DUBLIN — Marty Walsh returns this day to Ireland, the land of his parents’ birth, and it has been and will be described here as an Irish pol coming home.
But I’ve been telling everybody in Ireland that it’s a little more complicated than that. Describing Walsh as an Irish pol is like describing Seamus Heaney as an Irish poet: It’s accurate up to a point, but very limited in scope.
Walsh exemplifies the evolution of the Irish pol, an Irish pol who got elected mostly by those who don’t even have an Irish granny.
Actually, the best illustration of the evolution of the Irish pol is seen in the two Martys: Marty Walsh, the mayor of Boston; and Marty O’Malley, the governor of Maryland. O’Malley’s political rise began in Baltimore, when he was able to get elected mayor by building a coalition of African-American voters who saw him not as the white Irish guy, but as the guy who talked about the issues they cared about. The same happened in Boston, where minority voters saw in Marty Walsh not a typical Irish pol but a union guy who helped women and minorities get into the trades, a neighborhood guy who lived in a neighborhood where most people are not white.
Marty O’Malley and Marty Walsh don’t talk like Irish pols. They talk like urban pols, politicians sophisticated enough, and genuine enough, to know that being Irish is just one of many things, not the only thing, that makes you electable. This marks a major historical and cultural shift.
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The Protestant gentlemen who settled Boston eventually established the same kind of hierarchical society they had professed to despise when they sailed away from England. The wealthiest of these so-called Brahmins settled on Beacon Hill, the pinnacle of the city on a hill. It took a couple of hundred years, but just as they had got their city ordered just so, the potato crop failed in Ireland and everything was turned upside down.
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The Irish began arriving by the boatload, unwashed, uneducated, diseased, drunken, and perhaps worst of all to the sensibilities of those in the stately brownstones of Beacon Hill, Catholic. Because you could wash them, give them medicine, provide a free and public education, but at the end of the day the Irish were still a bunch of hard-drinking Papists, taking their orders from some Italian guy in Rome.
The Famine Irish, including those who headed north to work in the mills in Lowell and Lawrence, didn’t have it easy. They were openly discriminated against. The politicians of the day didn’t care much for the new immigrants so the Irish decided to elect their own.
By the early 20th century, the Irish pol became something of a standard, if not a stereotype, demanding unflinching loyalty in return for jobs and favors. The Irish became the dominant ethnic group not just in Boston but in Lowell and Lawrence and Worcester and Springfield, and Irish ward bosses protected their turf like pit bulls.
James Michael Curley, the onetime governor of Massachusetts and longtime mayor of Boston who became the most celebrated and notorious of Irish pols, established his bona fides with his constituents by taking a civil service exam for an Irish immigrant. The Brahmins were horrified; the Irish and other working-class Europeans who would become his core voters loved him.
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Curley went to jail for that impersonation, but as a political act it was priceless. The good government types were so appalled by Curley’s antics that after he became mayor of Boston in 1914 for the first of four terms, the gentle women of Beacon Hill and the Back Bay descended into the working-class enclaves of Charlestown and South Boston, to promote reform candidates who would beat back the Irish political machine.
Legend has it that one of these gentle ladies knocked on a door in Southie and was greeted by an Irishwoman holding a wash bucket. The nice lady from Beacon Hill asked the woman of the house to consider voting for her brother, one of the reformers taking on the Curley machine. When asked if her brother would be giving her a job if he won, the gentle lady from Beacon Hill was aghast. “Absolutely not,” she huffed. “That would be improper.”
The lady of the house sniffed, turned up her nose and said, “Why would I vote for a guy who wouldn’t give his own sister a job?”
Eventually, the Irish political machine, like all machines, became obsessed not with serving constituents as much as maintaining power. Even as the Irish took over the police, the fire, and even the boardrooms, Curley and his ilk talked as if they were MOPES: the most oppressed people ever.
The Irish vote dissipated, through demographic change. The Irish pol had to figure out how to appeal well beyond his base. It has taken more than a generation for this phenomenon to take hold, and in that time the definition of an Irish pol has undergone a massive transformation. Being an Irish pol, for good and bad, has less to do with race and religion, more to do with sensibilities and culture.
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One of the most successful Irish pols in Massachusetts is a woman named Linda Dorcena Forry. She’s the daughter of Haitian immigrants, married to a guy from one of the biggest Irish-American clans in Dorchester. As the state senator who represents Dorchester and South Boston, she presides over the annual St. Patrick’s Day brunch, and the truth is she can belt out “Wild Colonial Boy” with the best of them.
One of the last “Irish” ward bosses was a guy named Willie Lantigua, who ran Lawrence in recent years the way James Michael Curley ran Boston. Lantigua treated government like his own fiefdom, and characterized his most ethically dubious acts as merely the paternalistic actions of a man who took care of his put-upon constituents. When anyone dared to question his cronyism, he dismissed it as an attack on all Dominicans.
Marty Walsh will spend half of his time in Ireland hanging out with his cousins in Connemara, the other half pressing the flesh up in Donegal and Derry and Belfast and Dublin.
Meanwhile, there’s talk of Marty O’Malley running for president. Can’t wait to hear Hillary suggest she’s more Irish than him.
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Kevin Cullen is a Globe columnist. A version of this essay is part of “The Irish in Massachusetts: Historical Significance, Lasting Legacy” conference at the University of Lowell, Sept. 24-26, presented by UMass Lowell’s Center for Irish Partnerships and Queen’s University Belfast, open to the public. http://www.uml.edu/international-programs/Irish/Irish-in-Massachusetts/