“The Music of the Irish” has been hosted by Fordham students on WFUV (90.7 FM), the University’s public media station, since the mid-1970s. And next year, the show’s community of listeners and hosts will celebrate its 50th anniversary with a series of events, including a concert at Symphony Space in Manhattan on January 20. Cillian Vallely and Kevin Crawford of the band Lúnasa, Patrick Mangan and Alan Murray, Séamus Egan of Solas, and Celtic Cross are among the artists expected to perform.

The Voice of Irish New York

Ceol na nGael’s origin story is renowned at WFUV, where the show airs live every Sunday from noon to 4 p.m. In January 1974, Fordham students Gerry Murphy, FCRH ’76, and Mary Maguire, FCRH ’77, proposed a traditional Irish music segment during one of WFUV’s fundraisers. They knew the music would be popular among New York’s Irish expat community, but the result astonished them.

“We were totally unprepared for how the phones exploded during the first program,” Maguire recalled. “The pledges—and the checks—poured in.”

One scheduled hour of Irish tunes quickly grew into four. When Maguire had to leave the studio to go to her waitressing job, listeners called the restaurant to complain. Such was Ceol na nGael’s impact from the very start.

Over the past 50 years, the show has grown to be so much bigger than a short fundraising segment, even bigger than Fordham itself. It has become, quite literally, the community voice of Irish New York. Tuning in to Ceol na nGael on Sundays is what many hosts and listeners describe as a ritual. Frank McCaughey, FCRH ’02, GSE ’08, who hosted the show from 1999 to 2002, called it a “permanent fixture in our lives.” And former host Marie Hickey-Brennan, FCRH ’83, lovingly recalled how her grandmother, born in County Monaghan, Ireland, forbid anyone in the house from speaking during each broadcast so she could hear every note, every word.

A Loyal Fanbase

Today, Ceol na nGael represents the Irish parish writ large across New York City and the tristate area, providing the intimate familiarity of parochial Ireland to more than 30,000 listeners each week. The broadcasts also reach fans across the Atlantic who tune in to the livestream to connect with the Irish community in New York. One of the show’s distinguishing characteristics is its interaction with listeners. Many of the songs played on air are requested by people who call in, and who get to know the hosts personally.

When asked about their favorite memories of the show’s first five decades, former hosts praised Ceol na nGael’s loyal fanbase. Kevin Quinn, FCRH ’09, marveled at the show’s non-Irish listeners: “It’s just a testament to the program and, of course, the appeal of the ceol.” Kerri Inman (née Gallagher), FCRH ’11, laughed about an interaction with an Irish fan who told her she pronounced her own surname incorrectly. Patrick Breen, FCRH ’22, had arguably the most challenging hosting career, recording the show at home at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. But the listeners “never failed to provide us with the support and love we needed,” he said.

Cultural Ambassadors and Media Professionals

From the beginning, Ceol na nGael has been a notably transformative experience for its student hosts, molding them into young media professionals and ambassadors for Irish culture. I can speak to this from personal experience. Hosting the show from 2009 to 2012 defined my education at Fordham, sending me to Trinity College Dublin for a graduate degree and to my current career as a professor of Irish studies at Boston College. What I do in the classroom and in my scholarship is an extension of what I did in the studio every Sunday: reclaiming Irish creativity and history.

Many other hosts went on to build careers shaped by their time at WFUV, including broadcast journalist Patti Ann Browne, FCRH ’87, who was an anchor at MSNBC and Fox News; Mary Snow, FCRH ’85, who worked at CNN; Deirdre McGuinness, FCRH ’04, who went into professional fundraising; and Kathleen Biggins, FCRH ’87, GSE ’91, who hosts WFUV’s traditional Celtic music show, A Thousand Welcomes, from 8 to 11 on Sunday mornings.

‘Something So Much Bigger Than Myself’

Ceol na nGael has also been part of historically significant moments for the Irish diaspora. Deirdre McGuinness recalled broadcasting the show mere days after 9/11, for example, using Irish ballads to bring the community together through “hope and healing,” she said. And in the early ’90s, Eileen Byrne Richards, FCRH ’93, interviewed young people from Northern Ireland who participated in Project Children‘s summer program, spending time in the U.S. as a reprieve from the Troubles, the violent sectarian conflict between unionists and nationalists. The experience left an indelible impression: “I felt like I was part of something so much bigger than myself, and that still has an impact on me,” she said, expressing a sentiment echoed by all Ceol na nGael hosts, no matter when they stepped to the mic.

