“It was somewhat of a surprise, obviously good and exciting news. I’ve done a lot of [work]over the years in the Irish community, so it was nice to have that recognized and acknowledged,” he told Fordham Magazine in 2020.

Irish and New York blood run deep through his veins. His great-grandfather Daniel Houlihan immigrated to the Bronx from County Kerry, Ireland, in 1874. And his maternal grandmother, Rose Valerie Murray, emigrated in 1913 from County Tyrone in Northern Ireland. That’s why Houlihan has been so dedicated to supporting the Irish community. In addition to leading the Great Hunger Memorial project, he has worked with the Irish Arts Center, based in New York City, to curate an exhibit titled “Fighting Irishmen: A Celebration of Celtic Warriors,” which commemorated people who are “heroes to the Irish,” Houlihan said.

Houlihan also has been a longtime supporter of the Fordham community. A former member of the University’s Board of Trustees, he previously served as chair of the Fordham President’s Council and as a member of the WFUV advisory board. In 2011, Fordham honored Houlihan with its Founder’s Award, given to individuals whose personal and professional lives reflect the highest aspirations of the University’s defining traditions, as an institution dedicated to wisdom and learning in the service of others. He and his family have established scholarship funds for students and helped renovate the baseball diamond at Jack Coffey Field, which was named Houlihan Park in honor of him and his family.

For many attendees, it was a chance to see New York City come back to life after two years of social distancing and separation. Meghan McAlary, a senior at the Gabelli School of Business, who serves as the president of Fordham’s Gaelic Society, said she was grateful to participate in the parade after going through the pandemic.

“We’ve definitely had a lot of pent-up energy to get out here, so it’s nice to finally be able to get together,” she said.

Continuing the Tradition

McAlary was marching with her father, John, who said that he was thrilled to see his daughter so involved with both the Fordham community and her Irish roots.

“We got to travel together to Ireland before the pandemic, so just to see her out here as the president of the Gaelic Society—I couldn’t be prouder. I grew up in New York City and I used to come down to the parade every year as a child, and to see her continuing that tradition is just wonderful,” he said.

Eight decades’ worth of Fordham Rams participated in the parade, spanning graduates from the 1950s to current students. All nine of the University’s colleges, as well as Marymount, were represented, according to Michael Griffin, associate vice president for alumni relations.

Two of those generations were represented by the Wiedenhoft family, as Fordham College at Rose Hill sophomore Carolyn Wiedenhoft marched in the parade with her dad Robert, FCRH ’86.

“Seeing her love it and being able to share that with her is a great connection,” he said.

Catherine Trapani, a 2013 graduate of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and a member of the Fordham University Alumni Association advisory board, brought her daughter and best friend to the parade to participate for the first time. Trapani said that she wasn’t sure how the turnout would be with the weather and pandemic-related hesitations.

“It’s nice to see it filled with all different ages and schools,” she said.

Across the region, other traditions returned this year. In White Plains, James J. Houlihan, GABELLI ’74, served as the grand marshal of their St. Patrick’s Day parade to honor him for helping to establish the Great Hunger Memorial, among other volunteer and philanthropic works in and beyond Westchester County.

James T. Callahan, general president of the International Union of Operating Engineers, served as the New York City parade’s grand marshal. The parade featured a moment of silence for victims of the COVID-19 pandemic as well as in memory of the 20th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks and the war in Ukraine. The Fordham contingent stopped at St. Patrick’s Cathedral on its way up Fifth Avenue and tipped their caps to the church.

Honoring Father McShane: “It’s Why I’m Here”

This year’s parade marks the last time that Joseph M. McShane S.J., president of Fordham, addressed the delegation, as he will be stepping down in June. For many alumni, saying goodbye to him was part of the reason they decided to march.

“It’s why I’m here—this morning I got up and it was raining, but I said ‘I’m going anyway because it’s McShane’s last (one),’” said Stephen Centrillo, GABELLI ’79, ’81.

“He’s the most inspirational human being I know. I’ve known him for 20 years now and I’m just so happy for what he’s done for Fordham. And I wanted him to see as many Rams here, recognizing how we feel about him.”

At ‘Every Moment in Fordham’s History,’ Becoming People for Others

Before the parade, more than 200 participants gathered for brunch at the Yale Club. Father McShane served as the keynote speaker, and was met with a standing ovation from those in attendance. He called on the crowd to remember not only the story of St. Patrick, but also the story of another Irishman, Fordham’s founder Archbishop John Hughes— “a latter-day St. Patrick.”

