An Irishman's Diary

SURELY FATE WAS having a private joke at Ireland’s expense when it arranged that the name of our de facto national stadium should commemorate a famously corrupt politician.

Not that it does, officially. As we all know, Croke Park was named after an archbishop, reflecting the ideals of the State’s founding fathers. But its familiar title, acquired over time and now used affectionately by all who frequent it, is “Croker”. And that’s when it becomes a wry comment, accidental or otherwise.

The Richard Croker it does not formally commemorate was born and died in Ireland. Most of his intervening life happened in New York, which he ran like a feudal fiefdom for many years, without ever holding public office himself. The island of Ireland was peripheral to his career, in fact.

And yet even before he ended up having GAA headquarters named after him, his life was full of Irish historical portent. He was born just before the Famine, emigrating in 1846 with his impoverished family. He returned rich, just in time for independence. And he died in 1922, in the newly founded Free State, with Arthur Griffith among his pall-bearers.

As Ireland descended into Civil War subsequently, so did Croker’s family. Outraged (and disinherited) by his second marriage, to a Cherokee princess 40 years his junior, they challenged the will, unsuccessfully. And in a poignant posthumous footnote on the life of a man who vainly craved establishment acceptance – especially in England – Croker’s Glencairn estate became the Irish residence of British ambassadors.

The New York Tammany Hall organisation that he rose to control was not all bad. It started as a kind-of political debating club, with Democratic leanings, taking its name from an American Indian and organising itself around other native terms, such as “wigwam” and “chief”.

By the 1850s, when poor Irish emigrants flooded the city, it operated an unofficial social welfare programme, dispensing food and coal. The recipients became deeply loyal in return: and as long as they remained poor, all that was asked of them was votes: through which Tammany grew ever more powerful.

Politics was a robust activity then, with street gangs playing a key role. A New York alderman commented: “Show me a boy that hustles for the organisation on election day, and I’ll show you a comin’ statesman.” A skilled boxer, the future “Boss” Croker marked himself as a statesman early, rising to lead the Fourth Avenue Tunnel Gang while still in his teens.

By his second election, he was such a committed democrat that he personally voted 19 times for the approved candidate. But hustling was not always so easy. As a result of events on election day 1874, Croker was charged with the fatal shooting of a man called McKenna. He was cleared, but only just, when the jury split down the middle.

He kept a lower profile for a while under the Tammany chieftainship of John Kelly, a man who defined the organisation’s particular morality. There was a difference, Kelly said, between “honest graft” – a fee for political services rendered – and “dishonest graft”: outright stealing from the public purse.

A further refinement of this view held that an honest man was one who, once bought, stayed bought. And there was plenty of buying in late 19th-century New York. By the time Croker became Tammany chief, the fee for a judgeship – for example – ranged between $10,000 and $25,000.

There was a fixed price-scale for police jobs: $300 for a patrolman; $1,600 for a sergeant; with captaincies starting at $10,000. A policeman who raised the $15,000 for one of the more lucrative precincts was quoted by the New York Sun as saying that his days of eating “chuck steak” were over: “and now I’m going to get a little of the tenderloin.” At his peak of his power, Croker could have transformed New York. But it didn’t occur to him that he should, and the voters didn’t seem to think of it either. The concept of politics as an instrument of social change hadn’t caught on yet.

As a later commentator wrote: “The big-city machine had only one goal – the perpetuation of its own power. It developed a bureaucracy second only to that of the Catholic Church; it controlled the city for the better part of a century, winning elections and dispensing patronage, but in the end it left behind no more than Ozymandias. Its leaders had no vision [. . .]; no works of theirs remain.” Forced out of New York eventually, Croker spent his later years keeping racehorses and trying to reinvent himself as a country squire, initially in England, later Dublin.

With Orby in 1907, he owned the “the first Catholic horse to win the Epsom Derby”: although the description is questionable, since Orby’s father was English, his mother was American, and Croker was Protestant. In any case, King Edward VII neglected to invite Croker to the post-Derby dinner: the ultimate establishment snub.

Croker didn’t live to see Irish political leaders called “Chief”, or “Taoiseach” as we say here. And he didn’t live to hear the headquarters of the GAA named after him either. But he would surely have been flattered. No greater tribute could be paid to a politician and sportsman, who despite long exile, must have retained an innate understanding of his country’s two great national games: the clash of the ash and the nod and the wink.