For centuries, folk music has been colonial Ireland’s language of endurance, ever present historical artifact, and compass back home. No one knows this better than Ceol na nGael‘s 40-plus hosts, including current Fordham students Allie Small and Matt Cuzzi. The show regularly airs ballads like “The Fields of Athenry” and “The Town I Loved So Well,” earmarking the history of colonial struggle from which so many Americans are descended. And it has always found the balance in Irish music’s paradoxical duality, between its lament of injustice and its jubilant expression.

As the upcoming 50-year celebration brings to the fore, Ceol na nGael isn’t just entertainment, it is a living, continuously up-to-date archive of Irish cultural resilience. You can join the celebration at the 50th anniversary concert on January 20, 2024, at Symphony Space in Manhattan. Learn more and purchase your tickets at the Symphony Space website.

—Colleen Taylor, Ph.D., FCRH ’12, a professor of Irish studies at Boston College, hosted Ceol na nGael from 2009 to 2012. She is the author of the book Irish Materialisms: The Nonhuman and the Making of Colonial Ireland, 1690-1830, which is scheduled for publication by Oxford University Press in March 2024.

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Finding Ireland Outside of Its Myths: Personal Notes on the New York-Irish Connection

WFUV’s Ceol na nGael Celebrates 40 Years

Gaelic football traces its roots to the 1600s. It involves a round ball that can be caught, kicked, and hand-passed, as players aim to score points or a goal by kicking or punching the ball over the crossbar or kicking it under the crossbar and into the net.

Fordham has a rich history of ties to Ireland; its founder Archbishop John Hughes was born in County Tyrone, and the University has educated many Irish immigrants and sons and daughters of immigrants since its founding. The University is also home to the first Irish Studies program in the U.S., and boasts many prominent Irish alumni. Joseph McShane, S.J., president of Fordham, often speaks about his Irish Catholic heritage.

Fordham’s Gaelic Society started the Gaelic football team this year, and players said that the sport has helped them feel connected to Irish culture and history, as well as the Fordham Irish community.

The Gaelic Society is just one of more than 220 student clubs and organizations at Fordham, which include everything from United Student Government to Jazz Collective, Fordham Experimental Theater, and the Investment Banking Club.

Learn more about the Gaelic football team at Fordham.

In this video, she dances her way across campus, from Keating Hall to the University Church to Jack Coffey Field, in two types of shoes. She narrates her lifelong journey in step dancing and how she found her “family” at Fordham. This summer, Flynn plans on flying to Dublin to audition for Riverdance, a touring theatrical show that travels across the world. 

“I’m Irish, and my entire family is, too, so I always grew up with the music,” Flynn said. “Just the violins and the flute … and feeling the heat of the lights on stage … being in that moment and doing something that’s a little different than any other kinds of dance, that feeling in particular is what I love so much about it.”

“Universities are challenged in an urgent way by the questions that are now posed, questions that are after all existential, that are of the survival of the biosphere, of deepening inequality, of a return to the language of hate, war, and fear, and the very use of such science and technology yet again for warfare rather than in serving humanity,” he said.

The Sept. 30 lecture was part of the Ireland at Fordham Humanitarian Lecture Series, a partnership between the Permanent Mission of Ireland to the United Nations and Fordham’s Institute of International Humanitarian Affairs. (Watch the full lecture here.)

Higgins, a poet and former professor, said the Irish lost at least one million lives to starvation during the Great Potato Famine and saw more than 2.5 million emigrate. Therefore, the nation holds a collective memory that resonates with today’s crisis.

“We have known what it is to be hungry,” he said in his lecture, “Humanitarianism and the Public Intellectual in Times of Crisis.”

He noted that the Irish famine was editorialized in some newspapers as “an act of God.” The difference today, he said, is that the constant drumbeat of the news cycle desensitizes the listener.

“[Today,] we’ve become accustomed to narratives of how men and women throughout the world as refugees find themselves, through extended periods of time in unsuitable accommodation, confined to forced idleness, without even control over their daily diet,” he said.

Eugene Quinn, director of the Jesuit Refugee Service in Ireland, he noted, has said that children grow up “without the memory of their parents cooking a family meal.”

He lamented that millions of refugees spend years stranded in semipermanent camps around the world, while world leaders discuss the “internationalism and interdependency” of international trade.

“In fact [the conversation]nearly always begins with trade. This has devalued everything, really, in relation to intellectual life, and it has devalued diplomacy very seriously.”

He said that people’s loss of citizenship is so much more than a loss of a homeland. The rights of displaced humans become distinct from the rights of “the citizen.” Without citizenship, refugees lose their inalienable rights as a person, as well as their voice, he said, referencing Arendt.

“To be stripped of citizenship is to be stripped of words, to fall to a state of utter vulnerability with avenues of participation closed off, and thus new futures disallowed,” he said.

Given their past, he said that it falls to the Irish, at home and abroad, to be exemplary to those seeking shelter, especially since it is a crisis that will continue, fostered by climate change and exacerbated by precarious political situations.