Father McShane said that Hughes did four vital things for the city: purchasing land where the new St. Patrick’s Cathedral was built on Fifth Avenue; making sure there were Catholic schools for children to attend at their parishes; starting St. John’s College, which would become Fordham University; and helping to start Emigrant Savings Bank, which provided banking services to previously underserved Irish customers when it first opened.

“All of them really were aimed at one thing—taking care of the downcast, the downtrodden, the forgotten, the marginalized—us,” Father McShane said. “And Fordham has kept faithful to that mission.”

Father McShane said that “at every moment in Fordham’s history, Fordham is drawn to helping young men and women who have “great hearts and exceptional intellectual ability” find their way in the world and become people for others.

“This is what we’ve done for generations we’re able to do it now because of you—your kindness, your goodness, your generosity,” he said.

Those in attendance said that they were grateful for Father McShane continuing that mission throughout his tenure, particularly during the last few years.

“I feel like this St. Patrick’s Day, this parade is marking the point of [getting]  back to normal—it’s a brand new day, and it’s also being led by Father McShane,” said Sally Benner, FCRH ’84, chair of the Fordham University Alumni Association’s (FUAA) Advisory Board.

“We didn’t lose him and his leadership during the pandemic—he led us to the finish line and now we’re safe, we’re going to be OK.”

“We’ll be celebrating with one of [my wife]  Bridget’s delicious soda breads, so looking forward to that,” said Patrick Reynolds, FCLC ‘81.

“And we’ll have our family together, which we’re very blessed to have, even during this time of COVID-19,” chimed in Bridget Reynolds, PAR ‘14, ‘17.

The tradition of making soda bread is an especially comforting one for the Reynolds family. Bridget remembered it being one of the first treats her mother used to make, and the smell of baking bread brings back wonderful memories for her. Now, she makes it with her own family, which includes her husband and children Aileen, FCRH ’14, and Brian, FCRH ‘17.

“Soda bread is a simple recipe that makes plenty to share and brings comfort to those who eat it. That’s how my interactions with my Irish family have always been: simple, warm, and comforting,” said Aileen. “Making soda bread was something my grandmothers did for their children, my parents did for me and my brother, and now it’s something I can take on myself. It’s about family, which is what has always been central and most important to my Irish heritage.”

Something else important to the Reynolds family? A sense of humor. 

“I appreciate the Irish sense of humor, especially in the challenging times of life. We do have a wicked sense of humor that helps us get through,” Bridget said. “Our sense of family, our sense of faith, and our dedication to each other makes me proud.”

Watch Aileen attempt the recipe for the first time on her own below.

@fordhamuniversityFordham grad Aileen Reynolds makes an Irish favorite, soda bread, for St. Patrick’s Day. ##foodtiktok ##fordham ##stpatricksday♬ Irish music by fiddle and whistle(192108) – Hazime

Ingredients:
5 cups flour
1 cup sugar
1 tablespoon baking powder
1.5 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 stick room temperature butter
3 cups raisins
3 tablespoons caraway seeds
2.5 cups buttermilk
1 large egg

Bake at 350° for about an hour and 15 minutes or until an inserted toothpick comes out clean.

“When I was a little kid, my grandmother and my mother and my Uncle John would all play the piano and play the Irish songs and tell the stories behind them,” he said. “As I got a little older, as a teenager [and in my 20s], I wasn’t really so … focused on [those stories].”

But his love for his heritage and commitment to his community soon shone through, said Houlihan, a 1974 graduate of Fordham’s Gabelli School of Business.

“I started to get drawn back in through the music—I fell in love with the Irish music,” he said, and in the late 1980s, he began traveling to Ireland with his family and developing an interest in Irish and Irish American history.

Connected to Irish History

He was particularly drawn to those who shared stories about the hunger marches and walks to mass burial sites in Ireland to remember those who died during the Great Hunger, sometimes referred to as the Great Famine, a period from roughly 1845 to the early 1850s during which an estimated 1 million people died from starvation and related causes, and more than 1 million people left the country, many of them settling in New York.

“It was certainly an avoidable tragedy, and it was a dark stain on Ireland and also England,” he said. But while it undoubtedly “left a scar on the Irish psyche,” it also propelled many Irish families to work on “finding a better life for their children.”

