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A few words in tribute to my father

Monday, May 13th, 2013

I’ve been quiet of late, not because of any lack of things to talk about in the diaspora realm, but because I’ve been busy with some other things, mostly having to do with my father – I minded him for about six months before he died this winter, and since then I’ve been dealing with all the things involved with tying up the affairs of a well-lived eighty-year life.

I think my dad deserves a mention on this site. The experiences of him and my mother, both emigrants from the 1950s-era outflow, were the inspiration for my initial interest in emigration. They always remained as proud of being Irish people as they were of being American citizens, switching their passports to blue and raising their children in suburban New York but always calling Ireland “home”.  They – like so many others of their generation – maintained their loyalty to Ireland throughout their whole lives. If I’m honest, I’ve sometimes questioned whether this loyalty  has always been fully deserved, and it’s probably this question more than any other that has inspired my work on this site. But that’s for another day.

I was really moved by what one of my friends wrote to me after my dad’s death: “Your Dad was part of the best generation to represent us in the States – they repaid their hosts by working hard, raising families and living by good values. You can be very proud of him.” And I am.

I’ll just repost his obituary here:

Columbus (Colm) Bowden died in New City, New York on Jan. 19, 2013, a week before his 81st birthday. Colm was born in Balleen, Freshford, Co. Kilkenny, Ireland on Jan. 27, 1932. He came to New York in 1958, after a few years working in England for the Ford auto company. He married Teresa Philbin from Castlebar, Co. Mayo, in 1964, moving to New City to raise their family in 1968. Colm spent most of his working life as a New York City bus driver. After retiring from MABSTOA in 1987, he worked for the Town of Clarkstown for ten years.

Colm was much loved by his daughters, grandchildren and many friends and family. He will be remembered for his kind spirit, loyal friendship, generous heart and gregarious laughter. An enthusiastic card-player, he enjoyed frequent games of 25 at the Irish Center in Blauvelt, where he also spent numerous happy Sunday mornings cheering for the Kilkenny hurling team. He maintained strong ties to his native country, visiting relatives and old neighbors often; he phoned his sister Lena every week until the end of his life. Colm was very proud to have been named the Kilkennyman of the Year in 1985 by New York’s Kilkenny Association. An avid reader, he always kept up with the news from home, often with clippings sent by his late sister Kit, and the daily papers. A faithful Catholic, he was also a lifelong Pioneer after taking ‘the pledge’ at 18. After his retirement, he joined the Clarkstown Senior Citizens’ Club, where he made many new friends.

Colm loved travelling. Happiest behind the wheel, he drove to explore America and visit friends in such far away places as Montana, Florida and Canada’s Prince Edward Island. He celebrated his 70th birthday with a train trip across the country to San Francisco and his 75th birthday with a journey that fulfilled his lifelong dream of visiting New Zealand and Australia.

Colm is survived by two sisters in Ireland, Lena Downey and Lil Cahill; his daughters, Eileen Feeley of Alexandria, Virginia and Noreen Bowden of New City; and his two grandchildren, James Colm Feeley and Katherine Teresa Feeley. He will also be missed by his many nieces and nephews in Ireland and America. He was predeceased by his sisters, Margaret, May, and Kit (Sister Ethna), and his brother, John. His beloved wife, Teresa, died in 1986.

Back to normal programming soon.

Tweeting for Ireland

Sunday, October 7th, 2012

For the last seven days, I’ve tweeted under the @Ireland account on Twitter. Run by WorldIrish.com, the account is curated by a different person every week. It’s a relatively new idea, modeled after the @Sweden account I was pleased to be the first person to tweet from the Americas.

The week was great fun, with chats on topics including the Irish in South America, the visit of the Canadian Immigration Minister, the Late Late Show, the Irish at war around the world, emigrant voting and more.

New curators are needed every week, so if you’d like to take the helm for a week, see how on WorldIrish.com.

