Páircéir, Seán
Partner ● Brown Brothers Harriman Seán Páircéir is a believer in mutual funds. "As fund administrators, we facilitate a good idea," he says. "The diversification of risk." Risk, as it happens, is something Seán Páircéir has always weighed carefully. His earliest
Inducted: 2013
Partner ● Brown Brothers Harriman
Seán Páircéir is a believer in mutual funds. “As fund administrators, we facilitate a good idea,” he says. “The diversification of risk.” Risk, as it happens, is something Seán Páircéir has always weighed carefully. His earliest ambition was not to crack net asset value, but to act on stage and screen. And he nurtured this aspiration through adolescence and University College Dublin, where he studied English literature as well as French. Páircéir still values the lateral perspective yielded by prolonged immersion in great works of literature. “If you have studied the works of William Shakespeare, you have a pretty encyclopedic perspective on all forms of human motivation,” he says. That understanding extends to a good grasp of his limitations. “When I told my grandmother I had to choose between acting and a banking career, her answer was pretty brisk,” he recalls. “She said, ‘That is not really a choice, is it?'” Though Páircéir finds her logic hard to refute, now as then, he is not dissuaded by the experience of those contemporaries who made a different choice. One of them, Conor Macpherson, went on to become a well-known playwright. Another, Aidan McArdle, became the youngest actor, after Laurence Olivier, to portray Richard III at the Royal Shakespeare Company, and has since played a number of film and television roles.