*Sarah Hartnett, Director of Development UL Foundation, Emeritus President Dr Des Fitzgerald and Olive Foley. Photograph: Ray Lohan, Sportsfile
A donation by Olive Foley, wife of the late, great Anthony ‘Axel’ Foley, to the University of Limerick Foundation has created student scholarship programmes in the rugby star’s name.
Three pillars are covered in the scholarships – music and dance, access and sport. The Music and Dance element is divided between scholarships for the MA in Classical Strings and PhD scholarships in a variety of areas at the Irish World Academy of Music and Dance at UL.
Following Foley’s untimely death in early 2016, a number of groups organised fundraising events in his memory, following which Olive made a donation to the UL Foundation.
UL was described by Olive as the Foley’s “local university” and one in which the family share an attachment to given the amount of time Anthony spent working in the Arena during his time as Munster Head Coach.
“It is such an important institution – it is so important to us and it was so important to Anthony. Any time there was something new going up there, Anthony would come home and go ‘you have to drive in around UL and see the beautiful new building’. We just love that university and I really hope that my kids are going to go there,” Olive said.
The Killaloe native said she was particularly happy that the scholarships would cover Access programmes also. “Access is so important to us – and music and dance, well I suppose that would be more my side of the house than Anthony’s, but it is lovely to cover a wide variety of areas and not solely on sport, it is lovely that it can be spread around”.
Anthony’s compassion for young people is celebrated through the scholarship, Sarah Hartnett, Director of Development at the UL Foundation, maintained. “We are privileged to have been chosen to pay tribute to Anthony’s legacy in this way and also extremely grateful to Olive Foley for her generosity in helping to ensure that our most deserving students receive financial support”.