Reflecting, post-Harvard

Monday, October 1st, 2012

It’s high time I got back to my blogging: I graduated with my Masters in Public Administration from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government a few months ago. It was a grueling but wonderful experience that I will treasure for the rest of my life. One of the great things about it was the way the program enabled us all to pursue our various interests and passions, so I had the luxury of studying issues around democratic participation by emigrant citizens. I’ll pop up a few of the results of that work in the next few posts.

One of the extraordinary things about the Kennedy School, apart from the superb professors and my talented classmates, was the fact that, of course, the Kennedy school is named after that great icon of Irish-America, John F. Kennedy, and he is invoked everywhere. In an Irish context, the JFK thing sometimes seems slightly parochial (“There’s the descendent of the man from New Ross, walking the streets of Galway!”), but of course his vision had a global impact, and still has the power to inspire action around the world today.

As the child of Irish immigrants, to be able to study at such an institution  meant a lot to me. My parents left school at the age of 13 and 14; My father didn’t love school, but my razor-sharp mother  left school because she had leave home to work to support her family. She was so hungry for learning that she used to read my textbooks when I was a kid, and she often spoke how she hoped to go back to school eventually. She never got to do that; she didn’t live to see me graduate high school. While I was at Harvard, I often thought of my mother’s unfulfilled dream, and it added a bit of sadness to my pride that I had made it there. I reflected a lot how I had gotten there, and how my parents’ journeys from the Ireland of the 1950s and 1960s had paved the way. I am grateful to them.

Anyway, I’m back to the blogging and eager to get started again!

A bit of a hiatus, but I’m still here!

Friday, October 7th, 2011

I’ve been on hiatus for the past couple of months, owing to a rather dramatic change in circumstances. I’ve moved to Boston for a year to study at Harvard, where I’m working on a mid-career Master’s in Public Administration at the Kennedy School of Government.

I’m sorry to be missing all the excitement of this year in Ireland, what with the presidential election and all, but I’ll be back before long. In the meantime, my academic programme is a really wonderful experience – I’m studying alongside 200 other students from all over the world (something like 70 countries – including students from India, China, Japan, Egypt, the UK, Ethiopia, Croatia, Norway, Canada, Ivory Coast, Israel, Palestine, Nigeria, and lots more). Among our ranks are former (and future) government ministers, social entrepreneurs, soldiers, diplomats, technology consultants, journalists, college professors and many more interesting people of all sorts.

I was surprised to find that I seem to be the only one of the 1,000 students in the entire Kennedy School who has arrived from Ireland – though I have found two other Irish graduate students here at Harvard, both in the Graduate School of Education, one a teacher freshly arrived from Meath, the other a long-time resident of San Francisco.

While I’m here I’m studying things like economics, leadership, negotiations, advocacy, and policy change. So far, it feels like a wonderful gift, and I feel really lucky to be part of this class.

I’m still following all the events in Ireland, though I’ve been too busy to post of late. As I settle in I’ll be able to post a bit, although I’ll likely be quieter than usual on here until I graduate in May.

Should we appoint prominent diaspora members to the Seanad?

Monday, May 30th, 2011

Irish-American businessman Tom McEnery has made a number of suggestions about how better to engage the diaspora in assisting Ireland with its economic crisis. Mr McEnery, an author, businessman, and  former mayor of San Jose, lectures at Santa Clara University and Stanford University. He wrote an article in the Irish Times advocating greater engagement with the Irish diaspora:

It is time to think and act anew. Irish officials must implement solutions quickly, before it’s too late, redouble efforts at creating wealth in emerging companies and harness the untapped resources of the Irish diaspora.

There is much talk of this vast diaspora, but its resources are not being utilised. Until the Irish leadership sees that taoiseachs delivering platitudes and bowls of shamrocks will not substitute for meaningful engagement, it never will be utilised.

His first two suggestions are focused on economic development:

Merge IDA, Enterprise Ireland and other agencies involved in economic development into one agency, name a leader, maybe an American chief executive like Craig Barrett, and support innovation, jobs and company formation. Then measure performance, not press releases;

Put whatever resources you can muster into worldwide venture capital funds that have a link beyond the monetary to Ireland, a real eco-system, and make the creation of companies, not reports, their core product;

The most interesting of the suggestions is the last:

Instead of abolishing the Seanad, select members who serve at no salary but chosen only from the Irish diaspora. From Silicon Valley select the likes of Craig Barrett, John Hartnett, founder of the ITLG and the Wilde Angel Fund, Conrad Burke of Innovalight and John O Ryan, the inventor behind the dynamic Rovi Corporate.

