by Mark Bailey
Like many young Irish around him, O’Dowd felt the gravitational pull of America that had moved so many generations of Irish before him. His imagination was fired by Superman comic books, and then by the works of Whitman, Faulkner, and Hemingway, which were brought to his attention by an inspiring teacher named Brother Nolan.
America seemed so endless, so full of possibility, a place where anybody could be anything. To O’Dowd, nothing represented the vast greatness of America more than Muhammad Ali. “I read a Playboy interview with him,” O’Dowd said. “He was unbelievable. Giving up everything for his beliefs, basically. I thought he was an extraordinary person. He was magnificent in terms of what he achieved and what he was challenging. He was a hero. You couldn’t do anything like it in Ireland.”
One of his most vivid memories was waking up before dawn on May 26, 1975, and watching with his father Ali’s much-anticipated second world championship fight against Sonny Liston. They turned on the TV just in time to watch Ali knock out Liston only two minutes into the first round. “We went back to bed 10 minutes later,” O’Dowd said.
In the spring of 1976, when he was twenty-two, he flew to Chicago on a six-month student visa. He was a respectable Gaelic football player, fast on his feet and sturdy enough to absorb the game’s brutal hits. And he found a local team in Chicago that was willing to sponsor his visa and pay one-way airfare for their new Irish recruit.
A couple from Kerry who helped run the team took him in. Later, a teammate invited him to live in his fraternity house at Loyola University during the summer. He found a job in construction with an all-Irish crew, spending his days shoveling mortar into a wheelbarrow in the hot sun. But the thick-necked foreman who had arrived in the United States before him didn’t get on well with the college-educated newcomer. One day their argument—and O’Dowd’s job—ended in a fistfight.
He returned to Ireland that fall and went back to University College Dublin, where he graduated in 1977 with a degree in English and Gaelic. Despite his big dreams of faraway lands, he took a job teaching in an inner-city school in Dublin. He found himself frustrated and dispirited, teaching unruly poor kids who were too hungry to study. His father’s noble profession now seemed like an exercise in keeping order in forty-five-minute chunks. In the summer of 1978 he set off for America again on a new student visa, this time for San Francisco.
A friend had a brother on a Gaelic football team there and they were looking for new blood. California. O’Dowd saw it as the most American of all American places. Besides, he was feeling a little like a hippie anyway with his long hair and beard. San Francisco sounded perfect.
After a stint painting California houses and even starting his own little painting business, O’Dowd decided he wanted to try something more cerebral. As a teenager back in Ireland, he had started a school newspaper. In the United States, O’Dowd was struck by the large Irish immigrant communities in Chicago and San Francisco and how hungry they were for information, not just concerning news back home but also about specific issues they, as Irish Americans, cared about. In the pre-Internet era, many would drive miles to get weeks-old Irish newspapers that had been mailed from overseas. O’Dowd saw an opportunity.
Eventually, his visa expired, and he was officially an illegal immigrant. But in the late 1970s, that seemed more like a detail than a serious offense, and he barely gave it a second thought. After nearly falling through scaffolding to his death while painting, O’Dowd decided it was time to start a new career.
He scraped together $952 with the help of a friend, Tom McDonagh, to start a newspaper. He called it the Irishman and launched the twelve-page first edition on September 14, 1979, with an editorial that he wrote: “This newspaper is born out of a hope that we can act as the link between the various strands in the community and strengthen the bond of birth and upbringing that we all can share.”
O’Dowd already had a clear sense of living in two worlds, the land of his birth and the land of his choice. He rejected the notion that immigrants had to pick one or the other, and he argued that one of the great things about the United States was that it allowed him to be thoroughly American while maintaining his Irish identity.
His strategy for his business, and for the way he wanted to position himself as a bridge between two nations and cultures, rested on three pillars:
Be someone people can trust.
Be well informed.
Harness the untapped power of forty million Irish Americans, and urge them to think beyond St. Patrick’s Day parades to work for the betterment of both nations.
