The Tuesday Club Elected Me Treasurer Because I Was Late

Never Arrive Last to a Meeting

There is a lesson I should have learned on the ferries, where the man who turns up last to the engine room briefing gets the job nobody wants. I spent thirty-four years as an engineer on the boats between Ringaskiddy and Roscoff, and I was never late once. Then I retired, joined an investment club, and walked into the back room of a pub in Douglas eleven minutes after seven on a wet Tuesday in January.

They had already voted. In my absence, by a show of ten hands, I had become treasurer.

"You were an engineer," said Bríd, who had chaired the club since it began. "You like numbers." I pointed out that I liked pressure gauges and fuel consumption figures, and that money was a different animal entirely. She smiled and slid a shoebox across the table at me.

What Was in the Shoebox

The Tuesday Club, as we call it, is twelve people. Mostly retired. A couple of nurses, a primary school headmistress, a man who used to sell agricultural machinery, a woman who still works part time at the library, and now me. We each put in a modest amount every month and meet once a month to argue about where it goes. It started fifteen years ago with a few Irish shares, and then over time somebody got excited about a Swiss chocolate company, somebody else wanted a French car maker, and somebody's son-in-law in Amsterdam had recommended a Dutch firm that makes machines for making microchips.

So the shoebox held fifteen years of statements, dividend notices and letters in four languages, some in plastic folders, many loose. The previous treasurer, a lovely retired bank clerk called Seán, had moved to Galway to be near his grandchildren and had handed it over with the words, "It all adds up, more or less."

The Evenings at the Kitchen Table

I took it home and spread it across the kitchen table, and my wife Noreen took one look and went to bed.

I am not a financial person, but I am a methodical one. On a ferry, if a figure does not match what it should be, you find out why before you sail. I sorted the statements by year, and then by company, and I made a ledger in a hardback notebook, the way I used to log engine hours. Gross dividend declared. Amount actually received. The difference.

It was the difference that kept me up.

On the Swiss shares, a great chunk was simply gone before the money ever reached our account. Not a little. Something like a third. On the French ones, a smaller bite, but still a bite. I went through every year we had held them and the hole was there every single time, like a valve that had been weeping for fifteen years and nobody had put a hand on it.

A Word I Had Never Used

I rang Seán in Galway. He was delighted to hear from me and less delighted when I told him what I was asking about. He said he had always assumed it was just tax, the same as everywhere, and that there was nothing to be done about it. "It's the cost of doing business abroad," he said.

That might well have been the end of it. But I have a cousin in Boston, Declan, who did something in accounting for years, and I happened to mention it to him on our monthly phone call. He went quiet, which he never does, and then said, "Have you lot ever claimed any of that back?"

That was the first time I properly heard the phrase dividend withholding tax. I had seen it printed on a hundred of the slips in that shoebox, sometimes in French, once in German, and I had read straight past it, the way you read past the safety notices on a ferry you have sailed on a thousand times.

What Declan Explained

Declan explained it to me over two long phone calls, with Noreen occasionally shouting questions from the sitting room.

As I understood it, when a company in one country pays a dividend to someone in another, the first country often takes its slice before the money leaves. But a lot of countries have agreements with each other so that the slice is meant to be smaller for foreigners, and the difference can sometimes be claimed back. The catch, he said, is that nobody does it for you. You have to ask. In writing. Often in the other country's language. With forms that seem designed by someone who has never met a member of the public.

I went back to my notebook and sat looking at fifteen years of numbers with a strange mixture of anger and embarrassment. Not at Seán, who had done his honest best. At myself, a little, and at the whole arrangement, which seemed to rely on people like us not noticing.

The Meeting Where I Told Them

At the February meeting I stood up in the back room of the pub with my notebook and a sheet I had photocopied at the library. I am not a public speaker. On the ferries I spoke to engines, mostly.

I explained it as best I could. That a portion of what our foreign companies had paid us had been kept back each year, that some of it might, possibly, be recoverable, and that there were time limits, so the oldest years were probably already gone. I watched faces round the table go from polite to puzzled to genuinely cross. Maura, one of the retired nurses, said, "So we've been leaving money on the table for fifteen years?" and I said I did not know yet, but possibly.

Then the machinery salesman, Jim, asked the question that I think everybody wanted to ask. "Can we not just ignore it? It sounds like a lot of paper."

A Lot of Paper

He was right. It was.

Over the following months I learned more about dividend withholding than any retired ferry engineer should have to. I learned that some forms needed a stamp from our own tax office confirming we were resident in Ireland. I learned that a club like ours, with twelve people pooling money, raised its own questions about who exactly the owner was. I learned that one of the countries wanted things posted, physically, in an envelope, in the year of our Lord twenty twenty-six.

I also learned when to stop being stubborn. I am a man who has rebuilt a ferry generator in a Force 8, and I did not want to admit that a few sheets of paper had beaten me. But after a few weekends of trying to read French tax guidance with a dictionary, I accepted that this was a job for people who did it for a living. We talked it through as a club, as we talk everything through, and agreed to get proper help with the claims that were still open and see what came of it. It was the first time in fifteen years the club had spent money on something that was not a share.

What I Changed in the Notebook

I will not pretend we became rich. We are twelve pensioners with a modest pot. But some money came back that we had never expected to see, and more important to me, the hole stopped being invisible.

I added a column to the notebook. Next to every foreign dividend now, there is a figure showing what was taken, what should have been taken under the agreement, and whether anything is due. It sounds dull. It is dull. It is also exactly what I would have done with fuel figures on a ship, and I am a little ashamed that it took a cousin in Boston to make me think of it.

Bríd says I have become insufferable about it. At every meeting, when somebody proposes a new company in a new country, I am the one who puts my hand up and asks what the dividend tax withholding rate is there and whether we can be bothered with the paperwork. Sometimes the answer changes our minds. Mostly it just means we go in with our eyes open.

Twelve Hands Up

At the AGM last month, Bríd asked whether anybody else wanted to stand for treasurer. Nobody did. I said I would do another year on one condition, that next time I was late, nobody would vote for anything until I arrived.

Twelve hands went up. I was on time that night. I made sure.

Noreen says I have swapped one engine room for another. She might be right. The shoebox is gone now, replaced by four labelled files and a hardback notebook. Every month, I sit at the kitchen table with my reading glasses and a cup of tea and check that the numbers going out match the numbers coming in, the way I used to listen to an engine on a night crossing, waiting for the note that is slightly wrong.