A stranger in both cultures

BIOGRAPHY:Niall O'Dowd's journalism established him as a political player but it was his experience of emigration that shaped his life, writes ANTHONY GLAVIN

An Irish VoiceBy Niall O'Dowd The O'Brien Press, 288pp, €14.99

WHILE YOU shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, sometimes you get a clue – as with the lines of praise from Bill Clinton on New York publisher Niall O’Dowd’s memoir, An Irish Voice. Yet political junkies who dive straight into the latter half of the book for its remarkable insider’s story of the Northern peace process risk missing an affecting emigrant’s tale that sets the stage for the riveting political reportage that follows.

Son of a Co Kerry old-style Republican, Irish language enthusiast and school teacher father and a Co Clare mother, O’Dowd taught for a year in inner-city Dublin before heading to Chicago in 1978. Landing in America, he saw his first gun on a policeman, and later remarks on the struggle to distinguish between America and the endless movie reels inside his head.

The first six months in Chicago were not easy; the weak Windy City hurling club that paid his way out couldn’t provide an apartment or cushy job as the stronger clubs often did, and his J-1 visa was due to expire four months on, an experience which would inform his advocacy in the decades to come on behalf of the undocumented Irish in America.

Still, he got by with the help of kind strangers, including the large Kerryman who shunted his own wife onto their sofa in order to share his bed with O’Dowd, and a Polish-American, aspiring actress, girlfriend, whose voice coach he became as she rehearsed her lines from Synge’s Riders to the Sea.

The story gains further traction as he tells of how his father died shortly after he left Chicago for San Francisco that summer – a loss prefigured by a memorable encounter on his flight over with a fellow expatriate, a young Irish priest, who cried as he told of his own father’s tears at his departure the previous night.

In San Francisco he found work through his new hurling team, and in 1979 started his first newspaper, The Irishman, which he helped keep afloat by double-jobbing as a house painter over the next six years, a work ethic he would later bring to bear on the protracted Irish peace process. As a journalist he crossed paths with murderer Charles Manson, Mexican-American labour activist Cesar Chavez, and for the first time, Senator Ted Kennedy, for whom the bearded, long-haired O’Dowd donned a thrift-shop suit purchased the day before.

In 1985 he moved to New York to start up Irish America Magazine, and two years later the Irish Voice newspaper, which targeted the thousands of 1980s younger Irish economic migrants, providing a forum for the plight of the undocumented Irish, and helping pave the way for the Morrison and Donnelly visa reforms.

O’Dowd speaks as candidly as any American throughout: of the drinking he finally gave up in 1992, and of having left the Catholic Church after a brutal assault by a Christian Brother – part of that Irish “separate self which remained when you came over”, and which contributed to the severe depression that he battled with shortly after moving to New York.

Irish America Magazine established O’Dowd as a political player, on whom the Clinton campaign came calling in search of the ethnic Irish-American vote in 1992. Yet O’Dowd was often more impressed by various US businessmen and women, often philanthropic Republicans, who struck him as more grounded and pragmatic than many politicians, “who spent an inordinate amount of time wondering what the next move was and how you might help them get there.”

Two cases in point might be the Irish-American IBM executive, Jim Reilly, who drew a diagram for him on a paper napkin of how a direct link between the US and Sinn Féin might provide an “outside the box” approach to the political deadlock in the North, and the threat to the fledgling peace process as described by O’Dowd when Boston mayor Ray Flynn – initially part of the “A-Team” of Irish Americans O’Dowd had assembled along with himself, insurance executive Bill Flynn, philanthropist billionaire Chuck Feeney and former congressman Bruce Morrison – bailed out a week before the group’s first scheduled trip to Ireland in May 1993.

Much of what O’Dowd, a tireless, pragmatic, non-ideologue, details of his engagement with Sinn Féin and the IRA, and the pas de trois that played out between the US, Sinn Féin, and an outraged British government reads like a political thriller, with O’Dowd serving as a direct conduit between the White House and Adams as Clinton inched towards breaking the US/UK “special relationship” on the North by granting Gerry Adams a US visa in January 1994.

There’s no gainsaying, either, the critical part the August 1994 IRA ceasefire, which followed upon Adams’ visit, played in the subsequent peace process, nor O’Dowd’s hands-on role in helping to deliver it.

“An immigrant is a stranger in both cultures,” observes O’Dowd, which perhaps explains his own misreading in 2002 of Ireland’s fears of a possible US war on Iraq as knee-jerk anti-Americanism.

Yet the optimistic inclusiveness he encountered in his adopted land is precisely what he and his small band of can-do Irish Americans took with them north of the Border, with inestimable results. Only after his father’s death, O’Dowd writes, had he realised how much of his motivation for emigrating had been “to show him how I could make something of myself”.

Doubly expatriated by his death, he did just that – and more. His father would be hugely proud of him, and so should be all of us.

Boston-born Anthony Glavin is the author of the novel Nighthawk Alley