Obama and Clinton attack on Romney on Bin Laden a master stroke? Forcing Romney, GOP, onto back foot on issue of terrorism, defense

Barack Obama certainly has the gloves off after the new advertisement questioning Mitt Romney on whether he would have gone after Osama Bin Laden.

It is a classic judo trick to use your opponent’s perceived strength against him.

Republicans did it brilliantly when they questioned John Kerry’s war hero status back in 2004 against George Bush.

Now the Democrats are taking one of the GOP’s perceived strengths, tough on defense and terrorism, and using it against Romney.

It is based on a Romney statement in 2007 when he essentially stated it was a waste of money chasing after Bin Laden.

The fact that the Obama camp rolled out Bill Clinton to make the attack shows how important a move it is. Only Clinton or another living ex-president can make the compelling argument about how lonely it is at the top.

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Indeed, Clinton quotes George W. Bush approvingly on his remark that the president is the “decider in chief."

Clinton raises the question about Romney is ready brilliantly in the ad.

He asks what the consequences for Obama would have been if he had not made the call or had got it wrong.

Actually, we all know. Jimmy Carter’s failed rescue attempt of the US hostages in Iran was the final nail in his race against Ronald Reagan.

By moving so quickly to blunt a usual GOP advantage, Obama has shown he will be ruthless and direct in this campaign.

It will be interesting to see Romney’s response.

Here is the ad:

Denis O’Brien, a billionaire with a mission not just to make money-- Irish businessman praised by Clinton, NY Times, seeks to make a difference

Denis O'Brien (Credit: Forbes)

The O’Reilly family’s stranglehold on most of Irish journalism is over and that can only be good.

I’m delighted that businessman Denis O’Brien, much admired here in America, is taking over effectively as the chief shareholder of Ireland’s largest newspaper group, Independent News and Media.

I know O’Brien and consider him as one of the great business talents to emerge from Ireland in the past half century.

He is a straight talker, and is one of the few who avoided the calamity of believing their own propaganda, that they walked on water, based on nothing more than a property bubble and a backslapping media.

I remember discussing the issue of the plight of the Irish undocumented with him a few years back and he cast his mind back to the time he lived in the US as a penniless student and the problems he encountered then.

He asked what he could do to help on the Irish undocumented and he has done so ever since.

He chaired the 2003 Special Olympics World Summer Games in Ireland. It was the first time the Summer Games were staged outside the US with teams from 160 countries and over 30,000 volunteers. The 2003 Summer Games were the most successful in the history of the Special Olympics.

He also remains very active in Concern where he serves on the board of the international charity.

Denis O’Brien will bring a very different set of values to the newspaper world in my opinion.

He is a creator not a destroyer, who has pumped tens of millions of his own funds into Haiti and other impoverished countries where his company Digicel does business.

As The New York Times recently reported, he built 50 new schools in Haiti since the massive earthquake and has plans for 80 more. He is not involved in such work just for the photo-op, a fact he made clear to the Times.

“It’s all about project management,” Mr. O’Brien (53) said in an interview at Digicel’s offices there.  “Everyone’s on hand for the photo op, but where are the 100 houses that were promised after the
cameras are gone? I’m the guy who’s going to count them.”

Bill Clinton is another person deeply appreciative of what O’Brien has done in Haiti

“What is striking is how deeply he has embedded his Haiti work into both his business and personal life,” Clinton told the New York Times.

“Because he cares so much, it’s easier for him to motivate and hold accountable other network members.”

Back home in Ireland, as he’s a big fish in a small pond, O’Brien causes controversy because he is outspoken and direct.

He first came to prominence when he acquired the second Irish cell phone license in controversial fashion. It was a time when a Wild West atmosphere prevailed in Ireland with unregulated political and financial dealing.

O’Brien saw his chance and he took it. He turned the license into a hugely successful venture, unlike those who ended up with Eircom, the main mobile license, and bankrupted it.

O’Brien sold ESAT Digicel for $3 billion and created thousands of jobs since. O’Brien has used his money wisely. He has exercised major philanthropy and injected funds into University College Dublin and other campuses.

Many crocodile tears are being shed this past week over the issue of media monopoly because he also owns radio stations.

Yet when Sir Anthony O’Reilly owned the Irish Independent, the Sunday Independent, the Sunday World, the Evening Herald, the Irish Daily Star, the Belfast Telegraph and Sunday Life, 13 local newspapers and also one of the largest newspaper and magazine distribution agencies, Newspread, and several of the largest print works on the island, those same critics hardly offered a bleat of criticism.

