Will Notre Dame play Navy in Dublin again in November 2016?

Will Notre Dame play Navy in Dublin once again?

The announcement that Notre Dame and Boston College will play their 2015 game in Fenway Park has ruined hopes that the game would end up in Ireland.

It is known that talks between the sides and Irish backers had been underway but obviously no agreement had been reached.

The Fenway Park location was a master stroke anyway, clearly knocking Ireland out of the box.

Now the question arises if it will be another opponent that plays the Irish in Dublin as there is clearly enormous goodwill for such a game.

If you study the 2015 and 2016 schedules just released there is only one game that has no confirmed location.

That is the Navy home game on November 5th 2016 which at the moment has no announced venue.

Obviously, as a Navy home game they get to decide and could play it anywhere in the world for that matter.

But Navy too had a tremendously positive reaction to their Dublin game last year and may be anxious to come again.

There is certainly a large base of support from Irish government on down for such a game. The incredible sight of 35,000 Americans in Ireland for the last game was a massive tourist boost.

Irish-based billionaire businessman and philanthropist Martin Naughton a Notre Dame director. played a huge role in the success of the last game and seems keen to help again.

With a bit of luck the Fighting Irish will be back in their home from home in relatively short order.

Vice President Biden's Christmas party imparts a warm Christmas glow

Peggy Egan, Vice President Biden, Debbie McGoldrick, Alana O’Dowd, Niall O’Dowd and Dr. Jill Biden at the vice president’s holiday party.

The White House is known to everyone, but the vice president’s residence far less so. It was a real thrill to go there with my family last Friday as guest of Vice President Joe Biden for a Christmas party.

We had been at the White House the previous evening for a wonderful press party thrown by the Obamas, and had the opportunity to meet them in a receiving line. As a Christmas location, the beautifully decorated White House is impossible to match.

That is … unless you are going to the vice president’s digs the following night. The residence is nestled amid the compound at the U.S. Naval Observatory site in North West Washington where scientists study data from space.

When night stirs on the seas the observatory comes alive and the telescopes come out.

The Vice President's residence glows with Christmas warmth. 

The house itself was originally intended for the superintendent of the observatory, but it was so lovely that in 1923, the chief of naval operations kicked out the superintendent so he could move in himself.

Historically, vice presidents and their families lived in their own homes, but the cost of securing these private residences grew substantially over the years. Finally, in 1974, Congress agreed to refurbish the house at the Naval Observatory as an official home for the vice president.

I’m glad they did.

It is a beautiful Victorian residence that mixes warmth, charm and history in equal measure. It is far smaller than the White House but exudes a lived-in feel that contrasts with the often museum-like feel of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

A portrait of John F. Kennedy hangs over the fireplace.

In that respect it is a perfect home for Biden and his wife Jill. He has that lived in feel himself and suffered many slings and arrows in his long political life, none more so than when his first wife and infant daughter were killed in a dreadful car crash.

That would have finished lesser men but not Joe Biden.

That he recovered, served decades in the Senate and is now vice president of the United States with a shot at the big job in 2016 says volumes about the man.

He’s 71, looks 60 and acts like a man who can’t believe that a kid from Scranton, Pennsylvania has made it so far in the world.

There is a genuine modesty and interest in others about Biden that is usually knocked out of politicians at his level.

The Biden family's Christmas tree.

On several occasions during the evening he grabbed cell phones and called relatives of attendees, in the process giving people like my wife’s aunt, Nora Murphy, who is 87 and from Co. Kerry, one of the most pleasant shocks of her life when he called to say hello.

Biden has been exceedingly loyal to Obama, even when it was reported that replacing him with Hillary Clinton on the 2016 ticket had been discussed.

He is very much in Clinton’s shadow for 2016 as Democrats consider a further historic step in nominating the first woman after the first African American presidential candidate.

But Clinton looked a similar shoo-in in 2008 and fell to Obama, and there are some in Washington who see Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren as a viable candidate from the left, like Obama became.

In such a scenario Biden could very well figure. A long-shot yes, but he’s been a long-shot all his life and he sits a heartbeat from the presidency. Stranger things have happened.

Why Albert Reynolds was the greatest Irish leader of my lifetime

Former Taoiseach Albert Reynolds. 

Albert Reynolds was the greatest Irish leader of my lifetime.