“This is a deepening, if you like, of what I call the intersecting crisis of ecology, economy, and society,” he said.

But unlike the welcome that many European refugees received in the wake of World War II, today’s refugees have been shunned.

“The relatively small number of refugees reaching our borders [in the West]  has brought forth the type of narrative about ‘the other’ that we in the humanitarian tradition had hoped was assigned to the chronicles of the past,” he said.

“Countries whose citizens have often benefited from international asylum and migratory flows are reneging on their commitments with the aim of discouraging or inhibiting refugees from seeking the international protection to which they are entitled.”

It is here, he said, that public intellectuals and universities must play a crucial role to alter a discourse “soured by hateful rhetoric.” However, he added that today’s charged atmosphere has not made it easier for the academy to exert influence, with some in the community seduced by corporate power, and others complacent with current economic models as the only way forward, he said.

He asked what is being taught in Economics 101 in North America, and questioned how much of it was game theory and how much was real political economy, to say nothing of the coursework’s moral content. He worried that an emphasis on funding beyond the state has had a disjointed effect on the career structure of young scholars.

“I believe public intellectuals have an ethical obligation as an educated elite to take a stand against the increasingly aggressive orthodoxies and discourse of the marketplace that have permeated all aspects of life, including within academia,” he said.

Edward Said said it best when he stated that an intellectual’s mission in life is to advance human freedom and knowledge, he said.

“This mission often means standing outside of society and its institutions and actively disturbing the status quo. Yet it also involves placing a strong emphasis on intellectual rigor and ideas, while ensuring that governing authorities and international intermediary organizations are well-resourced. To quote Immanuel Kant, ‘Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.’”

“I was told that my great-grandfather cobbled the shoes of the Jesuits there,” says Quinn, who earned a master’s degree in Irish history at Fordham in 1975.

Four years later, he left academia to become a speechwriter for New York governors—first for Hugh Carey until 1982, and then for Mario Cuomo. Quinn was a key contributor to several of Cuomo’s most memorable speeches, including his July 1984 keynote address at the Democratic National Convention—widely regarded as one of the most powerful of the past four decades.

Quinn left the governor’s office in 1985 to become the chief speechwriter for Time Warner—a transition he made while working on Banished Children of Eve: A Novel of Civil War New York, which won a 1995 American Book Award.

He followed that with a collection of essays, Looking for Jimmy: A Search for Irish America (2007), and a series of historical novels—Hour of the Cat (2005), The Man Who Never Returned (2010), and Dry Bones (2013)—all featuring private detective Fintan Dunne.

Quinn and his wife, Kathleen, have two adult children, both of whom are Fordham graduates. He recently met with FORDHAM magazine to discuss his family history, his writing, and more.

How much did you know about your ancestors when you were growing up? Did your parents talk much about them?
No. I mean, I heard anecdotes and I always knew I was Irish—our Catholicism was our Irishness. But I think my parents’ generation felt, “We’re moving into America. That is the past. There’s no need to have it beyond St. Patrick’s Day.” You’re very proud of being Irish, but the particulars of it were not of interest. I think in my parents’ case, and their parents’, they pushed their children ahead, you know, and made sure that they went to college. I only knew one grandparent, and they never talked about Ireland. Never. And I think they loved cities—you know, the whole Irish farming experience hadn’t been too great.

Your great-grandfather Michael Manning, how much do you know about what brought him to America?
It was the famine that would have brought him. He would have been one of the 2 million Irish who left in 10 years.

When did you really delve into that history and learn more about what the immigrant experience must’ve been like for him?
Well, that’s how I wound up writing a novel. I was studying for a Ph.D. in Irish history with Maurice O’Connell at Fordham. Then I left the academic world to go into politics, and I used to go to the state library to research speeches. I found this housing report for 1855 that was like a description of Dickensian London. I recognized that this is where my great-grandparents lived, and I had never heard anything about it. So then I began to look into that, the conditions in New York in the 1840s and ’50s. It had an infant mortality rate like the third world. It didn’t have a sewer system. So I realized, in a sense, why they didn’t tell us all this growing up. What was the use in knowing that?

Do you think there is a tendency to romanticize the immigrant experience generations later, and do you see a danger in that?
Oh, yeah, it’s a human tendency. It becomes part of a sentimental path rather than a reliving of the brutal reality that so many people go through.

And I think the danger is that you can lose sympathy with people in poverty and difficult circumstances now, thinking, “We were more noble the way we did it.” You forget the people who didn’t survive, who were victims of a lack of opportunity, poverty. We tidy it up. I always say America loves immigrants, but they have to be here two or three generations before anybody loves them.