That’s why, he said, when he was asked to help establish a Great Hunger memorial in Westchester County, he was determined to see it through to completion.

“There had been a couple of false starts or attempts that didn’t go anywhere,” said Houlihan, the managing partner of Houlihan-Parnes Realtors, the family business his great-grandfather Daniel Houlihan established in the Bronx in 1891, after learning the carpentry trade and working his way up to become a contractor, investor, and builder. “I was basically approached [by a few members of the Greater Hunger Memorial Committee of Westchester County]and [told], ‘We’re going to abandon this project unless you take it over.’”

So he did.

“We raised about $1.3 million in funds, and we had an international competition for artists to design the monument, Houlihan said.

The committee selected a design by artist Eamonn O’Doherty of Dublin, Ireland, and the monument was unveiled in June 2001 in VE Macy Park in Ardsley, New York. The memorial consists of three main elements—one representing five members of an Irish family; a second depicting a “deserted shell” of a home that they left; and a third representing the potato famine, featuring an overturned basket from which potatoes spill and turn into skulls.

The monument received widespread critical praise and won several awards, including American Institute of Architects’ community recognition as “Most Outstanding Work of Public Art.”

Making a Difference in His Community

This year, Houlihan was recognized for helping to establish the Great Hunger Memorial, among other volunteer and philanthropic works in Westchester and beyond, when he was named grand marshal of the White Plains St. Patrick’s Day Parade. While the parade was canceled due to the coronavirus outbreak, Houlihan said it was an honor just to be recognized.

“It was somewhat of a surprise, obviously good and exciting news. I’ve done a lot of [work]over the years in the Irish community, so it was nice to have that recognized and acknowledged,” he said.

For years, Houlihan has worked with the Irish Arts Center, based in New York City. He helped curate an exhibit for the center called the “Fighting Irishmen: A Celebration of Celtic Warriors”, which aimed to commemorate people who were “heroes to the Irish,” Houlihan said.

“I created that and it took on a life of its own,” he said, stating that it traveled from New York to Boston to Ireland to Phoenix.

Closer to home, Houlihan also helped erect The Rising, a monument to the 109 Westchester residents killed in the attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.

Fordham Roots

He’s also been a longtime supporter of the Fordham community. A member of the University’s Board of Trustees, he previously served as chair of the Fordham President’s Council and as a member of the WFUV advisory board. He and his family have established scholarship funds for students and helped renovate the baseball diamond at Jack Coffey Field, which was named Houlihan Park in honor of him and his family.

The Houlihan family has strong connections to Fordham, with many alumni including his mother, Mary Murray Houlihan, D.S.W., a 1949 and 1986 alumna of Fordham’s Graduate School of Social Service; his brother Jack Houlihan, GABELLI ’75; Claire O’Neill Houlihan, GABELLI ’77; Patrick W. Murray, FCRH ’57; John Thomas Murray, FCRH ’57; the late Monsignor James J. Murray, FCRH ’48 and LAW ’51; and Ellen Houlihan, FCRH ‘05. His daughter, Christie Houlihan, a 2011 graduate of Fordham School of Law, now serves as the senior director and counsel at Houlihan-Parnes Realtors. His son, Michael McEvoy, received his M.B.A. from Fordham’s Gabelli School of Business in 2018.

In 2011, Fordham honored Houlihan with its Founder’s Award, given to individuals whose personal and professional lives reflect the highest aspirations of the University’s defining traditions, as an institution dedicated to wisdom and learning in the service of others.

Upon receiving the award, he noted that like Fordham’s founder, Archbishop John Hughes, his family came to America from Ireland to pursue their dreams.

“In reading a book about our founder, I couldn’t help but think about my maternal grandmother, Rose Valerie Murray, who emigrated in 1913. She also came from County Tyrone in Northern Ireland,” he said. “She was much like John. She believed in family; she believed in her faith; she believed in the country of her origin; and she believed in her newly adopted country, the United States of America. And like the archbishop, she believed in education.”

Houlihan has received numerous awards for his philanthropic and professional work, including the Ellis Island Medal of Honor and the Martin S. Berger Award for Lifetime Achievement in Real Estate. He said his latest recognition is a testament to his family.

“Certainly, it’s an honor—not just to me but to my ancestors who came before me and gave me the opportunity to live in the greatest country in the history of the world,” he said.