He printed five thousand copies of the Irishman and sold them for fifty cents each, mainly at Irish bars. He was nearly broke most of the time, supplementing his income by freelancing for the Irish Press newspaper in Dublin under legendary editor Tim Pat Coogan, who was a mentor to him.
He had read that 90 percent of new publications fail, but a fear of failure, which holds back so many others, didn’t weigh him down. If this venture didn’t work out he would just move on to the next thing.
He interviewed Charles Manson and César Chávez and kept up with the U.S. news but mainly focused on Irish issues—including the immigration status of so many undocumented Irish. They were trapped without any legal protections and feared that if they went back home for funerals and other family milestones they might not be allowed back in the United States. The response from his immigrant readers was immediate and satisfying.
Along the way, he fell in love and moved in with another Tipperary native and immigrant to the United States, Patricia Harty, whom he had hired to work at the Irishman. He had also gotten himself legal. In 1980 the Irish Press sponsored him for a work visa; and in 1984 he was among several thousand Irish who obtained permanent residency—a green card—through the Donnelly visa program. (He became a U.S. citizen in 1989 and still holds both Irish and U.S. passports.)
In April 1985, after five and a half years of publishing the Irishman, O’Dowd, still broke, was ready for a change. He and Harty moved to New York City, married, and—with a $40,000 loan from a wealthy friend and journalistic pioneer, Brendan Mac Lua, founder of the Irish Post newspaper in England—launched Irish America, the first glossy magazine of its kind.
They sent out direct-mail solicitations to 250,000 people using contact lists borrowed from a wide variety of sources: the Irish Tourist Board magazine, companies that sold Waterford crystal and other Irish goods, and Irish groups including the Ancient Order of Hibernians. O’Dowd sensed that many were “tired of the shamrocks and green beer image” of the Irish in America and would subscribe to a smart magazine devoted to Irish events and issues. To their delight, about 10,000 people responded—a high hit rate for a direct-mail solicitation—all willing to pay $19.95 to subscribe to Irish America, which debuted in November 1985.
Harty recalled being amazed as the checks started showing up at their tiny New York office, including one from Los Angeles Dodgers owner Peter O’Malley.
“I thought, ‘Wow, even the Los Angeles Dodgers believe in us,’ ” she said.
Two years later, O’Dowd and Harty started the Irish Voice, a newspaper aimed primarily at younger Irish immigrants. The paper began covering issues like AIDS in the Irish community and practical problems faced by the undocumented Irish, and it soon became a formidable rival to the more established Irish Echo newspaper that had been around since the 1920s.
O’Dowd was on his way to becoming what Bill Clinton later called “the voice of Irish America for this generation.”
BY 1985, AFTER seven years in the States, O’Dowd felt he understood the complications and contradictions of being an Irish immigrant, and with his publications he made it his mission to help his fellow countrymen and women more fully celebrate their roots and their culture while at the same time embracing America.
“I was a man of two countries, one the land of my birth which I still hankered after, and yet somehow rejected,” he wrote in a 2010 autobiography.
The other was
my adopted home of the United States where I was happy but never fully a part, forever camped outside the mainstream. An immigrant is a stranger in both cultures.
When I returned to Ireland on vacations it had all changed, still recognizable enough for me to be at home, yet an outsider there. When I returned to the U.S., I was from somewhere else, no matter how much I tried to fit in. Emigration forces you to think about who you are but also to regret who you might have been if you stayed behind.
Because of his own experience, O’Dowd had the ability to understand the new arrivals, but he also proved adept at connecting with the more established community, who had ties to Ireland though their parents and grandparents.
He sought out meetings with influential Irish Americans, including Don Keough, then the president of Coca-Cola, whose great-grandfather had left Wexford in famine times. Keough said to him, “Where have you been all my life? I’ve wanted to talk to you.” Keough, who became a mentor to the much younger O’Dowd, told him people wanted to connect with others with similar backgrounds and with their own family history. Keough urged O’Dowd to keep reaching out to remind people they are Irish American and show them how to celebrate it.