People lose sight of the kind of labels and stereotypes that have been attached to new immigrant groups. The Irish, their disease was cholera. People thought they carried it with them. It came from tainted water, but people didn’t want to live around the Irish because they thought it was their disease, and they were judged to be mentally inferior to Anglo-Saxons. It’s like IQ tests, when they were first used at Ellis Island: They felt that Italians and Jews would bring down the national IQ. So you just see these things, and I don’t know how you cure it.

I think if you’re Irish and if you understand your history, if it doesn’t leave you with sympathy for the underdog, I don’t know what would.

You’ve written—both in Banished Children of Eve and in Looking for Jimmy—about the pivotal role Archbishop John Hughes, Fordham’s founder, played in galvanizing “the Irish-American process of reorganization” in the mid-19th century. How would you sum up his contributions?
I always say he was as much an Irish chieftain as a Catholic churchman. He’s the stem of the whole flower, the central figure, or however you want to describe it. He was here when a million Irish came out of Ireland from the famine, essentially skill-less, impoverished, and he was the mainspring of their reorganization. I always say that the Irish experience in America was about reorganizing. They were a mob when they came here. They had no financial resources. They had no education. They had no skills.

The engines of reorganization were the Catholic Church, the Democratic Party (which called itself the “Organization”), and the labor movement. The thing was to know the community was there, and it held together. Things cohered.

How did you go from grad school at Fordham to political speechwriting?
I wrote an article for America magazine in 1979 called “An American Irish St. Patrick’s Day.” I submitted it because, I didn’t know it at the time, but I was fascinated by this Irish-American experience that seemed to me to be going away without having been examined. We never looked at ourselves. Now we were moving to the suburbs. We were losing that thing I was talking about; the coherent thing was falling apart. But where was the record of it? Supposedly the Irish are great writers, but I couldn’t find any novels about the Irish-American experience. One, Elizabeth Cullinan, she wrote a beautiful novel, House of Gold, about the Bronx parish that I grew up in. But I remember everybody was horrified that she wrote it. She was putting out the family laundry. My mother was like, “How could she do that?”

So I wrote the article about this, and a Fordham alumnus read it and gave it to [New York Governor] Hugh Carey, who knew my father and was looking for a speechwriter. Out of the blue, they asked me to write the Fordham Law School commencement speech for him. I’d never written a speech. But I was looking for a job, and I didn’t want to be underemployed, so I wrote the speech. They really liked it and eventually offered me a job. I said I’ll do it for a year and then go back to academics. That was almost 40 years ago.

What did you learn from your experience in Albany?
To work in politics behind the scenes, you learn so much about the dynamics of human interrelationships, how much is based on personal relationships. Merit and hard work are no match for it. You know what was the great motto of the Albany machine? Honesty is no substitute for experience.

At what point did an academic career recede in your rearview mirror?
It receded when I got my second raise. I was making about twice what I’d been making. And then I got married. My wife is from the Bronx. We knew each other 14 years before we got married. That’s what’s known in the west of Ireland as a “whirlwind courtship.” She had moved to Albany for graduate school. She was a rehabilitation counselor. We reunited and got married. Finishing the doctorate would have been taking a big step backward. And some part of me always wanted to be a writer. It was an ambition.

Tell me about the genesis of Banished Children of Eve. I understand you initially thought you were going to write a history of the Irish in New York. Is that right?
I was an ex-academic. I still have a big interest in history. I used to send away for remaindered books. As I began to think about the experience of the famine Irish coming into New York, I realized there was really no central history written of it, this big event. I got one book on the Draft Riots, The Armies of the Streets [by Adrian Cook]. This historian did what no historian had done before. He went down and got the records from the morgue. They used to say a thousand people died in the riots. He could identify a hundred and something people. One of the names was Peter Quinn. My Quinn ancestors weren’t here yet. They didn’t come until 1870, but I was like, “Whoa, who is he?”

The personalization of history struck me. There were no diaries, no records. Nobody wrote. There’s not a scrap of paper in my family of anybody’s experience. So I wanted to write a history, but I began to realize the voices I wanted were not recorded. Then I found out that this songwriter, Stephen Foster, was in New York at the time of the Draft Riots. I went down—I think he committed suicide in the New England Hotel on the Bowery, and I stood in front of it. Every novelist is part psychotic; we hear voices. And standing there, I kind of felt I knew who he was. I had never written fiction, not a lick of it. But I said the only way I reach those voices is in novels.

How conscious were you of the fact that as a novelist you were drawing from your work experiences—for example, from the time you worked as a court officer in the Bronx?
At some points I was, absolutely. Dealing with a city, I felt like it was in extremis [as it was during the Civil War]. Being in the South Bronx in the ’70s in a uniform and sitting in a courtroom with 150 people and saying, “Well, you know, these people look poor and strange to me. And this is what my ancestors looked like to the people who were wearing the uniforms at that time.”