O’Brien has his critics and his drawbacks but he is a fundamentally decent man, trying to do good.

On that I’d bet my bottom dollar.

New questions about Father Michael Kelly's guilt or innocence -- Case seen as similar to story of priest accused in the movie "Doubt"

Father Michael Kelly

I had occasion to speak to a person from California who is a long time friend of  Father Michael Kelly, the California-based priest who flew to his native Ireland after losing a civil case against him on an abuse charge.

Yesterday we wrote that Kelly was found liable on the civil charge despite the fact that the accusations against him by a 37-year old man, a pilot for Southwest Airlines, were based on “recovered memories” a highly dubious method as recent history has shown in cases such as the McMartin preschool case.

The man alleged that Kelly abused him when he was a young altar boy back in the mid 1980s.

The person who knows Kelly for over twenty years says they believe that Kelly was likely innocent but they could not be absolutely certain.

The person told me that Father Michael Kelly is straight out of the John Shanley play and movie ‘Doubt’ where an unproven charge against a priest results in his removal from a parish.

“Father Flynn of that movie” the person said, “is exactly like Kelly. “There is suspicion but no outright proof and he has plausibly and extensively denied it.”

This is no open and shut case.  Kelly passed two lie detector tests, has hundreds of his former parishioners still siding with him and an extensive inquiry by the diocese of Stockton found him not guilty.

His flight to Ireland was not illegal. He is not under any prison sentence, he lost a civil case.

My informant also told me that the plaintiff’s attorney John C. Manly who is a specialist and who has won hundreds of millions against the church in such lawsuits, easily outsmarted the Kelly attorneys who were not in the same league. “They were no match for Manly” the person said.

There is said to be another case against him dating to 2002 but the fact that it has never been to court suggests it never will rise to the burden of proof needed to prosecute.

Parishioners still flocked to him and they turned out in large numbers for him despite the guilty verdict.
Kelly is left in a no man’s land, half priest half accused felon.

According to local reports he can no longer publicly perform priestly duties.

Kelly cannot invite people to participate in privately held events, but individuals can invite him.
Kelly did participate in a privately conducted Easter vigil at a rural Lodi-area residence.

Local Bishop Stephen Blaire is required to write a formal report to a Vatican body called the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith, which is responsible for dealing with clergy sexual abuse crises within the Catholic Church.

"They will advise me back what action they believe should be taken," Blaire told the Modesto Bee.
That could mean they defrock Kelly.

But the question will always remain--- is he innocent or guilty?

Martin O’Malley’s march towards the White House in 2016

Martin O'Malley (AP Photo / Patrick Semansky)

The man who may be the next president of the United States after either Barack Obama or Mitt Romney, was most recently belting up a storm of Irish music in the White House for the St Patrick’s Day celebration.

He claims he wasn’t measuring the drapes, but he was overawed by warming up in the East Room with all its historic connections

Martin O’Malley, 48, Maryland’s popular second term governor, had reformed his band, O’Malley’s March, for the special occasion.

Sitting over a pint of Guinness in Fitzpatrick’s in Midtown Manhattan this week, O’Malley told me how the White House gig had come about.

Because the White House celebration had to be moved past St. Patrick's Day this year, to Tuesday, March 20, the organizers suddenly found themselves without a band.

Hearing this, the Democratic governor of Maryland decided to lend a hand, or a guitar, and suddenly he was playing for 600 VIPs and the President.

If it was an audition for White House troubadour, O’Malley might not get the job. But the aim may be much higher.

When the talk turns to the presidential race in 2016, as inevitably it will when the November election is past, you can expect to hear a lot more about Martin O’Malley.

Already the buzz is out on the telegenic governor with the Kennedy-type looks and appeal and Irish roots in Mayo.
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On February 3 of this year, The New York Times rated O’Malley, now head of the Democratic Governors Association, in the top three of future Democratic presidential candidates along with Hillary Clinton and New York Governor Andrew Cuomo.

“Compared with his fellow governors, Mr. O’Malley may be a more natural progressive fighter,” The Times wrote. 

“A former Baltimore mayor, he could point to Maryland’s schools, among the best in the nation, and his willingness to fight for tax increases and cut other parts of government to finance education.”

Chris Cilliza’s influential column “The Fix” in The Washington Post rates O’Malley the number two contender after Cuomo for 2016.

It is heady stuff, but O’Malley is not buying it, at least not yet.

“Let’s see what they are saying by the end of this year, or the end of next year about where people stand,” he says. “Things can change awful fast in this business.”