The news that he is in the later stages of Alzheimer’s is profoundly upsetting. He is a man who will walk in history. Though he only served from 1992 to 1994 he turned peace in Northern Ireland from an impossible dream to a startling reality.

He oversaw good economic times, but it was his decision to take what many deemed a reckless gamble and confront the massive issue of the Northern troubles that really sets him apart.

A pragmatic businessman who came to politics later in life, he saw an opportunity where career politicians had refused to take the risk.

Sure they all talked the talk, but always within safe parameters prefacing everything with simple platitudes about stopping the violence and never doing too much about it.

Then came Albert, the”country and western” politician from rural Ireland, an accidental politician in many ways, and a hugely successful businessman. He was widely derided as a country bumpkin but he was clever as a fox.

On his first day in office he said Northern Ireland peace was his priority and the jaded press corps duly yawned and went back to sleep. There was clearly zero expectation he would deliver.

But Reynolds meant what he said and he was never going to allow platitudes to form his policy.

He knew there was a shift within the Republican movement towards an unarmed strategy and he wanted to give that space to grow.

He knew that the new British leader John Major had no bloody hands on the issue like Thatcher and could be engaged.

He knew the U.S. had just elected a new president Bill Clinton who had drawn major support from Irish Americans for his promises on peace in Ireland and an American role.

He was fearless in pursuit of all three strategies. I knew he was a different kind of politician on one of my early meetings with him as part of an Irish American peace delegation which featured businessmen Chuck Feeney, Bill Flynn, former congressman Bruce Morrison, Labor leader Joe Jameson and myself.

Albert threw all his advisors out of the room and engaged us straight on his daring policy switch. He drilled us on Clinton, who we were persuading to give a visa to Gerry Adams. He made it clear he was a man of direct words and action and that he had reached the conclusion the IRA wanted to stand down. His job was to make that possible. I doubt if there was another politician in Ireland who shared his optimism.

The Downing Street Declaration in 1993 was his crowning moment, when the British at last acknowledged they needed to be neutral towards Irish unity and partners, not imperial powers.

With such daring moves he gave the key players a space in which hope could grow. He backed the Adams visa, backed the Irish American outreach, kept the Brits neutral and held secret talks with IRA figures.

The country and western politician instead was a high wire political  artist, who, amazingly kept his balance.

We met him again shortly before the IRA ceasefire which changed everything in August 1994. Again he threw the advisors out and gave us a message to deliver, that only an all-out ceasefire would do. When it came it was just that.

On the day of the ceasefire we met in the RTE studio in Donnybrook in Dublin. He bounded into the room and almost crushed my hand with his handshake. I was witnessing a politician on the greatest day of his career. He took many plaudits that day from all over the world and deserved every one of them.

Amazingly, a few months later he was out of power after a bizarre series of events involving his Attorney General  who failed to prosecute a notorious pedophile priest.

Albert never saw it coming. As he sagely remarked it was the little hurdle that tripped him up, not his incredible and dangerous work on the peace process.

I last saw him on a wonderful day in Stormont when Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness announced the power-sharing government in 2007 and I had the pleasure of introducing him again to Senator Edward Kennedy who had flown over for the day. They warmly embraced, two great men who made peace possible.

Teddy is now gone and the night draws in for Albert, but he was a bright shining star in the peace process, the most difficult of all political tasks an Irish leader has tackled. Imagine how much worse off the Irish would be if in the midst of the current economic slump the mayhem in the North was still continuing. The country owes him a debt of gratitude.

May his remaining days be bright and filled with the love of the exceptional family he and his wife Kathleen raised.

Claims that Irish lobby is racist to seek visas for their own undocumented

Jennifer Nugent Duffy, associate professor at Western Connecticut State University (Photo: NY Times)

The most racist, anti-Irish book I’ve read in a long time crossed my desk today.

No, it wasn’t some Celt-hating citizen of Britain who wrote it. Rather, it was an “associate” college professor, Jennifer Nugent Duffy, the Yonkers-born daughter of Irish immigrants who still run a prominent bar there called Nugent’s. I won’t be paying a visit anytime soon. 

I should have known by the name of the book, perhaps, and “Who’s Your Paddy” as a title gives the plot away. It is a blatant attempt to demonize and denigrate the Irish in Yonkers where she grew up.