I figured it wasn’t just an Irish story I was telling at that point because once you stepped off those boats, you’re no longer Irish. You’re still Irish, but you’re becoming something else. And part of that experience is you have to interact with people you never had to interact with before. You might hate them. But you have to live with them, and some part of you is going to rub off on each other. That dynamic hasn’t changed.

Since 2005, you’ve published a trilogy of historical-mystery novels featuring the Irish-American detective Fintan Dunne. Do you see those books as part of a continuum that began with Banished Children of Eve?
Yes, Fintan Dunne is a descendant of Jimmy Dunne [in Banished Children of Eve], but I don’t know how. He’s a cousin somehow. The idea was that they would be three books that would stand alone, but in a way tell the history of New York from the First World War to the Cold War. And the thread would be this Irish-Catholic guy, Fintan Dunne.

I love Raymond Chandler. I always felt his character Philip Marlowe, he’s really Irish American with his hard-edged blend of cynicism and idealism, and he belongs in New York. So that was the inspiration for Fintan Dunne. I knew people that lived in that New York, and the thing about New York is, you never have to look for a story to tell. It’s right there in front of you.

How do you go about conducting research for your novels? When do you know enough’s enough?
I love doing research. Every writer wants excuses not to write, and research is the best excuse to have because you’re still working on the book. What I would try to do is immerse myself to the point where I would feel that I have some sense of that world. Then I would start to write, and if I had to look for other pieces, I would.

When I was researching Banished Children, my wife and daughter were away for the summer at Shelter Island. I would go out on weekends, but every night after work, I’d go to the newspaper division of the New York Public Library. I read all of the newspapers from the Civil War. I remember sitting there, and the air conditioner wasn’t working. It was August. I said, well, now I’ll read all of Harper’s Weekly. Then I realized I can either write this or research it for the rest of my life because the research is quicksand; it’s so interesting.

Did it get harder to stop researching for the Fintan Dunne books because it’s just so much easier to find things these days?
Oh, yeah, it’s unbelievable. I used to keep a list at my desk. I’d write down things to look up. Then at lunch hour—I was working at the Time-Life building—I’d run to the library. Now you just go online. It’s so much easier but not as much fun. It was so much more like detective work before. You were like Fintan Dunne. You were a gumshoe tracking stuff down.

What does it mean to you to be an American of Irish ancestry born in New York? What kind of cultural inheritance do those three things imply?
My father once said to me that the legacy of being Irish is having a sense of humor and rooting for the underdog. And if you’re going to live in New York City, those are two necessary things!

And I think the great thing about being Irish and Catholic in New York is you don’t have to be. Everybody can choose what they want to be. It’s not an identity imposed on you. Tomorrow, I could be an American Buddhist. To me, that makes it so much more valuable, you know, that freedom to be what you want to be that New York confers, I think, as much or more than any place in the world. I can be this. Then I can admit other people’s rights to their choices.

You’ve talked about storytelling as a noble occupation, something that unites us all. Would you elaborate on that?
You grow up, and you think there are serious jobs—accountant, lawyer, business CEO—and then you realize, the most important thing human beings have, the thing that makes us human, are stories. The first thing we did after we sat around campfires was to tell each other stories. It is essentially what it is to be human.

In every human society, one of the most important persons has been the storyteller, the seanachie in Irish. Before the Bible was written, it was spoken. Every religion is organized around a story. Every nation is organized around a story. Every family has its own myth.

Now I think there are bad stories. There are stories that are written or told badly, and then there are stories that are bad, like eugenics. That was a bad story. It was essentially a story that was used against other people to commit mass murder. Stories are very powerful.

One of the things I learned in writing speeches was that a good speech is a good story. And [Ronald] Reagan, one of his powers as president was, he had a story. He had the story of the frontiersman and the lone pioneer. One of the reasons why Cuomo is remembered is he had a story too—family, mom and pop. That’s what people listen to.

Do you ever itch to be back where you were—
To be young with hair? Sure, everybody does.

I mean, as a political speechwriter, having the opportunity to help tell a story in that way?
No. I’m really glad I did it. It was a defining experience. It helped me be a writer in ways I can’t describe. But I would never, ever want to do it again. For five minutes, I wouldn’t want to do it again. And I do think you have to be young to do it. It’s physically taxing. And it’s an exercise in anonymity.

Next month, you’ll be participating in a Fordham conference on “The Future of the Catholic Literary Imagination.” How would you define that term, and do you think of yourself as a Catholic writer?
When I’m writing, I never think about being Catholic. It’s just who I am. I’m not advancing any dogmas.