Shannon Quinn, FCRH ’10, GABELLI ’18, associate director of alumni relations for NYC programming, accepted the award on the University’s behalf during a ceremony at Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus.

More than 500 students, alumni, family, and friends marched up Fifth Avenue and past St. Patrick’s Cathedral on March 16.

Many of the Fordham marchers had gathered for breakfast at the Yale Club earlier that morning, where they heard Cathal Pratt, a Fordham doctoral candidate in English, relate the long history of the University’s Irish studies program. Founded in 1925 by Irish nationalist Joseph Campbell, it may very well be the oldest such program in the world.

Pratt emphasized how Campbell reminded Fordham of its Irish heritage, an immigrant past filled with both challenges and compassion that Fordham celebrates to this day.

On Oct. 22, members of the St. Patrick Day Foundation presented Fordham with the first-place plaque at the McNally Amphitheatre on the Lincoln Center campus. Accepting the award on the University’s behalf was Shannon Quinn, FCRH ’10, GABELLI ’18, associate director of alumni relations, NYC programming. Other universities were also honored at the ceremony.

More than 500 Rams marched up Fifth Avenue in Manhattan for the parade this March. About half of them gathered for brunch at the Yale Club earlier that day, where Joseph M. McShane, S.J., president of Fordham, spoke with pride about Irish immigrants who risked so much to achieve the American dream.

He said that St. Patrick’s Day is a day for “savoring everything our ancestors did to leave Ireland and come to a place filled with uncertain promise.” Those that left their troubled country, he said, would have never dreamed of the successes their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren would eventually realize.

A Fordham contingent has been marching in the parade since 1937, with a brief hiatus during World War II. No fewer than eight Fordham alumni have served as grand marshals.

This year more than 500 Rams marched up Fifth Avenue past the cathedral bearing the name of the Irish saint, its soaring edifice built by Fordham’s founder, Archbishop John Hughes.

Before the parade, about 250 Fordham marchers gathered at the Yale Club for an annual breakfast. John Harrington, Ph.D., dean of academic affairs for Fordham’s new London Centre, gave a short talk about Irish studies at Fordham and its “lineage of strong scholars,” but he also homed in on Archbishop Hughes’s Irish past.

Harrington noted that that the Hughes family farm, like many Irish farms, wasn’t contiguous. Plots could sometimes be separated by miles. The Hughes family farm had plots set about a mile apart with the border separating Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland running between the two.

“The family was up close to separation and sectarianism,” said Harrington. “I think if he could look back, he’d have strong ideas about Brexit.”

Throughout the sunny day the mood remained cheerful, but suffering from The Troubles and the struggle of 30 million Irish-American immigrants was not far from the minds of marchers, not least Joseph M. McShane, S.J., president of Fordham.

“The whole story of the Irish experience in New York City, in the 1840s, 1850s, and 1860s, is of being outsiders, of being looked down upon and despised,” said Father McShane. “Hughes was the guy at the head, defending his people, but at the same time he was excoriating them to get them to rise, and education was very important to that.”

Father McShane said that St. Patrick’s Day is a day for “savoring everything our ancestors did to leave Ireland and come to a place filled with uncertain promise.” He said the Irish that left their troubled country would have never dreamed of the successes their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren would eventually realize.

“Even here at the Yale Club!” he said. “Who would have thought in the 19^th century we’d be here using their cutlery instead of cleaning and polishing it.”

Patrica McCarthy, an M.S.W. student at the Graduate School of Social Service, said that her grandfather came from Ireland. She said that it’s important to continue to “open people’s minds and to open doors” for immigrants.

Her husband Kevin McCarthy, LAW ’78, agreed. McCarthy teaches at nearby John Jay College.

“It’s important to try to legalize the status of our DACA students, especially for students at Fordham and at John Jay where there’s a very large contingent of DACA students,” he said.

As they waited for the parade to start, Liam Strain, PCS ’03, and Mary Grogan Strain, FCRH ’92, said they represent a mixed marriage: He of Lincoln Center, she of Rose Hill. Liam said he should have graduated in 1984, but returned to get his degree in 2003.

The Strains, like Harrington and others at the parade, also expressed concern about Brexit, saying that any “hard border” between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland may disrupt newfound peace.

“When I came back to finish my degree at Fordham the Celtic Tiger was in full bloom, the Good Friday agreement was forged,” he said. “As a political science major and it was a great time to see Ireland as a model for change and moving toward the future.”