Nugent Duffy is especially scathing about Irish efforts to win immigration reform. The Irish Lobby for Immigration Reform, she says, has adopted a “race-conscious and racist lobbying agenda.”

The basis of Nugent Duffy’s book is that she divides the Irish into “Good Paddies” and “Bad Paddies” (racist in itself), but really finds there is little difference between them.

The Good Paddies pretend to be upstanding Americans, but most become Bad Paddies and spew hate the first chance they get.

This monstrosity will be published in time for Christmas by New York University Press, surprising given that university’s stellar tradition in Irish Studies. Did they ever hear of proper editors?

Nugent Duffy is associate professor of history at Western Connecticut State University. 

Her world-view is that of a self-hating Irish Catholic woman, and everyone she encounters must fit the stereotype.

Even her own parents do not escape the name-calling and are called “White Flighters,” people, she explains, who endorsed a white-only racial mix and fled mixed neighborhoods.

Slamming your own parents? This is truly a monumental steaming pile of horse dung of a book.
Are there racists in Yonkers? Of course.

Are there racists in every community in America? Of course.

To demonize and conclude that all are racist is something else entirely.

Such nuances completely escape this colleen on a kamikaze mission against her own kind.

Coming in the week when that same Yonkers community turned out in its thousands to help the stricken Gill family, who lost their daughter in an horrific car accident, it is a dreadful indictment of a beleaguered community from one of their own.

No mention either of the great work of the Aisling Center which organizes food runs for the homeless of whatever color every week.

Because of Nugent Duffy’s local ties, she secured numerous interviews with local Irish. I’m sure many will deeply regret the access given as they are presented in the worst possible light in order to confirm her own prejudices.

Even though she uses pseudonyms, it is obvious to me who many of them are.

She even has “informants” who she sends to various events to report back to her with the worst news they can gather.

ILIR meeting

Mostly that is about Irish having drinks or carousing after events for the Irish Lobby for Immigration Reform (ILIR), of which I am a founder.  That’s when she says the “Bad Irish Paddy” slips out.

Nugent Duffy had one informer go to a fundraiser for ILIR, which was a variation on a popular bachelor dating game. She reports in horror that “all the bachelors were loaded.” Some also used bad words!

“What if members of Congress saw this?” the book exclaims.

What indeed! Heavens to Betsy.

She castigates another ILIR fundraiser, a “Cultchie (sic) of the Year” fundraiser – a harmless event celebrating rural Ireland at which everyone, almost all from rural parts of the country, has a good time.

But they had way too much fun for associate professor Nugent Duffy, who accuses them of “mocking a rural stereotype.” She just can’t help her political correctness.

But wait, there’s more. The esteemed professor gravely accuses the band Cray and Dempsey of changing words to a song they sang at ILIR rallies. The original lines are “We’re Irish and we’re rocking. All we wanna do is rock and roll.”

Allegedly their crime is that they changed the words on a raucous weekend night in a Yonkers bar to “We’re Irish and we’re rocking and all we wanna do is f*** and drink.”

This dreadful slight on the professor’s tender ears takes a full page in her book and is used as evidence of Bad Paddyism.

There are even bars in Yonkers who are serving underage drinkers she claims, and one was even closed down for a while. Coming from a bar owner’s daughter that is some comment to make.

On the way back from an ILIR rally in Washington, the professor is disgusted to see some “Bad Paddies” light up and smoke.

“Then,” she writes, “the Bad Irish Paddy could be kept hidden on this day, but only for so long.”

Jesus wept.

Senator Charles Schumer and ILIR President Ciaran Staunton

It also appears we are not allowed to lobby for our undocumented the way so many other groups lobby for theirs – and if we do we are racists for doing so.

Were the Australians racists when they got a special visa deal? How about the Mexicans when they got one? The Polish when they sought one?

But the book contains no mention of those groups. Just the racist ILIR.

The president of ILIR is my brother-in-law, Ciaran Staunton, and I often joke with him about the amount of time he spends lobbying with other groups, liaising with ethnic lobbies from across the country.

If she had bothered interviewing him instead of using secret little informers she might have learned a lot more in her research.

He and other leaders in ILIR such as Bart Murphy in San Francisco and Billy Lawless in Chicago have reached out across this country to build grassroots links with other ethnic groups to bring about immigration reform.