I have an essay in Looking for Jimmy where I said there are three elements to the Catholic imagination: sin, grace, and mercy. I wrote that years ago, and Pope Francis, the word he uses all the time now is mercy. We don’t want justice. We want justice for other people. We want mercy for ourselves. In politics, there’s not much mercy. It’s always been an in-demand commodity in the world, and it always will be, because it’s such a leap. Mercy is not deserved. It’s freely given, and there’s no rationale for it.

Interview conducted, edited, and condensed by Ryan Stellabotte.

Watch Peter Quinn’s New York, a five-minute video in which Quinn talks about his noir-tinged Fintan Dunne series and the city as muse. “For me,” he begins, “New York City isn’t so much a setting as it is a character. It destroys some people, elevates others. But one thing New York won’t do is leave you alone. It’s always changing.”

Members of the University community gathered at St. Patrick’s Cathedral—the final resting place of that founder, Archbishop John Hughes, the first Catholic archbishop of New York—for a Mass that formally launched Fordham’s 175^th anniversary year, or Dodransbicentennial.

With the founding of Fordham, first known as St. John’s College, “the great story of Catholic higher education in the Northeast began,” said Joseph M. McShane, SJ, president of Fordham, who celebrated the Mass. “The cathedral is one of the other gifts that John Hughes gave to the church, the city, and the country, and it is fitting therefore that we gather here, near his tomb, to celebrate what he did for us.”

The anniversary year will feature special events, exhibits, and programs that highlight Fordham’s history and impact. Also celebrated will be the 100^th anniversary of three Fordham graduate schools—the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, the Graduate School of Education, and the Graduate School of Social Service—and the 170^th anniversary of Fordham becoming a Jesuit institution of higher learning.

“In this year, as we celebrate our storied past, we will also focus on the promise of our next 175 years,” said Maura Mast, PhD, dean of Fordham College at Rose Hill, in remarks following the service. “Our story is the story of generations of students, educators, and alumni who believed in the power of a Fordham education to transform lives, and who gave heart and voice to our guiding principle, wisdom and learning in the service of others.”

Fordham’s Origin

The Fordham story began with Archbishop Hughes’ dream of helping immigrants and Irish Catholics who faced poverty and prejudice in both Ireland and America, as Msgr. Thomas J. Shelley, GSAS ’66, explained in his homily at the Mass.

“He considered education the indispensable means for the members of his immigrant flock to break loose from the cycle of poverty that ensnared them, and to take part in what today we would call the American dream,” said Msgr. Shelley, professor emeritus of theology and author of Fordham, A History of the Jesuit University of New York: 1841-2003 (Fordham University Press, 2016).

He described Archbishop Hughes’ “begging” in New York and Europe to pay for the college’s original 106 acres and for the building renovations that were needed. The struggles continued after the college opened its doors on June 24, 1841, at Rose Hill Manor, in what was then Westchester County. The diocesan clergy members running the college were repeatedly called away, and the college had four presidents in five years before the Society of Jesus took over in 1846.

Archbishop Hughes also had to face down the prejudices of his time. In 1844, he showed his “tough and feisty” side when he told the nativist mayor of New York City that he would turn the city into “a second Moscow”—destroyed by Russians during Napoleon’s 1812 invasion—if a nativist mob attacked the city’s Catholic community (as it had recently attacked Philadelphia’s). The nativists backed down.

After the homily, Father McShane noted that Archbishop Hughes distributed muskets to area Catholic churches and schools for protection. Two sat in the Fordham president’s office for many years until one president gave them to a friend, he said.

Honoring Archbishop Hughes’ Message

Msgr. Shelley also cited Archbishop Hughes’ words: “‘I have always preached that every denomination, Jews, Christians, Catholics, Protestants—of every shade and sex—were all entitled to entire freedom of conscience’” without hindrance. The words, Msgr. Shelley said, were effectively endorsed by the Second Vatican Council in the following century.

“I do not think that the influence of John Hughes on Fordham University is limited to the past,” he said.

After the service, Father McShane spoke of “all that we have to live up to.”

“We have to live up to the fact that [Archbishop Hughes] left us an institution that from the very start was precarious—founded on faith, sustained by love, aimed at transmitting wisdom and learning so that people would serve others and do the world a world of good; that is to say, set the world on fire and transform other hearts.”

Fordham University Board of Trustees Chairman Bob Daleo, GABELLI ’72, noted the progression of Fordham from “six students and two buildings” to the University it is today, with three campuses, an academic center in London, about 15,000 students, and academic partnerships worldwide.

“Today we do honor the achievements of the past, but we truly celebrate the opportunities of Fordham’s future,” he said. “In doing so, we rededicate ourselves to sustaining Fordham not simply as an institution but as a way of life.”

Visit our 175^th timeline. 

