Business executive, attorney and philanthropist Brian P. Burns is the founder and principal benefactor of the John J. Burns Library of Rare Books and Special Collections at Boston College.

An accomplished collector, Burns’ “America’s Eye: Irish Paintings” by more than 35 artists, including Jack Yeats, exhibited at BC early in the year and then traveled to the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery in Dublin

One of Burns’ paintings, by Paul Kelly, depicts Cork Cathedral and Cobh Harbor, from which most of the ships sailed for America. In fact, Burns’ grandfather walked 18 miles from his village to make that journey. Burns’ father, the third of nine children, became a distinguished judge in Boston, and the first Irish American to join Harvard Law School’s faculty.

The John J. Burns Library, which Brian Burns named for his father, houses more than 100,000 rare books, 3,000,000 manuscripts and has the largest archive of rare Irish books in the U.S., including the papers of Beckett and Yeats. Burns also endowed the Library with a visiting Scholar in Irish Studies chair.

Burns is vice-chairman of the Irish Fulbright Commission and is a member of the Ireland-America Economic Advisory Board to An Taoiseach, John Bruton. Recently Burns was elected a trustee of Dublin’s Trinity College Foundation. In 1978, Burns was elected the youngest director of the American Irish Foundation, established in 1963 by Presidents John F. Kennedy and Eamon de Valera.