O’Malley talks about the incredible fundraising that candidates for president have to undergo. By 2016 it may be a billion dollar pricetag to enter the race and run. 

“I remember when raising $30,000 to run for the State Senate was a huge task,” he laughs.

O’Malley also knows how fickle political winds can be.

As we spoke he was under pressure back home after the collapse of budget negotiations at the last moment. One columnist wrote that this happened because O’Malley was spending too much time on the national stage.

O’Malley laughs that criticism off. Latest polls show him in the low to mid fifties in approval ratings in his home state, a figure governors most anywhere would be envious of.

For the next six months O’Malley will be working night and day to elect Democratic governors and re-elect President Obama.

He says the race with Romney will be close, only likely to break Obama’s way in the last few weeks when people really focus on it.

Then it will be on to January, the inauguration of the next president and the beginning of the long march to 2016. My guess is O’Malley’s march will have only begun then.

My few hours meeting the amazing Warren Buffett -- I found oracle of Omaha a true and modest gentleman

Warren Buffett

News that Warren Buffett has prostate cancer comes as a shock.

I had two hours with Warren Buffettt back in 2008. I had been dispatched to Omaha to interview the oracle by his great friend Don Keough, former head of Coca Cola.

Don was writing his autobiography, ("Ten Commandments for Business Failure") which was later a New York Times bestseller, and he asked me to help with the introduction to the book from Buffett.

So off I went to Omaha and downtown to the utterly anonymous office building where Buffett works.

I had expected a significant security presence, but it was clear that while there was some, Buffett lived life on his own terms, which meant retaining his anonymity at a minimum of fuss.

Upstairs in his office suite it could have been any accountant’s office, nothing flashy or indicating the greatest financial genius of the age.

I was ushered in to the great man’s presence soon after.

What struck me right away were his modest manner and his incredibly clean desk. No teletypes chattering, no Bloomberg TV blaring, no stock market updates, just a telephone and Warren Buffett.

It made sense; he was never a creature of the markets, rather a man who analyzed in private with few distractions, unimpressed with the daily storm and drag of the markets.

Like all great interviewees, he had put aside the time for me and nothing else mattered for that period.
Because it was for his great friend, Don Keough, he had put aside two hours.

We sat, me on a couch, him on a chair, in his modest office and chatted as if we had all the time in the world.

He was quick, funny, and clearly loved the topic matter, Don Keough.

He reminisced about the old days in Omaha when he was a struggling stock picker and the man across the road, Don Keough, was just starting with Coca Cola.

He was lively, animated and curious, fun to be with.

A measure of Buffet’s modesty is that he still lives in that house across the road from the old Keough residence.

After two hours we were done and he could not have been more courteous or kind. I am sorry to hear that he has early prostate cancer and I’m sure he’ll beat it.

He is truly one of the good guys.
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Australia replaces real estate as the main topic of Irish conversation -- Land Down Under beckons for a new generation as economy fails

Sydney Opera House went green for St. Patrick's Day.

Dublin -  If you came to Ireland a few years back the topic of conversation inevitably turned to real estate, no matter whom you talked with.

Now that topic is Australia.

Nothing signifies the shift in Ireland’s fortunes more than the new reality that emigration to Australia in particular is on the minds of millions of Irish.

Everyone seems to know someone who has a family member who has emigrated there or is about too.

In a restaurant in Meath on Friday an overheard conversation went like this.

“Not gone yet Down Under?” addressed to a mid-twenties young man.
“No off next week, thanks be to God.”

And so it goes.

 The mining boom in Western Australia in particular has meant that the geography of cities like Perth are discussed as intimately as Cork or Dublin.

A few years back the topic was the number of houses someone owned, how much they had escalated in value, and the latest overseas hot place to buy a second home.

The place to be seen was the latest housing expo featuring properties in Spain, Turkey, or pick your spot in America, especially Florida.

Now tens of thousands line up for hours waiting to enter job fairs for Australia and Canada, which finishes a strong second.

Some of the stories emerging from those fairs are tough to read with families splitting up, people re-emigrating, and especially older intending migrants, their lives in ruins after the bust in Ireland, getting out.

In a local paper here, a vox pop asked a dozen people what they would do if they won the lottery. Three said they would visit Australia to reunite with their sons and daughters who had moved there.

When my nephew Rory recently passed away he was prayed for in Sydney and Melbourne at masses there because of extended family connections there.

It is all part of the new reality or should that be the old reality?

I have often written that emigration waves from Ireland come every thirty years, the 1920s, 1950s, 1980s, and now again.