When I lived in Dublin and met an Irish person, I would almost always get the same two questions. The first one was often asked with a raised brow: “Do you know that Colleen means ‘girl’ in Irish?” I quickly tired of that question. But the second one I never tired of hearing because it was always asked with respect and excitement: “You used to live in the Bronx?!”

I bring this up not only to thank Fordham for the street cred it earned me among my Irish friends but also because it shows that when I moved to Ireland, I talked about Fordham and the Bronx quite a lot, to strangers and friends alike.

The link between Ireland and the States is self-evident: It’s there in history, in street names and surnames, in Irish-American culture, in St. Patrick’s Day, which we celebrate by marching up Fifth Avenue.

But the link that joins Fordham, New York, and Ireland is not so generic as to be reduced to the common knowledge of mass Irish immigration to America in the mid-19th century. It’s a link that is constantly revitalized. My life, from the moment I stepped foot in the Bronx at the age of 18 seven years ago, has been living proof of that fact.

I grew up in Connecticut as an obsessive Irish dancer, going to feiseanna every weekend, dancing at local halls and television studios, even skipping school on St. Patrick’s Day. Like many other Irish Americans, I grew up listening to tales about the home country, the stories my aunts and uncles would tell about the family farm in County Clare. Since I was a small child, I loved Ireland, but it wasn’t until I came to Fordham that I truly learned what it means to be Irish. At Fordham, I came to know Ireland outside of its myth.

Getting in Tune

One of the best things to ever happen to me occurred during my freshman year at Fordham, when I became involved with WFUV’s Irish music program, Ceol na nGael, the Music of the Irish. I was blessed to carry the torch of hosting the show, and every Sunday afternoon my co-host and I sat before the mics in the studio in Keating Hall.

The tunes we played were our weekly bridge to the greater New York Irish network, to our listeners across the nation and even across the Atlantic to our Irish fan base. Each Sunday we’d get a slew of requests for the community’s favorite Irish classics—folk songs like “The Fields of Athenry,” “When New York Was Irish,” and “The Leaving of Liverpool.” After only a few months at FUV, I had the lyrics to all those ballads memorized, and I used to sing them in my awful soprano to my roommates when I’d head back to my dorm on a Sunday night.

But the music wasn’t only with me on Sundays. Those ballads merged with my weekday life as a student. During my sophomore year, I took a course in Irish-American history as part of my Irish studies minor. One particular class meeting we focused our discussion on Famine history, and I remember how the whole class took a moment to pause our conversation and reflect in silence at the staggering reality of the recorded numbers: 1 million dead, over 1 million immigrants, all in just five years. We sat together in disbelief as we realized even today Ireland hadn’t recovered its population.

As I left class that day, I popped my headphones in to prepare for my walk across campus. “The Fields of Athenry” happened to come on my shuffle as I walked, and with the class discussion still whirling in my mind, I listened to the lyrics of that ballad, really listened to them for the first time. I bore witness to the song’s story of Michael, who stole food to feed his family and was forced to depart on a prison ship—a narrative that, I knew from my class, was based in historical truth.

These reflections didn’t shatter the illusion of my family’s folktales. Rather, I felt more connected to my family history than I ever had been before. The next Sunday, as I prepared for Ceol na nGael, I included “The Fields of Athenry” on my playlist, and I chose one for my great-grandfather too: “From Clare to Here.”

Finding an Irish Voice

Such an anecdote was characteristic of my Fordham education—what I learned in the classroom always pushed beyond the facts to the feeling and ethics behind the knowledge. At Fordham, I gained more than history, however. I gained, or rather, regained, a language. I can’t think of many other colleges that would have provided me the opportunity to learn a minority language like Irish; and Fordham even did more than that—the college sponsored me to travel to Connemara for a summer and live in the Gaeltacht, to break bread every day with an Irish-speaking family and enhance my conversational skills. By the time I was a junior at Fordham, I had an entirely different voice than when I first arrived in the Bronx. For the most part I sounded the same—my accent hadn’t changed, much to my dismay. But in just two years’ time I was able to slip into a language that hadn’t been spoken in my family for generations.

Fordham not only made me a better speaker of English and Irish, it made me a better listener as well. When home for Thanksgiving the first autumn after my summer in Connemara, I overheard my mother and my uncle talking in the kitchen while preparing the turkey. When my mom laughingly told my uncle, in her thick pseudo-New York accent, to “put the kaibosh on all that baloney he was chatting,” she was, unbeknownst to herself, speaking a form of Irish.