Add in Maria Shriver, Gabriel Byrne, Chuck Feeney, Niall O’Dowd and Declan Kelly too. And then from across the US, Australia, Canada and globally pick more such people and use them. Don’t lose them in a jumble of compliments and forums. As I once noted, I often found more wisdom in a conversation over a pint in McDaid’s or an hour at San Jose’s Irish Innovation Center than a day of speeches at Farmleigh. Implement, implement, implement as if your future depended on it – for it surely do.

I appreciate the spirit behind this suggestion: there are many in the diaspora who are willing and able to take a philanthropic approach to Ireland, and who would surely do us much good. I also appreciate the desire for greater engagement that is driving this idea, the generosity and good will among the diaspora that it highlights, and the innovative approach that is so sorely needed in rethinking the relationship between Ireland and the Irish abroad.

But I think it’s a highly problematic idea, for the following reasons:

1. Appointing, rather than electing, more representatives to the Seanad would reinforce the undemocratic nature of that body.
2. Asking people to serve in an unpaid capacity will ensure that only those of significant means will be able to do so. Not every talented person is wealthy enough to do substantial amounts of unpaid work.
3. These kinds of appointments would reinforce one of the most fundamental distortions in Irish society: the distinction between the insiders and the outsiders. One of the keys to the way the potential for success is often unleashed in the Irish abroad is that when Irish people leave, they often find themselves less bound by the restrictions of class and connection. Recent efforts to implement top-down networks and give government greater access to the most successful of the Irish abroad are aimed at establishing a hierarchy among the Irish abroad that the establishment here understand and are more comfortable with. This is not a step forward.

All the same, we’re blessed here in Ireland, in having a large international base of people around the globe who are interested in assisting us. We haven’t got the relationship right yet, but the more ideas we can throw around the better. I believe that we should favour those ideas that move us toward greater equality and more democratic representation of all of our citizens.

Senator David Norris wants overseas voting rights in presidential elections

Friday, May 20th, 2011

Presidential hopeful David Norris, who was profiled in a recent Wall Street Journal article as he toured the US on a fundraising visit, has come out strongly in favour of emigrant voting rights – but only in presidential elections. He told the Irish Post in the UK:

“I definitely and absolutely believe that Irish people living outside of the country should be able to decide who the next President of the country is. The old saying of ‘no representation without taxation’ may apply to a general election but there is no real basis for it in terms of electing a President in this instance.�?

He added:

“The Presidency is removed from Government, the executive and the area of taxation so giving Irish people abroad a voice would be a great thing, the right thing. It would keep us all organically connected and I feel very strongly that the vote should be extended to all Irish people everywhere whether they’re in Ireland or not.�?

Senator Norris has spoken in the Seanad in favour of emigrant voting rights in the past. His emphasis on the issue of taxation is puzzling, however, given that

• no other developed nation besides the US taxes its expats on money earned abroad (The US required the payment of taxation on foreign-earned income long before it granted voting rights to expats – and voting is not conditional on the payment of taxes),
• the payment of taxation is not required for voting rights for Irish residents,
• some emigrants do pay taxes, and
• the requirement of the payment of taxes in exchange for a vote is a profoundly undemocratic principle that calls for a return to the time when only men of property could vote.

There is some irony in the fact that Senator Norris was visiting the US in part to fundraise for his campaign: it’s another indicator of the way Ireland and various segments of Irish society regularly seek economic aid from the diaspora. It might not be taxation, but it’s invaluable.

If Irish emigrants were given the vote in presidential elections, it would surely benefit the effervescent, high-profile Senator Norris. It’s just a shame to see even a long-time supporter of emigrant voting rights can be influenced by a perspective that would link taxation and voting in a way that  appears to hold no weight anywhere else in the developed world.

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