By Greg O’Brien
Special to the BIR

The distinguished Irish poet and playwright W.B. Yeats once posed the challenge: “to hold, in a single thought, reality and justice.”Edris B. Kelley — a former president of one of the city’s oldest Irish organizations. the Eire Society of Boston, which promotes Irish culture through the study of the arts, sciences, literature, language and history of Ireland —contemplates the challenge every day. She also never has forgotten what her maternal grandmother, Eileen Walsh O’Halloran from Stonybatter, outside Dublin, instructed her as a child: “Make sure you say something nice to someone every day, then tell me what you said.”

Old school to the core, Edris, raised first in Randolph, then in the Back Bay in the 1940s, has been encouraging individuals and seeking out reality and justice for decades, with the help of some prominent close friends who have helped shape her character as much as her grandmother and the stone walls of Kilkenny.

Kelley is a fine example of the impact of role models in a life. For more than 30 years, she has been a friend of Padraig O’Malley, the noted author and the John Joseph Moakley Professor of International Peace and Reconciliation at UMass Boston’s John W. McCormack Graduate School of Policy Studies. The Dublin-born O’Malley, a Senior Fellow in the Center for Development and Democracy, has accomplished as much as anyone in his day for the cause of reconciliation and peace in Northern Ireland, South Africa, and other places around the word. “I have been a supporter of his work, which has stretched my horizons far beyond what I had ever imagined,” says Kelley in the kitchen of her Marshfield home.
Edris Kelley
Brendan Rogers, whom Kelley met about 35 years ago in Boston, is also a supporter of O’Malley’s work. The former vice consul for the Irish Consulate in Boston, today he is director of the Development Cooperation Division of the Department of Foreign Affairs in Ireland.

Late last year, Kelley reconnected Rogers and O’Malley over dinner at the Charles Hotel, and the reunion ultimately resulted in plans for the second annual conference of the Forum for Cities in Transition, held two months ago in Derry, the flash point for The Troubles in Northern Ireland in the past. The Northern Ireland Peace Process took center stage at the forum, and senior negotiators from all sides of the conflict shared with an international audience “how they concluded that violence would only perpetuate killing,” reported the Londonderry Sentinel.

Belfast, Beirut, Kirkuk, Kaduna, Nicosia, Jerusalem, Haifa, Mitte, Mitrovicë/Kosovska Mitrovica, Mostar, Nicosia, and Ramallah were all represented at the forum, which O’Malley established in 2009. The sessions work on the principle that cities that are in conflict or have emerged from conflict are in the best position to help other cities in the same situation, noted the Sentinel.
“Had you not let me know Brendan was in town last September, and asked me to join you, the Derry conference would have been stillborn,” O’Malley wrote Kelley in an e-mail invitation. “You will be our guest of honor.”

Not bad for a retired Marshfield teacher who taught early childhood classes for 34 years. Rounding our Kelley’s trilogy of male supporters is Phil Johnston, a fellow Marshfield resident, former New England Administrator for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services under President Clinton, former Secretary of Health and Human Services under Gov. Michael Dukakis, a five-term Massachusetts lawmaker, and former head of the Massachusetts Democratic Party.

But don’t get giddy about the influence of the accomplished men in her life, Kelley, a strong Gaelic woman, told the Boston Irish Reporter that her grandfather, Padraig O’Halloran, raised in the parish of Barna outside Galway, was a highly intelligent man. “He did everything my grandmother told him!”

For the first five years of her life, Kelley lived in Randolph with her grandparents, who greatly assisted her parents in child-rearing. Kelley’s mother, Katherine (O’Halloran) was 18 years old when Edris was born. Her father, Joseph Bradford, a parsimonious individual from the Back Bay with “movie star” looks, named her after an impressive black lecturer he had encountered at MIT, Mohammad Idris, who later became the first King of Lybia, reigning from 1951 to 1969 before being deposed by a coup of Libyan army officers led by Moammar Khadafy.

Suffice it to say that Edris (Bradford) Kelley, who was placed as an infant in a dresser draw that served as a bassinette in her grandparents’ bedroom, had humble beginnings, but through the love, loyalty, and legacy of those around her she became an individual of great distinction in her own way—not so much in monetary terms or professional accolades, but in ways that would make the poet Yeats proud.

She learned through “osmosis,” Kelley concedes.