Billy Lawless (left) attending an immigrant rights meeting

None of this permeates the dull blade of a brain of Miss Prim and Proper, but it surely should have impacted some editor to ask some pertinent questions about where the associate professor’s racist taunts came from – or has political correctness run amok in our colleges altogether?

Apparently a whole clutch of academics helped Nugent Duffy write her garbage. They too, especially those from NYU, should be listed in this Hall of Shame.

The writer gives a special shout out to her Irish family and friends, so let’s give them a rip roaring acknowledgement too.

Let’s hear it for Seamus, Nora, Jimmy and Sean Nugent, the Boyles and Boylettes and the Dundalk Duffys – not forgetting her partner Niall Duffy.

Folks, be proud. Gypo Nolan has nothing on your girl.

Inside the beautiful White House on a cold Christmas evening (PHOTOS)

A perfect gingerbread White House

PHOTOS: Inside the White House media Christmas Party

White House: A visit to the White House is always to be treasured, but at Christmas time it becomes truly special.

My wife Debbie and I were invited on White House press night when the media gathers to meet the president.

Waiting in line to meet President Obama and First Lady Michelle is a little like waiting for communion.

We shuffle forward slowly until suddenly there we are in a small room with the President and First Lady and the marine guard announcing the next guest.

It all seems a little surreal as Obama shakes our hands, indulges in polite conversation for a minute or two about his Irish trip and hope for immigration reform and then we pose with him and Michelle.

You can never say enough about the magic of the White House at Christmas; it is truly the most magnificent venue in the world to observe the festivities.

It makes you incredibly proud of this country as your stroll the halls Lincoln walked, the rooms the Kennedy family gathered in, the East Room where Reagan spoke on so many occasions.

Now it is the realm of the Obamas, but the history of the place overwhelms any single president.

It is a rare highlight and my wife and I enjoyed it as a great occasion. Here are some pictures we took inside the sanctum on Christmas 2013.

Enjoy!

PHOTOS: Inside the White House media Christmas Party

 

Mario Cuomo and Mike Dowling dazzle at Irish America lunch

Michael Dowling and Mario Cuoma at the Irish America Business 100

If there is a better orator in America than former New York Governor Mario Cuomo I have yet to hear him or her.

And if there is a more extraordinary story of success after tough beginnings among Irish emigrants than Michael Dowling, president and CEO of the huge North Shore-LIJ health system, I have yet to read it.

Put the two together, throw in dynamic new Irish Ambassador to the U.S. Anne Anderson and music legend Judy Collins and you have the recipe for a marvelous afternoon, which is just what we had last week at the Irish America magazine Business 100 luncheon at the Metropolitan Club in New York which honored Dowling this year.

Cuomo may be over 80 now, but the resonant voice, the ability to empathize, the extraordinary insight into the mindset of the emigrants to America’s shore is still unparalleled.

I first heard him speak in 1984 at the Democratic Convention in San Francisco. I was a raw, wet behind the ears young immigrant myself at the time.

Cuomo’s speech about his parents, who came to America, uneducated, lost their first child and scraped a living for years to care for their family was widely considered the best ever speech on the topic. It bowled me over.

This is the segment about his father. “I watched a small man with thick calluses on both hands work 15 and 16 hours a day. I saw him once literally bleed from the bottoms of his feet, a man who came here uneducated, alone, unable to speak the language, who taught me all I needed to know about faith and hard work by the simple eloquence of his example. I learned about our kind of democracy from my father. …“

It is a democracy that elected not only the son of those penniless immigrant parents to the highest office in New York State, but their grandson too, current governor Andrew Cuomo.

I think it still is an incredible speech, and Cuomo has not lost his fastball all these years later as he gave a magnificent tribute to Dowling, the Knocaderry, Co. Limerick native who was Cuomo’s health commissioner and social services commissioner for 12 years during his terms in office.

Cuomo called on Dowling to be the national spokesman on health for this administration, no easy task given how badly they screwed up over Obamacare.  It would take a man of Dowling’s genius to rescue them now.

For his part Dowling’s poor Limerick background puts Frank McCourt in the ha’penny place. He grew up on a tiny farm, his father died young and his mother was deaf.

From age 15 or so he was the breadwinner, working jobs in Britain and eventually here where he grabbed the American dream with both hands, worked and studied incredibly long hours and ended up a professor of social policy at Fordham University.

