The founder of the Mitchell Scholarship programme has warned that it faces closure unless a more reliable and improved funding model can be secured.
“The bottom line is that everyone loves the Mitchell but nobody wants to be the one to pay for it,” Trina Vargo, founder of the US-Ireland Alliance, which sponsors the programme, said. It funds 12 young postgraduate students from the US on a year of study in Ireland or Northern Ireland.
“If you look at what we are competing against in terms of other scholarships like this, they all started with a billionaire who tended to have interest in the country they set up, like the Gates Scholarship for Cambridge or the Rhodes for Oxford. We are the only scholarship that started with no money.”
The funding model is primarily financed by the Irish Government through the Department of Education, whose office was approached for comment.
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But Ms Vargo believes if the programme is to establish a more secure footing and survive beyond her stewardship, it will require further assistance.
“You can’t keep up with inflation and you are annually chasing it. Right now we get money from the Department of Education and there is no certainty. This year, I was just told this month we were getting money. If the scholars are going to come to you, they have to feel that their basic costs are being covered,” she said.
Persistent attempts to persuade both the US government for funding and approaches to American philanthropists have yielded nothing.
Ms Vargo spent more than a decade working as a foreign policy adviser for senator Ted Kennedy and her memoir, Shenanigans, described her behind-the-scenes role in the evolving peace process. It was then that she came up with the idea for an Irish-American educational scholarship.
She approached prominent Irish businesspeople such as Bernie Gallagher of the Doyle hotel group; the late Donal Geaney; and Michael Smurfit, who gave start-up funding. She approached George Mitchell, who had just brokered the Good Friday Agreement, and agreed to have the scholarship named after him.
“Then I went to Bertie Ahern and Mo Mowlam and they both saw the vision immediately and gave the money to get it started,” she said.
Almost 300 scholars have participated in the Mitchell over the past 25 years and Ms Vargo believes that it has created valuable links between Ireland and graduates who have gone on to work in the political, business and artistic realms. Losing that, she says, would be detrimental to the ongoing and fast-changing relationship between Ireland and the United States.
Ms Vargo said if the programme is closed, it will be “a huge loss to the relationship” between Ireland and the US.
The recipients of this year’s scholarships were due to be announced on Friday.
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