For a few hours, Marty Walsh was just another Yank on holiday, enjoying the sights and sounds of Clifden, one of Co. Galway’s loveliest and liveliest towns. Boston’s 47 year-old mayor had just enjoyed a sailboat ride and a quiet lunch with his partner Lorrie Higgins and two other traveling companions on a brilliant Saturday morning in Connemara.

Now, as he strolled through the scenic village with other tourists, he was incognito in blue jeans, sneakers, and an old-school Red Sox ball cap; mercifully, he was off the grid, stopping to buy scones and desserts for his mother at a local bakery called Walsh’s.

The respite would not last long.

Later that evening, he began a series of public events with a Mass celebrated in his mother’s home village of Rosmuc, followed by a reception that went late into the night.

The first five days of Walsh’s first trip abroad as mayor in September were a blur of bonfires, parties, church services, and endless photo opportunities— with the mayor getting rock star treatment at every stop. In a few places, the frenzy to get photos with him was such that he had to be hustled into a waiting car, often by his cousin, Winnie Curran, a Boston Police sergeant who is accompanying the mayor on the trip.

Martin J. Walsh may not be a household name throughout Ireland, at least not yet. But in the west of Ireland, and especially in the southern parts of Connemara where John Walsh and Mary O’Malley were born and raised, he is a celebrity of historic importance, a modern-day chieftain with a deeply personal connection to thousands of people, most of whom still speak Irish as their primary language. The Gaeltacht, as that Irish-speaking region is called here, is most certainly Marty Walsh country.

It clearly tested the patience of his security team at times, but the mayor himself cheerfully accommodated every request.

“It’s such a big thing for everyone in both villages. They’re just super excited, especially the kids who have seen the news in the papers and on the radio. I think they view it as a chance to meet somebody famous. I don’t think of myself as someone famous, but they do. And even some of the adults, they know the family and my uncles all these years. They’re overwhelmed.”

Said Walsh: “I was born in St. Margaret’s Hospital. My home is Dorchester, Massachusetts. But I am also from Rosmuc and Carna in Connemara.”

It was the theme he carried throughout his public remarks in the region: The people here claim Marty as their own, and vice-versa.
•••

Martin J. Walsh was indeed born in Dorchester’s St. Margaret’s hospital on April 10, 1967. His parents, Mary (nee O’Malley) and John Walsh, later had a second son, John, now 44. Both parents left Connemara in the late 1950s. In 1962, they met at a dance hall in Roxbury and were married in 1965— settling in Dorchester, where John’s older brother Pat Walsh was becoming a leading member of the Laborer’s Union Local 223.

“He would never, ever even think of moving somewhere else,” said Marty’s mother Mary. “I moved all this way to marry a man who grew up 20 miles from me,” she laughs.

In 2000, Pat Walsh told the Reporter why he and his younger brother left their hometown Callowfeenish, near Carna, in the first place.

“Things were very hard in Ireland back then. They weren’t as good in this country as they are now, either. You had to find your own work, ” explained Pat, who did just that— working his way to the top of Local 223. Pat’s son Marty— the mayor’s cousin— took over as head of the laborer’s local when his dad retired.

John followed his older brother into the union and together they helped make the Southie-based chapter one of the region’s strongest and most Irish of trade unions. John earned the nickname ‘Doc’ — in part for his habit of caring for ailing young workers who, just on ocassion, might show up for work looking a bit green around the gills. When he wasn’t on the clock, he and his fellow laborers would often work overtime — and without pay — on labors of love. One of his prized possessions is a plaque given him by the old pastor of St. Margaret’s Church — Fr. Dunn— for his “unique contributions” to restoring the church back in the 1970s.

Both Pat and John are gone now. John passed first in 2010— and his son the state representative recalled at the time how much his father’s love for the bloodsport of Boston politics informed his own career track.

“He absolutely loved, loved, loved local politics his whole life,” then-Rep. Walsh said, recalling his dad’s joy in Martin’s 1997 election to the legislature. “And for his own son to win… it was easily his proudest moment.”


Pat Walsh passed away a year after his brother in November 2012. On his deathbed, Pat had an election day visit from Elizabeth Warren, who came to his home to say farewell to one of the key members of the union coalition that supported her run.

“I’m not sure that he really knew who she was at first,” recalled Marty Walsh, who was there for the brief meeting. “Pat was pretty far along. But she came up to his bed and grabbed his hand and said, ‘Pat, I’m Elizabeth Warren. And I just wanted to say thank you.’ ”

“Congratulations,” Pat told her, although the polls would not close for several more hours.

“Pat knew at 2:30 that day that she’d be the next senator,” said Rep. Walsh.
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For folks from Dorchester, “Marty” is now the vessel of their own aspirations: the kid from the three-decker on Taft Street who has beaten cancer, a drive-by bullet blast, and “the disease” to grasp his city’s ultimate brass ring. He has become living, breathing proof that we can tame our own demons and even harness them for the purposes of a greater good— like ministering to an emerging generation of Bostonians whose futures are similarly imperiled by bullets and booze.

The confident, poised, and at times eloquent Marty Walsh who breezed through his Conte Forum address on Jan. 6, 2014 morning is a far cry from the hesitant, harried candidate I first encountered on a King Street sidewalk in the winter of 1997.