“Everybody wants a touchstone. Everybody wants to be grounded,” O’Dowd said. “Here’s a guy with every success in the world, and what he most wanted was to feel part of something that’s unique. And the Irish heritage is pretty unique.”
Keough, who died in 2015, became so involved that he even brought two of the richest men in the world, Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, to Ireland to try to spur economic development there.
In addition to his newspaper and magazine (and later his website, IrishCentral.com), in 1987 O’Dowd started an innovation for which he would also become well known: lists of prominent and influential Irish Americans.
He started with the “Business 100,” a list of the top one hundred Irish American business leaders in America. It was simple to find them: at the time, he said, almost a third of the Fortune 500 CEOs had some Irish roots. What was harder to find was a sense among many of them that their Irish heritage mattered.
“What I was trying to do was forge this sense of Irish identity, in different groups,” he said.
I took it into the realm of Wall Street, business, places where Irish identity wasn’t previously celebrated. I just said, “Here’s your culture. Here’s your history.”
A lot of people have said to me that business people, particularly on Wall Street, don’t care about their heritage. In fact, I found it quite the opposite, and they were very chuffed and very into it when I approached them about their heritage. You know, when you start an interview with the question, “Tell me about your parents,” or “Tell me about your father,” it has a profound impact on the person.
Robert J. McCann, chairman of UBS Americas, who has been honored on O’Dowd’s lists, including the “Irish America Hall of Fame,” said O’Dowd caused him to reflect on his own background and spurred him to a new activism in Irish causes. McCann grew up in Pittsburgh, the son of Irish immigrants who raised their children to focus on their life going forward in America. They didn’t talk much about being Irish or the country they had left. When, for instance, McCann was invited to attend the American Ireland Fund’s annual dinner in the late 1980s, he went because it was good for business, not because of any particular affection for Ireland.
But his perspective changed as he got to know O’Dowd and other influential Irish American leaders, including Pittsburgh native Dan Rooney, who was chairman of the Pittsburgh Steelers and would become the U.S. ambassador to Ireland. “It made me think differently about what it means to be Irish,” McCann said. “I want to be involved in things now.”
McCann said O’Dowd’s first impression can be misleading.
He always kind of looks like an unmade bed. He’s normally 15 minutes late. He talks in that almost whisper of his, and words run together. It took me a couple of years to kind of figure it out, but then I realized: Niall makes all of us who are Irish American better informed, more aware, more sensitive to what is going on actually in Ireland. He’s an incredibly easy person to underestimate. But anybody that does is really making a mistake and missing out.
The impact of what he knows and how he conveys it to you, it makes you want to be better. It makes you want to represent Ireland and your efforts for Ireland better. There’s nothing wrong with a good parade. There’s nothing wrong with a good party. But we Irish are so much more than that. And we tend to underestimate ourselves or not speak boldly about what we are.
McCann eventually became involved with the American Ireland Fund, and he is now a member of its executive committee. He is a driver behind a new Irish Arts Center being built in New York (as well as supporting the Abbey Theatre in Dublin) and a key backer of Narrative 4, a foundation founded by Irish writer Colum McCann. Rather than passively showing up at a few dinners and donating some money, he’s now actively working on projects that channel the talent of Irish America.
And all that started with one of O’Dowd’s lists.
“At first, I didn’t think the lists were that important. But what I’ve come to realize is, everybody likes recognition,” McCann explains. “And there are a lot of people, if you give them an opportunity to become more aware of Ireland and things Irish, they’re happy to take up that opportunity. But you need something to trigger that. People are busy. I’ve seen Niall use these lists to get people involved, and I think it’s a very clever way to do it.”