What I never predicted was that Australia would be the fulcrum of the new exodus.

Neither Britain nor America seems the focus this time. The British economy is only marginally better than Irelands and visa laws make it difficult to access the US.

Australia and Canada, because of restrictive banking laws, are also the only two major industrialized countries that avoided the worst of the banking and real estate boom and bust. Both countries also have massive natural resources.

China’s demands for natural resources and raw materials has fueled the mining boom in Australia and the Irish in search of work have gladly settled there.

Centuries ago the worst fate was to be deported from Ireland to Van Diemen’s Land and forced to work at penal labor. Read Robert Hughes’ classic account ‘The Fatal Shore’ to see just how awful conditions were for the Irish who were sent there.

Now they are leaving on jetliners by the planeload. Sometimes plus ca change.

Phew! A near disaster is averted on Bettystown Beach-- car set to float away on the tide until my relatives arrive

Bettystown Beach (Credit: Paul Power)

So on Wednesday afternoon I took a walk on Bettystown beach in County Meath, a wondrous place from my childhood, just six miles from my hometown of Drogheda.

I invited one of my oldest friends, Eddie Holt along and he  said he’d meet me there.

The sun was high, the Irish Sea was clear blue and all was better with the world.

Until Eddie decided to drive along the beach to meet me halfway and walk from there.

He fearlessly drove past the “Warning soft sand do not drive any further” signs with gay abandon and was soon spinning his wheels helplessly about 20 feet from the water as high tide beckoned.

Walking back I was wondering who was the idiot with his car stuck when I realized it was Eddie.

So here we were. I am as useful as a eunuch in a brothel when it comes to cars and everything about them.
Eddie does know stuff, but after ten minutes of spinning the wheels and only digging deeper we decided we needed help.

My brother, Fergus, the member of the Irish parliament,  was summoned from nearby Drogheda.  He would surely know what and who to call. He didn’t really but he had a good laugh at us.

My other brother Michael’s father in law Dick Reilly who lived nearby was also summoned. He knew a local farmer with a tractor but he had forgotten his phone and had to go back to his house to get the number and call him.

Meanwhile the tide was now at ten feet from the car.

A local priest from Drogheda , Father Iggy, out for his daily constitutional, happened by. We asked if he could temporarily stop the waves advancing like King Canute tried but he quietly deferred. He would give us a push instead he said.

Others came by, some to gawk at the impending disaster. One man said he’d help but he’d just had an operation. Another said he was worried about a heart attack.

The tide was now at five feet from the car.

My brother helpful as always, picked the moment to  tell us the story of the fire engine from Drogheda that has literally been swallowed up near the same spot when it came to rescue a car that was floating away and had gotten too close to the water.

Dick Reilly came back and said the farmer was on his way. That cheered us up but we waited and waited.
At last someone useful showed up – a brother in law of Fergus, Gerry Cullen, a top-notch singer with the Voice Squad and a former schoolteacher.

Soon after yet another brother in law showed up. He’s a publican. It was like family reunion day on the beach

Gerry went back up the beach and asked the man with the first four-wheel drive car he met to come and save our sinking car.

The water was now at two feet away, lapping around our ankles. The car was an older Lexus, in perfect running order, bright red and lots of good honest miles on it. Would it meet a watery grave? Eddie was starting to get emotional about it.

The four-wheel drive man arrived, thanks to Gerry, backed up and took out his rope---God bless him, at last someone was in charge.

So we started to push, the parish priest, the publican, the politician, the returned yank the retired laboratory worker, the singer, and journalist (Eddie) and two strangers

We pushed and we panted and we pushed again and eventually the four-wheel drive pulled Eddie’s car clear. Not a moment too soon .

The car and our dignity were saved. The four-wheel drive man would not take a penny, the tractor and the farmer arrived too late but he would also not take a penny.

The priest blessed us all and hoofed it  and we stood on Bettystown beach as the rain began to fall and thanked the wonderful Irish and unbreakable family bonds.

God in a time of personal crisis –how does he measure up? What I learnt from a dark night of the soul amid pain and suffering

A man and woman praying

So is there an all-loving all-seeing God or is it a convenient invention to salve the soul?

I have had major reason to consider that question over the past few weeks as my 12-year-old nephew Rory Staunton cruelly lost his life to a toxic infection in a New York hospital.

In the intensive care unit I met two pastors, both doing their best to console a frightened and exhausted family desperately concerned for their little boy,

With one I ended up discussing the philosophy of Spinoza, the Dutch philosopher who believed that if there was a God he was abstract and uncaring.