After emigrating to Boston, Kelley’s grandmother worked as a nanny on Beacon Hill for the Honeywell family; her grandfather, a man with a thick Irish accent, was head janitor at Boston Gear Works on Hancock Street in Quincy. The couple raised six children, with Edris being ten years younger than any of her surrogate siblings. “They instilled love, caring, and confidence in me,” says Kelley, who later went to live with her parents and two sisters, Brenda and Martha, in Boston. Edris’s grandparents, with children grown and out of the house, moved to the Bradford family home on Beacon Street where they continued a “cradle-to-the-grave” caring of Kelley, so much so that they purchased a cemetery plot for her in Wollaston so she could one day be buried next to them—coming full circle, as they say, in Ireland.

They also provided Kelley with a great love of Ireland. “They did so by example, not wearing it on their sleeve,” she says. “They taught me about the culture, beauty, language, and passion of Ireland.”

Kelley thrived in the Back Bay, playing softball outside Fenway Park, roller skating in the Esplanade, attending Notre Dame Academy in Boston, Mt. St. Joseph’s boarding school in Brighton, the Wyndham School on Marlborough Street, and, later, Boston Teachers College on Huntington Avenue.

There she fell “madly in love” with Robert Kelley. The two married, moved to Quincy, then Marshfield, having three children along the way—Rhonda, Dianne and Roberta. She now has four grandchildren—Morgan, Ryan, Fionn, and Jack.

Consistent with her enduring urge to teach, Kelley later earned her teaching degree at Bridgewater State College and a master’s in education from Cambridge College. She retired from teaching eight years ago after her husband passed away. In recent years, she has served as a Marshfield Housing Authority Commissioner, and has been involved in the Marshfield Boys and Girls Club, the North River Art Society, and the Marshfield Democratic Town Committee.

Still not done in her search for reality and justice, the retired teacher went to work at the UMass Gerontology Institute, then through a friend, Rose Sullivan, was introduced to Henry Weldon of the Eire Society of Boston, “a grandfather type, who provided me with a deeper education of Ireland, got rid of all the leprechaun stuff, and gave me a more formal understanding of what Ireland was all about.”

She was hooked on the Eire Society from the start, later becoming a member of the organization’s board of directors and Society president for three years. She is still active on the board. Each year the society awards its Gold Medal to individuals who have greatly contributed to the Erie Society’s mission. Recipients in the past have included President John F. Kennedy, the film-makers John Ford and John Huston, the Irish actresses Siobhan McKenna and Maureen O’Hara, the Irish poet Seamus Heaney, former U.S. Ambassadors to Ireland William Shannon and Jean Kennedy Smith, former speakers of the U.S. House of Representatives John W. McCormack and Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill, Irish President Mary Robinson, Kelley’s friend, Padraig O’Malley, and Edward W. Forry, publisher of the Boston Irish Reporter.

The society’s goal, as noted on its website (eiresociety.org), is to raise awareness of the many Irish contributions to civilization and the work of the Irish for the advancement of American ideals. Established in 1937, the society over the years has hosted more than 1,000 lectures, screenings, opening nights and receptions, and has cooperated over four decades with Irish consular and diplomatic missions, given its support to Irish hospitals, educational ventures, ecumenical and peace-seeking projects, and creative enterprises too numerous to count.

In the balance, the society endeavors to avoid clichés of any type—never holding a St. Patrick’s Day function and printing its letterhead in black or royal blue, not emerald green. There is indeed a concern that without an education of Irish issues and culture, in time, perhaps generations from now, being Irish in Boston will be a matter of having an apostrophe in a name or a pint at the Eire Pub. “We try to dispel the stereotypes all the time,” says Kelley. “We’re working hard to provide an understanding of the substance of being Irish.”

In many ways, that substance is Edris B. Kelley, a woman who since 1970 has traveled to Ireland to see family at least once a year, who gives the best she has in faith, love, and humor every day of her life, who still says something nice to someone every day, and who still sends out handwritten thank you letters—not e-mails, twits, but letters.

“If someone stops for a few minutes to think of you, pick out a card, write a personal note and mail it, that’s a statement of caring,” she says. “It should not always be about convenience in life; it ought to be about genuine caring. And for that you have to work at it every day.”

Kelley does, no doubt, and in that vein is as Irish as the poet Yeats.

Greg O’Brien is president of Stony Brook Group, a publishing and political/communications firm based on Cape Cod. The author/editor of several books, he writes for several regional and national publications.