Popular FAO veteran Bill Supple dies at age 85

 ROME – William Supple, an Irish former senior accounts executive at the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) with a colourful sense of humour and a gift for friendship, has died at age 85, his family said. Bill Supple joined the FAO after a spell working in South Africa for a diamonds company and rose to a high-level position at the Rome-based UN agency under the reign of the Lebanese director general Edouard Saouma.

 After retiring from the FAO, Bill was active in English-speaking community groups in the Eternal City. He was popular for his gift for telling humorous anecdotes in colourful language with his distinctive brogue twang and twinkling eye. He was respected for the time he took to help many members of the expat community in difficulty. For many years he could be spotted smoking a pipe on his scooter zipping around Rome until well into his 70s.

 Bill was a devoted father and grandfather. He loved entertaining family members in his holiday home that he bought on the island of Sardinia. Before joining the FAO he worked in London and for Irish television in Dublin before meeting his Italian wife, marrying her in Florence and then moving with her first to South Africa and then back to Rome.

 During his time at FAO his steady hand in the agency’s accounts department helped curb what critics saw as the wilder spending excesses of the Saouma regime and paved the way for future reforms of the organization imposed by Western donor countries.

 Bill was born in 1940 in Limerick county, Ireland, the eldest of eight children. He showed academic promise from an early age. He was spotted by a local Jesuit priest and sent to Jesuit seminary college but by age 18 decided he did not have a vocation for the priesthood, opting instead to go to university. He paid for his own studies through his own work, taking a bachelor’s and then a master’s degree, and paying also for a sister and a brother to go to university.

 Bill was immortalised when he acted a part in the 2019 film Tomasso directed by his friend the American film maker Abel Ferrara.

 William Supple, UN senior manager, born 1940, died of pneumonia Jan. 10, 2026, in Rome.

 The funeral was held Tuesday Jan. 13, at 10:30 a.m. in the Chiesa Santi Angeli Custodi at Piazza Sempione, Rome.

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