When you see all the war, the killing the famine and suffering it is easy for many to agree with Spinoza.
We discussed the Sermon on the Mount, and the eight beatitudes, which are the most relevant part of the Christian theology in my experience.

Those are profound statements that truly do preach humility and compassion and revive faith in the New Testament.

Yet how has that love and mercy expressed itself?

There were two church services for Rory, one in Ireland, one in America where God’s mercy and grace were front and center.

I was assured by many that Rory had gone to a better place and that God had a plan for him.

At his funeral mass there were repeated references to a merciful God but it was hard to see the mercy in depriving my grieving sister and her husband of their beautiful son.

I acknowledge now more than ever, the importance of the ritual of the religion, especially in the wake of Rory’s death when I see the incredible comfort that the ceremonies  brought to his parents.

I saw God in the incredible caring of Father Tom from Mayo in the hospital room in New York in the way he told my little niece that her brother was gone, a truly saintly man.


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Rory Staunton, a beautiful boy, leaves this earth. The hardest column I will ever have to write
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But that is not the same as believing in God.

Despite the overwhelming desire to believe the answer is positive the question must remain unanswerable.
There is no evidence either way that is definitive or conclusive for me.

My awful encounter with death has if anything, increased my sense of how unknown the great questions of our existence remain.

I am comfortable with that. Great certainties held by people unnerve me anyway. All punishing, all powerful, all merciful deities of whatever religion make it too easy to avoid the really difficult question which is;

Who are we? Why are we here?

I’m afraid I have no idea.

The final farewell as my family say goodbye to Rory Staunton -- A sad leavetaking for grieving relatives amid sodden Irish skies

Rory Staunton

On a wet and grey Easter Monday amid slanting rain, my nephew Rory Staunton was finally committed to the Irish soil, buried beside his beloved grandmother in St. Peter’s graveyard in Drogheda, 30 miles from Dublin.

The dull thwack of the soil against the coffin after it was lowered signaled the final farewell for me to the 12-year-old boy who only a few weeks earlier was the joy and hope of his parents, New York based Ciaran and Orlaith Staunton, who is my sister. He was also the beloved big brother of his sister Kathleen.

Then, Rory contracted a deadly toxic bacteria after a slight cut during a basketball game and died in a New York hospital despite frantic efforts to save him.

I don't know what rough Gods insisted that it was time for Rory to be called home, but they surely were not merciful ones.

One look at my devastated sister and her husband and their daughter as the coffin was lowered for the final time would tell that instantly.

There is a finality to Irish burials that is not practiced in American burial rituals, where the coffin is usually  set aside until the bereaved depart.

In Ireland, the body is lowered as the parents and bereaved watch.
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It is no easy job. Pallbearers strain to balance the heavy coffin as it is lowered.

Rory’s pallbearers were slipping and sliding on the wet earth as the rain poured down, finally succeeding, and I thought of Emily Dickinson's poem, "I felt a funeral in my brain" as the surreal scene unfolded.

"And then I heard them lift a box
and creak across my soul"

In a nice touch, the first earth poured on Rory's coffin was from his beloved Tullaghbawn Beach near Westport County Mayo where Rory loved to play with his cousins on long summer days.

Earlier, in a tiny County Meath church where he was once a ring bearer for my niece’s wedding, Rory's funeral mass was attended by among others, Irish Prime Minister Enda Kenny and Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams, as well as Deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland Martin McGuinness.

It was a fitting tribute to the remarkable young boy, all three had met him and loved him, close family and political connections to both parties ensured that.

Ciaran, Rory's father, one last time eulogized his son and talked about the pain of dressing him for his final journey and the grief of a father forced to bury his only son.

In those few moments it seemed impossible for Rory to be gone, the bright wonderful boy whose picture adorned his coffin and who Ciaran brought back to life with such vivid words and memories.
But gone he is, his race run long before its time. He has left behind an indelible mark on me and mine.

Thank you to all who wrote such wonderful supportive letters and I know from letters and responses that this brave little boy has touched hundreds of other lives also.

May he rest in peace.

An Irish wake for Rory Staunton back home in Meath --- The families and friends gather for the timeless Irish ritual

The Irish wake for my nephew Rory Staunton began in the parlor of his Aunt Derval’s house among the rolling hills and farmland of County Meath.

Rory, aged 12, died at New York University Hospital a week ago from a toxic infection suffered after an elbow cut received at a basketball game.

The parlor is the room in the Irish house that is kept spotless, has all the best furniture and finery but nobody ever visits it except for occasions of great joy or in this case grief.