When the Strains were in school they met at the Gaelic Society, where Liam was then president. Then, as now, the two said it was easy to draw parallels from the Irish experience to today’s immigrant experience.

“Dagger John Hughes was a big defender of the immigrants—they happened to be Irish at the time, but that story resonates today,” said Liam Strain.

His wife agreed.

“I was an Irish history minor, so New York City was a great place to connect to the history of the Irish, but it was also a great place to connect to the history of immigrants from all over the world,” she said. “New York is a really diverse campus so it’s a great place to celebrate any heritage.”

Then, while visiting the Rose Hill campus, he walked past the statue of Archbishop John Hughes—founder of Fordham, tireless advocate for Irish immigrants, and combative public personality who unabashedly pushed back against anti-Catholic prejudice of the mid-19th century, shocking some of his fellow clerics and earning nationwide fame.

Loughery had found his subject. “I do think he is a major player in 19th-century American history and had not been given his due,” he said. “I just knew this was a great story.”

Loughery tells that story in Dagger John: Archbishop John Hughes and the Making of Irish America (Cornell University Press, 2018). It covers the full scope of Hughes’ life, from obscure Irish immigrant to first archbishop of New York to confidant of U.S. presidents and player on the world stage. As Loughery describes, Hughes was warm-hearted and devout but also fierce and resourceful in service of his destitute, despised Irish immigrant flock. He raised funds prodigiously, founded schools and churches and orphanages, and met threats of anti-Catholic violence with fiery rhetoric about fighting back, with force if necessary. And he used his rhetorical gifts to publicly refute Catholics’ detractors at every turn.

Hughes fervently believed in his own brand of leadership and was ready and willing to be at the center of the storm, said Loughery, an English teacher at the Nightingale-Bamford School in Manhattan and award-winning author of four other books, including John Sloan: Painter and Rebel (Henry Holt, 1995), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

Tell me more about the problems he was up against.
When he came from Philadelphia to New York as coadjutor bishop in 1838, he was horrified—I don’t think he had a clue how bad things were going to be, that the churches were all in danger of foreclosure. And then the church burnings, the convent burnings—between the 1830s and the 1850s, there’s this enormous number of books about the pope’s supposed plans for America, and how the undermining of American democracy is underway with all these Catholics coming in. It probably was not a view most American Protestants supported, but the anxieties were real enough. And the poverty of the Irish coming into New York was a significant problem. The number of people pouring off those boats during the years of the Irish potato famine was colossal. The slums exponentially grow and people start to think, our city is being overrun. There’s the rise of a fundamentalist Protestant movement that wants to say, “We are under attack.”

How did Hughes respond?
His job, he felt, was to make sure these new people coming in do find jobs, they do go to church, they do become reputable citizens. He believed that without the church, the Irish Catholic immigrant was going to be lost, that without some sort of bedrock faith, we as Americans were headed in a very dangerous direction. I think he consecrated a hundred churches in his time. He tried to found churches right and left, and he said even more important than putting in the church building, the priest there should be working to get a parochial school going. He was absolutely devoted to the idea that education was the way out of poverty.

So he’s constantly trying to fundraise and get more priests to come in and get more teachers and get more nuns to come work here, and he’s trying to get a university like Fordham going. It’s amazing he lived to his 60s, that he wasn’t completely worn out by this superhuman effort.

There’s one record of him talking in downtown Manhattan and raising $1,500 dollars that night, a colossal amount of money, for a church-basement grammar school. He was a very popular lecturer; people knew he was the fighting bishop. He was the face of Catholicism in America. He was somebody who had gone to Europe and met the kings and the popes. So he cultivated a colorful, dynamic, charismatic personality, and he had a great speaking voice.

He also felt the need for a kind of public relations campaign where we show what good citizens we can be, and so he’s very involved with courting politicians and being courted by them, trying to get himself seen as helpful to people in power.

How did he break the mold?
I think a lot of bishops were astonished that John Hughes came in and said every insult, every question, every attack [against Catholics]will be met head-on, we will not look the other way. And some of them felt, “You’re making things worse. If we didn’t have to answer every criticism, we didn’t have to constantly be on the barricades, we might be getting along with Protestants better.” And then he gave this speech in 1850, “The Decline of Protestantism and its Causes,” and had many bishops saying, “What in the world do you need to take these people on like that for?”