Along the way he encountered Cuomo, who hired him despite the lack of Harvard degrees or fancy background. Dowling was, by all accounts, the best health commissioner and also social services commissioner in decades.

Nowadays Dowling runs North Shore-LIJ, the third largest hospital chain in the U.S. with 46,000 employees. But he has never forgotten his humble immigrant roots. He spends as much time with the janitor as the doctors, he says proudly, and can often learn more from them than the highly paid professionals.

Anderson added to the occasion as a bright new face of Ireland in America, an accomplished woman who has put teeth into the Irish contribution to the immigration reform debate.

Also adding to the atmosphere was a wonderful off-the-cuff performance by music legend Judy Collins who sang a new Irish ballad she recently composed. Look for her PBS Special from Dromoland Castle around March 17 for a wonderful evening.

All in all an afternoon to remember.

Recalling Irish America’s greatest moment: President Clinton’s first visit to Belfast

President Bill and First Lady Hillary Clinton arrive in Belfast in 1995. 

It was 18 years ago this week when I stood among the 200,000 people crammed into the center of Belfast waiting for President Bill Clinton to appear for the city’s Christmas tree lighting.

While we waited Van Morrison warmed us up on a cold and frosty afternoon with the song “There Will Be Days Like This.”

With perfect hindsight I can say Van was wrong. There will never be another day like that one.

On the chairs beside me sat Martin McGuinness, Gerry Adams and Joe Cahill, the leadership of the Irish Republican movement. Not far from me sat David Ervine, Gary McMichael and Gusty Spence, heads of the Loyalist movement.

Once they had been trying to kill each other. Now they were making moves for peace thanks in large part to the work of the Irish American president.

Up until that day the notion of an American president in Belfast was fanciful in the extreme, yet here Clinton was. I’ll always remember Martin McGuinness especially, and the disbelief and joy in his eyes that this day had finally dawned.

If there is ever a day that will stand out in history, this was it. Indeed, it was the greatest day of my journalism career and in some ways my worst, but more on that later.

I was reminded of the day this week by an excellent article by James Carroll in the Boston Globe remembering the occasion and what the message of the first American president ever to visit Northern Ireland meant to the multitudes. Interestingly, as Carroll noted, Clinton reached back to the American Civil War.

“I grew up in the American South,” Clinton said. “My forebears were soldiers in the Confederate Army . . . They lived the experience so many of you have lived.”
And then Clinton recalled the first post-Civil War Arkansas governor, who had fought for the Union.

“We have all done wrong,” Clinton said, quoting a speech an earlier Arkansas governor gave to his constituents, who had been split between the two sides.

“No one can say his heart is altogether clean, his hands altogether pure. Thus, as we wish to be forgiven, let us forgive those who have sinned against us and ours.” Then Clinton drew the lesson: “That was the beginning of American reconciliation, and it must be the beginning of Northern Ireland’s reconciliation.”

Maureen Dowd of The New York Times later wrote that she never saw Clinton happier than that day when he stepped out onto the stage before Belfast City Hall and thousands chanted his name. (Though in the Belfast accent, hilariously, it sounded more like “Bull, Bull” than “Bill, Bill.”)

“In Ireland Mr. Clinton discovered the joys of being a foreign policy president,” Dowd wrote.

And Ireland discovered the incredible potential when American soft power – no troops, no drones – is brought to bear on a world problem.

Earlier that day former Congressman Bruce Morrison and I had had a very different kind of meeting with senior Republican members who warned us all was not well, and that British refusal to act on the IRA ceasefire in August 1994 had produced incredible strains within the movement. It was a chilling moment in an otherwise remarkable day.

So it proved a few months later when the Canary Wharf bombs signaled the end of the first ceasefire.

Though he gets major praise, I have always questioned then-British Prime Minister John Major’s handling of the initial IRA ceasefire, believing if he had grabbed it instead of seeking to exploit it, the end of the war would have come much sooner and there would never have been a ceasefire breakdown.

But it was all won back, again with much help from Americans and the incredible determination of men like Gerry Adams and Martin McGuiness and then George Mitchell who came in to stamp his indelible imprint on the peace talks.

It all seems long ago and far away now, but life for many Irish reached a zenith that December day in Belfast in 1995. America had at last stepped in to the Irish/British conflict, and peace for the first time had a chance.

I’m just glad to have had the chance to witness history in the making.