Derval, a nurse, had waked my mother and her own husband Paddy Hogan, a farmer there over the past ten years. She had been a tower of strength at the side of my sister Orlaith and her husband Ciaran when their son Rory passed away in New York.

Now it was, unbelievaby, 12-year old Rory’s body with the Irish and American flag and the flag of his beloved Mayo that lay in that same room in that same house in a beautiful corner of County Meath in this blessed time of spring when new life abounds.
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The long journey home begins for 12-year-old Rory Staunton -- Taking his final trip back home to his beloved Emerald Isle

12-Year-Old Rory Staunton’s life is celebrated in style at New York church Over 1,000 throng to say farewell to our laughing boy in Woodside, Queens

Rory Staunton, a beautiful boy, leaves this earth. The hardest column I will ever have to write
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The Staunton and O’Dowd families had flocked from all over Ireland and America and some locals had dropped in too.

The wake followed a very defined ritual, similar in Irish rural life all for generations. It is a blessed one, especially for the parents of Rory who can once again absorb the love and support.

The arrival of the little boy’s coffin from the Aer Lingus flight from New York was accompanied with dread, floods of tears, and a sadness so profound that the gloom seemed impermeable.

As the priest said the brief prayers, the sounds of tears and desperate sadness filled the room.

Then, after the priest departed and the individual visitations to the coffin were completed  the stories began and Rory’s life began to reassert itself.

From the Staunton side we heard about the little boy’s annual travels to Mayo every year and the life and the times he witnessed there.

Rory always spoke of his best friend forever, Donal, the son of Ciaran’s brother, and the two young boys are roughly the same age. I’d never met Donal but if there is an Irish version of Rory it is him, inquisitive, warm, friendly and now clealry heartbroken.

Then the memories of Rory on this very farm were brought on, the kid Yank home from America who seemed to move so naturally through the rhythms of Irish rural life. Once he was found on top of bales of hay stacked so high no one could quite figure out how he climbed up there.

His fascination with Paddy Hogan’s pet sheep who followed Paddy around like an obedient dog, after being house-raised was also recalled.

It was time for the little girls to pay their own tribute. His sister Kathleen and my daughter Alana prepared their last little play and concert for Rory, which they performed behind closed doors for their beloved Ro Ro.

I’m glad I didn’t witness it as it would have been too much.

The wake went on late into the life. Farming life was one constant topic, as two rural families united in grief for a young boy but also in celebration of an extraordinary life. In the midst was Danielle, Derval’s daughter, nine months pregnant and ready to start the cycle of life anew in the never-ending battle

The funeral mass and burial now lies ahead before Rory can rest forever in his beloved Ireland. Our hearts are broken but the extraordinary love for Rory in Ireland and America is solace indeed.

The long journey home begins for 12-year-old Rory Staunton -- Taking his final trip back home to his beloved Emerald Isle

Beloved Rory Staunton

Rory Staunton, age 12 when he passed away, was always a little Irishman. He died in a New York hospital last weekend of a freak toxic infection.

Though born in Manhattan and a resident of Queens from an early age, he brought out his brightest colors where Ireland was concerned.

One of my first images of my nephew is as a four year old proudly flying the Irish tricolor in his house shortly before his family headed off to Ireland for the summer.

When there, he had a great friend in his cousin Donal in Westport County, Mayo. The two would be out and about all day, racing on the nearby beach, planning and plotting the games little boys play.

His father remembers a night when a gaggle of cousins and Rory decided to camp out all night. The longer the night went, the more the kids began to abandon it as things went bump in the night and temperatures dropped. Rory was the last to survive, brave as usual.

The rest of the time his mother and father, Ciaran and Orlaith, stayed in my sister Triona’s holiday home in West Kerry, hard by the Brandon mountain, wild and scenic and utterly isolated and where generations of the O’Dowds hailed from.
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READ MORE:

12-Year-Old Rory Staunton’s life is celebrated in style at New York church

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Rory Staunton, a beautiful boy, leaves this earth. The hardest column I will ever have to write
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Rory loved it there and I walked the roads with him several times showing where his grandfather’s farm was and where 14 kids were raised on a patch of land that would “scarcely bathe a star” as Yeats remarked.

He loved to hang out in the pubs there, listen to the fishermen tell their tall tales, race down to the piers to see the boats come in and measure up the catch.

Padraig, his relative there, marked Rory out early as an Irish lad.

“That fellow is not American at all,” he’d say, looking at the flaming red head, so clearly at home among the locals.