Kaibosh comes from the Irish caidhp and bás—caidhp in Irish is a hat, and bás means death, so kaibosh becomes a “death cap.” Put the kaibosh on it. Put an end to it, already. As for baloney, you might be surprised to hear that slang word isn’t related to the deli meat, but to the Irish béal ónna, which means “silly mouth” or “silly talk.” Later that night at Thanksgiving dinner, when my brother asked my cousin if there was any gravy left, and she replied, “There’s gravy galore,” I heard Irish again. Galore comes from the Irish go leor, which sounds and means, like it does for our Irish-American slang, “plenty” or “a lot.”

The myth that Irish was a dead language, the myth that my family was strictly monolingual, was irreversibly broken that Thanksgiving. I heard in old family phrases the new Irish words I had learned in Connemara; I heard how a centuries’ old language breathed new life each day in contemporary American conversation.

Through history, song, and language, my roots back to my ancestral past in Ireland grew stronger and stronger with each month of my time at Fordham. But perhaps the most important tie Fordham sewed for me was through literature and surprisingly through feminism.

Songs of the Unsung

My challenging liberal arts education as an English major at Fordham made me thirsty for further study. With support from my faculty mentors at Fordham, I was accepted at my dream program, the Master’s in Irish Writing at Trinity College Dublin. For a year I read the great Irish works of Joyce and Beckett, Swift and Yeats. I walked down Nassau and Grafton Streets every day, took a turn around Stephen’s Green regularly, passed by the home of the Book of Kells on my walk to class, learned, wrote, and virtually lived (as it felt in those arduous essay-writing months) in the house where Oscar Wilde was born on Westland Row, where our master’s course met for study.

By the time the final leg of the dissertation came along, I was surprised but thrilled to find myself in the college’s rare and early printed books room, reading an original copy of a novel published in 1809 by a young a woman from Dublin—a novel only I and a handful of other Irish scholars today have read. I gladly took the risk of making an argument for this unknown writer named Sarah Isdell and her little-known novel, The Irish Recluse, a rather radical narrative about a woman who creates a feminocentric family unit in a castle in Kerry.

At the end of the work I conducted for my master’s, I looked down at my 70-page dissertation—at the work I had slaved over, that I was so proud of, that had cost my poor father a tearful international call or two from his daughter—and it suddenly registered that my connection with this novel had roots in a speech I heard on freshman orientation day at Fordham.

“To be bothered.” That’s what Joseph M. McShane, SJ, president of Fordham, said he wanted out of us as students: to leave Fordham bothered by the questions our education had raised, by what we encountered outside the University walls.

I was undoubtedly romanced by the literature I had studied at Trinity, by Dublin’s historical charms, but I never let that romance eclipse the Jesuit ideal of justice and suspicion that had been ingrained in my undergraduate education. Whether I was conscious of it at the time or not, I was quietly bothered by that androcentric syllabus list I received on my first day at Trinity, by academia’s small, sometimes exclusionary canon of authors. I left Trinity more widely read, more worldly and confident than when I had arrived, but I left it the way I left Fordham, the way Father McShane encouraged us to feel—bothered. I knew I had more work to do for Irish feminist literary criticism, and it was that inquiry that brought me to Boston in pursuit of a PhD.

Making the Irish American

I share all these personal anecdotes not to wax lyrical about myself, but to demonstrate that Irishness is a multifaceted, complex, precious, and constantly unfolding thing. Irish culture comes from a place of struggle and pain, but beauty as well, laughter and spirit, all expressed in the most exquisite art forms, and yes, even in a bit of myth and magic. If I hadn’t gone to Fordham, I’d only know the mere surface of this cultural depth.

Now that I live in the States again, I often get asked—with a similar expression of respect—“You used to live in Dublin?” And when I go back to Ireland this summer, I’m sure I’ll get that same interest in my Bronx connections when I swap international stories with the people I encounter.

In the Irish language, when someone asks you where you’re from, the reply is phrased Is as mé, which directly translates as “I am of.” I am of New York and of the Bronx, and I am of Dublin just as much as I am of a tiny town in Connecticut, and maybe even still of a tiny town in County Clare.

To be Irish American is to be of many places and to be of two nations, to inhabit two homes at once. I am grateful to Fordham for teaching me how invaluable that multiplicity is.

One of the most common signatures of being Irish is a reverence for folklore. No doubt the Irish have an instinctive penchant for telling stories. Walk into any pub in any town in Ireland, and you’ll see it proven true.

But I think the best part of Irish culture are the stories that haven’t been told, the ones muffled by history and prejudice.

So I encourage you to listen thoughtfully to the Irish tales you hear in conversation. Listen thoughtfully to the lyrics of a Dubliners ballad or the words of a Seamus Heaney poem. Go to Ellis Island and listen to its silence. Hear again, with new ears, the very sound of your own name. There are more stories lingering there than you realize, more stories waiting to be recorded. Irish America is a story only partially written, and it’s places like Fordham that inspire us to fill the empty pages.