He had come to Pope’s Hill—then foreign turf for the Savin Hill upstart – to give his first press conference in the special election to succeed Jim Brett in the 13th Suffolk rep’s seat. Walsh was nervous and edgy. His remarks were unremarkable – read from a 12-page “public safety” platform pamphlet — but they weren’t what was important then. He was there to fly the flag in Neponset’s Ward 16, to eat into his rivals’ base, and to project the strength of a candidate who had managed to maneuver himself into an enviable spot: He was suddenly the front-runner, having cleared the deck of all challengers from his base in Savin Hill.

The 29 year-old Walsh was eager to make friends outside of his comfort zone. Unshackled from the tension of a hard-fought, six-way race, his natural, good-natured style began to show itself more. He threw himself into the work of being a lawmaker, but more importantly, as a go-to person for people with problems.

“Marty chose people over power and by empowering other people he empowered himself,” says Danny Ryan, an early political mentor and conscience. “He’s addicted to helping people.”

Under Tom Finneran, who was midway through his tenure as House Speaker when Walsh arrived, he was able to deliver big ticket items to his district, including long-delayed funding to build out the 72-acre Pope John Paul II Park in Neponset. Walsh played a supporting, but important, role in compelling the MBTA to pay for major upgrades to Dorchester’s four Red Line stations. And he put the heat — and a heaping dose of Irish guilt— on the old MDC to get Morrissey Boulevard’s crumbling Beades drawbridge replaced, dramatically telling the Reporter in 1999: “I don’t want my parents driving over the bridge when it collapses.”

As disciplined as he was in his personal life, Rep. Walsh sometimes seemed to flail about politically. In Finneran’s wake, he backed the wrong horse in two House leadership fights. In January 2002, he went public with his interest in becoming Suffolk County Registrar of Deeds — hardly a job coveted by a politician with higher aspirations. A week later, he pulled back from the brink— and despite being offered the job by Secretary of State William Galvin— opted to stay on course in the House.

Despite sometimes tough coverage from his local newspaper on these and other matters, Marty Walsh never shut off the lines of communication or sought to exact revenge. He can get angry— and he’ll let you know he is. But he has always come back to earth and acted professionally. He seemed grudgingly to accept— and expect— our scrutiny, and the criticism that would follow. He knew he would get a fair shot at getting his side out. It’s safe to assume that as he takes on his newest challenge, minor tussles with watchdog reporters will no doubt be counted as an important part of his political education.

More often than not, the Reporter tracked Walsh’s career with routine reports about bills filed and campaigns won. He showed guts on many occasions and defied expectations. He defied an unhappy civic association crowd that wanted to block the Pine Street Inn from converting a dilapidated six-family house on Pleasant Street into transitional housing for the homeless. In the fight over building dorms on the UMass Boston campus, he defied his fellow union chieftains and stood alongside his Savin Hill neighbors in opposing dorms. And he would tell anyone who cared to listen— well before the Goodridge decision— that he’d happily vote to give gay men and women the right to marry.

“If you want to label me a liberal because I’m supportive of people who are trying to get sober and trying to recover, and trying to stop infectious diseases, they can label me as a liberal all day if they want,” Walsh told former Reporter editor Jim O’Sullivan, now a political editor for the Globe, in a 2004 profile. “Because I’m a white Irish Catholic, people will assume that I’m gonna be a conservative, and I think that’s unfair because people don’t get an opportunity to talk to me and ask me my positions on the issues, or talk about issues. I think it’s kind of an unfair label.”

Walsh’s best quality— the one that makes him so likeable — could be his greatest potential weakness in the mayor’s job: He’s a pleaser. He wants to leave everyone smiling. He seeks to defuse confrontation and focus on the things people have in common. This instinct makes him eminently electable, but it harbors the risk that candidate John Connolly sought to define in last year’s mayoral race: That Walsh won’t be tough enough to say no when it counts, if it means losing a friend.

It says here that Walsh has it in him.

•••
On his recent trip to Carna, Walsh attended a Sunday morning Mass at St. Mary’s Church in Carna. Just inside the church doors, two memorial Mass cards with the faces of John and Pat Walsh were posted in a frame for the mayor to see as he entered. It was one of many reminders throughout this leg of Walsh’s trip that this American’s roots— and his political success— are very much a part of Connemara’s future as well.

Two days later, Walsh was back in Carna to lay a cornerstone for a planned Emigrant Commemorative Center on the site of what is now an empty, dilapidated schoolhouse overlooking the sea. The mayor pledged to help support the centre by working to raise funds and awareness in the Boston Irish community.

“You know the story of people leaving the west of Ireland. You know my parents’ story and as I look out across the room, it’s your story, your family’s story,” Walsh told an overflow crowd of several hundred who packed into a tent next to the ruined building, which dates to the late 19th century. “The people left the west of Ireland, not to get away from the land, as people thought it was, but they actually left the west of Ireland to strengthen their own land here in their native areas,” he said.

Then, to great applause, he pledged: “I’m here today to tell everyone that I’m here to commit to you that we will build this center and we will open this center.”

He added: “You can never forget where you came from. That’s why I’m here today.”