“Yerrah, he’s one of ours,” he’d say.

He was indeed one of theirs and now he is home among them though not the way any of us could ever have imagined.

Aer Lingus Flight 104 took off from New York last night with Rory’s little body on board. There was never a question but that he would go back to his people.

The airline could not have been more accommodating and helpful to us family members heading back on our long journey home with Rory.

We arrived in Dublin on a cold but clear spring morning into the embrace of the loving tribe. Family had come from all over to bear him home.

Over the next two days before he finally rests beside his nana in an Irish graveyard, the Irish tribes he springs from, the Stauntons from Mayo to the O’Dowds from Kerry and Louth, will embrace him back into their bosom now.

Their laughing American Irish boy is home.

12-Year-Old Rory Staunton’s life is celebrated in style at New York church Over 1,000 throng to say farewell to our laughing boy in Woodside, Queens

Beloved Rory Staunton

Periscope: Rory Staunton, a beautiful boy, leaves this earth. The hardest column I will ever have to write

My 12-year-old nephew Rory Staunton’s brief life was celebrated in St.Mary’s in Queens, New York yesterday and over 1,200 showed up forcing an outdoor viewing link to be set up.

Rory died in a New York hospital on Sunday last after a toxic bacteria entered his body through an elbow cut received at a basketball game when he fell.

The huge crowd was an extraordinary acknowledgement of the impact of Rory. I saw grown men and women weep.

Many had to turn away from Rory’s parents, my sister Orlaith and brother in law Ciaran, distraught at their sorrow.

Friends I have not seen in decades showed, all bearing witness to the immutable fact that when a child dies a community rallies to the stricken family.

And stricken we are.

Getting up yesterday morning was a painful act, I would have given lots of money to be 1,000 miles away, preferably on an island.

My beloved Rory was dead and a day of sorrow with no peace or joy beckoned.

Yet by the end of it, it was uplifting to feel the love of an Irish community so obviously ready to stand by a family in grief. The rituals of the church, too, on such occasions, have a wonderfully calming effect, providing continuity and sense of perspective.

St.Mary’s was built in 1860, generations of Irish came and prayed, married, and were buried out of that same church. Rory Staunton was just the latest.

My brother in law Ciaran Staunton took the bravest step, eulogizing his own son. He stood before the packed congregation and described the kid he called his “pal,” never his son, who went everywhere with him and was an “unindicted co conspirator” in a number of escapades, most notably when the famously balding Ciaran got Rory to demand of a confused local barber where was the wig his father had ordered weeks before.

But he also talked about the Sunnyside community Rory grew up and prospered in. It really is a slice of new New York where Irish/Jewish and all religious types mix readily.

Rory attended bar mitzvahs, and his Jewish friends helped trim the Christmas tree. The place is an anti-Semites nightmare.
Ciaran described how Rory had prospered at the local non-denominational school, had received an education that showed him windows on the world, and most recently,Ciaran had found a letter to the North Korean government in which Rory had demanded that they explain their hideous policies.

How Ciaran pulled it off I don’t know. He has been so overcome with grief that I feared that he wouldn’t even make it to the church door.

I spoke about the love Ciaran and Orlaith had for each other which sustained them even during their dark night of the soul.

I spoke about my sister and Rory and the little love notes he left her around the house and the chats they had about college and his next big move in life.

I spoke about Kathleen, already missing her big brother and her hero and how brave she has been.

Now it is on to Ireland and the long journey home for Rory who will be buried with his beloved grandmother in Drogheda on Easter Monday.

For Ciaran and Orlaith it will be the last leg of a nightmare week that will be seared in their hearts forever.

I hope Ireland and family there will work its magic, as if often does, and ease their pain.

A tribute to Rory created by his classmates:

When darkness comes and illness strikes a child; My flood of letters from families who live in great pain

Periscope: Rory Staunton, a beautiful boy, leaves this earth. The hardest column I will ever have to write

I have been overwhelmed by e mails and letters about Rory Staunton, my 12-year-old nephew who tragically passed from a toxic bacterial infection in New York on April 1st.

Many of the letters are from families who underwent such heartrending events themselves.

They are all heartfelt and profound and fill me full of admiration for the honesty and rawness they proclaim and how they offer advice on how to cope.

They describe their own struggle to cope, some describe their haunted sense that if they had done something differently it would not have ended up in the death of their child.

They are wrong to blame themselves of course, but as one person wrote, "the future was stolen from us, all our hopes and dreams."

Several close friends relayed family tragedies to me that I never knew about.

