.
In 1983 he was appointed chairman of the board of Inishtech Capital Fund Ltd, an Irish venture capital company formed in the Cayman Islands to invest in the US.
After a successful merger of the company he relinquished the chairmanship in January 1989.
He was a director of Independent News and Media from 1990 to 1999.
He took up residence in Monaco in 1998 and was the driving force behind the establishment of The Ireland Fund of Monaco, of which he was president until he stood down in 2005.
The instigator in funding a writer and an academic in residence at the Princess Grace Irish library, he also created a literary prize and humanitarian award.
In 1990, with Andrew Mulligan, he initiated and established the Parnell fellowship for Irish Studies at Magdalene College, Cambridge, and in 1996 was made an honorary fellow of the college.
Trinity College Dublin and the University of Ulster also honoured him, and in 2004 he was made a commander of the order of St Charles by the prince of Monaco.
He held membership of clubs in Dublin, London, Monaco, Paris and San Francisco, and was a life member of the Killarney golf and fishing club. He regarded Kerry as home and kept a house near Beaufort.
Known for a cranky directness with which he pricked pomposity and exposed humbug, he also was possessed of warmth and compassion.
His friendships crossed national and class lines, and he was excellent company.
His wife, Elisabeth (née Tourne), whom he married in 1952, survives him along with his stepson, Marc Banet-Rivet, and grandsons, Mathieu, Antoine and Adrien.
Billy Vincent: born July 17th, 1919; died October 18th, 2012.