He was not a pacifist, unlike many other bishops who did turn the other cheek when the church or convent was burned in their area or rioters threatened them. He felt Americans only respect you if you fight back, so he was definitely a more aggressive person.

Was he more than just the “fighting bishop”?
There were gentler sides to him. There are so many letters in the archives from priests and parishioners thanking him for his help and concern, and that’s a part of him you don’t see in most other accounts of his life. He definitely has been stereotyped as belligerent and egocentric. There was a woman named Sophia Dana Ripley who converted and was uncertain whether she would be a good Catholic or not; he would take people like that under [his]wing and explain that God accepts you as you are, that the church understands frailty and human nature and exists to help bring you into the embrace of God. He really could reach out to people in ways that he doesn’t get credit for.

Was he a creature of his times?
So many bishops of the time didn’t know how to deal with all these problems, so they would try to placate those groups they could. He was the sort of person who just said, “No, this is not acceptable, I’m going to launch into every battle on every front I have to.” That sort of person is indeed pretty rare, and the legacy of someone like that will always be contested.

It was a completely different time. He was inventing things out of whole cloth. There were no roadmaps for what he was doing in this country, for how to make it work. He was an innovator, with all the flaws and greatness that that implies.

Related: Below is a video on Fordham’s participation in the 2018 St. Patrick’s Day Parade in New York City. Read the news story.

“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.”

Update: On March 17, Taylor was the featured speaker at the Fordham alumni brunch prior to the New York City St. Patrick’s Day Parade. Read her talk, “Finding Ireland Outside of Its Myths.”

10. Star of the County Down

A classic folk song from the late 19th century, it’s a great one for chorusing with friends. Definitely one to pull out at the pub!

9. There Were Roses

Written by Tommy Sands during the Troubles, this is one of the most moving pleas for peace in Northern Ireland. I always need tissues handy when I listen to it. I’m particularly fond of Derry singer Cara Dillon’s version.

8. Óró Sé Do Bheatha ’Bhaile

I learned this one in the Connemara Gaeltacht. It’s a rebel song, and the title means “welcome home.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6VqEtpOdhTE

7. Red Is the Rose

My parents taught me to appreciate this gorgeous love song. No one sings it better than the late, great Liam Clancy. The melody dates back to an 18th-century Scottish air.

6. Pastures of Plenty

Solas does an Irish version of this American classic written by Woody Guthrie. Solas was one of the first bands I discovered working at WFUV, and now I’m a dedicated fan.

5. Last Night’s Fun Set

The title speaks for itself, but this is one of my favorite sets of tunes from one of my favorite bands, the musicians who put women in traditional music on the map: Cherish the Ladies.

4. The Fields of Athenry

Written in the 1970s but set in the years of the Great Famine, this might be my favorite of the canonical Irish folk ballads. No matter how many times I hear it, I never tire of the melody. A couple of years ago, I sang this song with my family when driving though Athenry in east Galway. My favorite Irish folk band, the High Kings, however, have a much better handle on the harmonies.

3. Rare Auld Times

This is my Dublin song. “The Rocky Road to Dublin” comes in as a close second, but this beautiful ballad evokes that quintessentially Irish sense of nostalgia. The High Kings do a gorgeous rendition of this one, too.

2. Paddy in Zululand

I love this set because it represents how Irish trad has mixed with the American music melting pot. Bronx native and fiddling visionary Eileen Ivers gives traditional Irish tunes some homegrown New York flare with her rock, pop, and Afro infusions. I have a tendency to indulge my air fiddle playing with this one.

1. Morning Nightcap

In my opinion, there’s no better set to jam out to than “Morning Nightcap.” This is trad band Lúnasa’s best piece, and it’s their show-stopping finale at every concert. Wait till the final tune hits—such a foot stomper!

Mother Nature didn’t get the memo about the proximity of March 17th to the first day of spring, but that didn’t stop 250 proud members of the Fordham community from donning their most festive winter duds and marching in the 253rd Annual St. Patrick’s Day Parade.

The morning started with a pre-parade brunch hosted by PricewaterhouseCoopers and then saw the group, led by Joseph M. McShane, S.J., president of Fordham, and Grand Marshall John T. Ahern of the International Union of Operating Engineers (IUOE), march the nearly two-mile parade route, Irish eyes smiling the whole way.