One described the death of a sister, another, a niece killed on her 16th birthday, another whose son's child died and the distraught mother later committed suicide.

I feel like I have been introduced to something hiding in plain sight, the tragic losses at the hearts of so many families who bear the burden so silently and heroically in many cases.

Since Rory died I have been enveloped in a new reality that will change me for ever.

Watching him pass away was the worst weekend and event of my life.

What was looking like  a totally humdrum New York weekend was shattered by a knock on my door at 5.a.m and an urgent call to rush to the hospital.

I had known earlier in the week that Rory was running a temperature and frankly, had not thought much about it. These things happen to kids all the time.

I literally  took a step back and felt my legs go weak when Greg, the boyfriend of my niece, informed me how sick he suddenly was.

I had to close the door on him to pull myself together, I had to stop my heart racing frantically.

My wife Debbie was equally unbelieving. This wasn't really happening was it? Our Rory at death's door?

From then on unreality took over. The visit to the hospital and the intensive care unit, the increasingly grim prognosis as the virus did its deadly work, the desperate efforts to save him.

I know now it is a scene that was repeated for so many over the years, among those who wrote to me. It is one I will never wish even on my greatest enemy.

I thank those readers  for starting a conversation and for making me understand what had never been so clear before.

When death came like a thief in the night and takes a child nothing will ever be the same again.

A tribute to Rory created by his classmates:

Rory Staunton, a beautiful boy, leaves this earth. The hardest column I will ever have to write

Beloved Rory Staunton

Periscope: When darkness comes and illness strikes a child; My flood of letters from families who live in great pain

This is the toughest column I will ever write and the one I least expected to.

On Sunday night in a New York hospital my beautiful 12-year-old nephew Rory Staunton passed from this earth.

Rory wasn’t just my nephew, he was the son I never had, the precious possession of my sister Orlaith and her husband Ciaran Staunton along with their daughter Kathleen.

Orlaith was the one that followed me to America. I introduced her and Ciaran on an Irish weekend in the Catskills back in the 1990s. Soon they were pledged to each other and they have had a wonderful marriage and family.

From earliest times, Rory was a laughing little boy, an impish toddler always ready for fun, especially when his sister Kathleen and her sidekick,my daughter Alana, were involved.

In later years, he was also strangely mature for his age, taking part in adult conversations while other kids played childhood games.

I tried to steal Rory away often; a Notre Dame game, a weekend at our house, whenever the opportunity presented itself. I revelled in this big laughing Irishman, with the "Simpsons" and "Family Guy" obsession, the absurd sense of humor and the serious political side of him who studied American politics with the intensity of a professional.

JFK was his hero he told me, because of his idealism. Rory too wanted to make a difference, to help the less well off. For one so young he already had a highly developed social conscience.

He had already been to the White House and had met President Obama and Michelle on St.Patrick’s Day in 2011. Not surprisingly, given his parents and their keen interest in all things political, Rory was fast becoming a political expert.

Rory charmed the pants off whoever met him. The girls were already showing interest, but Rory was a busy guy. He had taken flying lessons at 11, leaving his parents with their hearts in their mouths as he flew fearlessly into the wild blue yonder with his instructor.

Ireland was his spiritual home. On vacations back in his Dad’s Mayo or his Mom’s Kerry and Louth he fell in with the locals and a gaggle of cousins, discussed Mayo’s continued Gaelic Football failures with the best of them and came back to New York as attuned to Ireland and its rhythms as any local.

He was about to spread his wings, and Georgetown University and its politics degree were on his radar. Rory was opening up, emerging from a chrysalis, ready for the beckoning world, to take flight.

Then on Sunday we lost him. Four days earlier he had received an elbow scrape after falling while playing basketball, which had somehow allowed a toxic bacteria into his system. Two days later he was hospitalized, fighting for his life, a battle he ultimately lost.

There is an air of unreality even as I write this. My beautiful red-headed, five-foot nine-inch tall nephew has departed, leaving an utterly broken family and circle of friends that stretches from New York to Ireland to many other points behind.

It was the worst weekend of my life as I watched the beloved boy battle vainly against the host of toxins that were attacking him.

Despite the best efforts of outstanding doctors and nurses in the Intensive Care Unit , the darling boy did not survive.

He is gone now into the wild blue yonder where he used to travel as a pilot in the making.

Soar high Rory, and keep watch on us down below. We love you and miss you so much. Some day with a blue sky above and a fair wind behind, and our hearts full, our dreams will come true and we will meet our beautiful boy again.

Until then, slan go foill a chuisle mo chroi.