Maureen Mitchell, president of global sales and marketing for the asset management arm of General Electric, met O’Dowd through his lists: she has been on the “Business 100,” and in 2016 she was named to the magazine’s inaugural “Top 50 Power Women.” She and Irish ambassador Anne Anderson were the keynote speakers at the luncheon celebrating the power women list. “There is this connective tissue that binds us,” Mitchell said. “So many people have Irish surnames and they think about that on occasion. I think what Niall has done through the magazine, the website, the lists, is that he’s given a very disparate community a voice and a sense of self.”
Mitchell’s parents were immigrants from Ireland, and she grew up in an Irish American enclave in Manhattan. She said her family was more focused on America than Ireland, in contrast to some of her neighbors—second or third generation Irish—who did focus on their Irish roots, but in a sort of “holiday Irish” way.
“What Niall has done is bring me back to that Irish community,” Mitchell said. “Absolutely I see my Irishness differently. I’m once more intrigued with it and its impact on me. I will make sure that my children and my new grandchild will have a sense of that as well.”
And this was the goal. Harty—who still edits Irish America despite splitting from O’Dowd after four years of marriage—says that starting the magazine was a way to create a bridge between the two nations and that remains true. So many people she’d met in America called themselves Irish but had never been to Ireland. “For them Ireland was this mythical place,” she said. “I started to realize that you don’t have to be born on the island of Ireland to be Irish. It’s the same plant, just different soil.”
THE IRISH CONNECTOR is also a crusader. O’Dowd uses his publications and stature to advance key causes. For decades one of his top priorities—along with peace in Northern Ireland—was working to help get legal status for undocumented Irish.
In the 1980s, O’Dowd campaigned in his editorials to pressure Congress to create “Donnelly visas,” named after Representative Brian Donnelly of Massachusetts, which would go on to give many Irish immigrants legal status—including O’Dowd. Later, as the number of undocumented Irish was rising in New York and many U.S cities, due to the fact that Ireland’s economic fortunes were falling, O’Dowd raised the profile of his crusade and became what Bruce Morrison, a former U.S. congressman from Connecticut, called “the trumpet, the mouthpiece,” for the Irish immigration reform movement.
While in office Morr
ison pushed through an immigration reform bill that led to forty-eight thousand people getting visas—known as “Morrison visas”— in the early 1990s. While he used to say he could get a free drink in any Irish pub in America because of all the undocumented workers who benefited from his help, Morrison also said that O’Dowd played a key role in promoting his bill. In addition to writing about immigration constantly in his newspaper, the Irish Voice, O’Dowd personally lobbied members of Congress, including Senator Kennedy.
The Irish Voice explained the political fight, gave legal advice to the undocumented, listed resources available to them, and editorialized about the need for elected officials to help. The undocumented could pick up a copy of the paper in bars and Irish centers across America. A popular column called the Green Card, written by Debbie McGoldrick, was a must-read for thousands.
McGoldrick, the daughter of Irish immigrants who grew up on Long Island, had gotten her first job out of college at the Irish Echo. She remembered thinking that O’Dowd’s startup newspaper would be a flash in the pan, “a rag that might last three months.” But in 1991, the Irish Voice had only gotten stronger, and she joined. She was passionate about the issues the paper covered and never tired of reporting on them. (In 1996, she married O’Dowd, and three years later they had a daughter, named Alana.)
In December 2005, O’Dowd created the Irish Lobby for Immigration Reform, an organization that now has twenty-eight chapters across the country. He wanted to stop hiding the fact that there were so many undocumented and put it front and center. He organized hundreds of Irish people from across the country to descend on Capitol Hill, knocking on doors and demanding action from Congress. But the mood of the country was turning, and it was getting harder to push any immigration reform law through Congress.
O’Dowd mobilized Irish Americans behind an immigration reform bill sponsored by Kennedy and Arizona Republican senator John McCain. In 2007, hundreds of people swarmed Capitol Hill wearing “Legalize the Irish” T-shirts. O’Dowd’s publications pushed hard. But in the end, the Kennedy-McCain immigration bill of 2007 faltered. It would mark the beginning of a far more hostile and divisive atmosphere in Washington toward immigrants.
