Following is an excerpt from “The Bostonian: Life in an Irish American Political Family” by Larry Donnelly, a Boston Irish columnist and media contributor on politics, current affairs, and law in Ireland and the US. It will be launched locally on Fri., Jan. 7, 7:30 pm at the Irish Cultural Center of New England in Canton.
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“Welcome to the family business, kid!”

My father bellowed out these words from our front door and they rang in my ears as I strolled somewhat apprehensively down the street I grew up on, armed with a clipboard, two pens and several sheets of officially headed paper from the town clerk’s office. 

I was on a mission to obtain a mere 25 signatures from neighbours in order to get my name on the ballot for the lowliest of elected positions in Massachusetts local government: representative town meeting member.

I was just 22 years old, having completed an undergraduate degree and moved back to my family home while pursuing a Law degree in Boston. Politics had long been my passion, euphemistically, and my obsession, in reality, from an unusually young age. And this was the first actual foray ‘in the arena’ for me. 

It was something I had long been encouraged to do and had expressed a serious interest in, but the idea of it had always been far more romantic than the drudgery – setting out to knock on familiar and unfamiliar doors, looking to obtain the assistance of those who answered on that Saturday in the winter of 1997.

Although Dad never sugar-coated what any political candidacy entailed, I had shrugged it off as no big deal beforehand. Like many children, sons in particular, I should have listened more carefully to my father. Dad had more experience than almost anyone in this regard. His mother’s side of the family had been involved in electoral politics in the city of Boston and the state of Massachusetts since emigrating from the west of Ireland around the start of the 20th century.

My father’s great-uncles, Frank and Johnny Kelly, were legendary graduates of the old school. As a unit, they were once described as rather unsavoury characters, who the then ruling Boston Brahmin WASPish class ‘feared would get control of [what had always been their] city and run it into the ground’. The Boston Brahmins were the descendants of mainly British landowners who were among the first people to come to the ‘new world’ and who retained a stranglehold on wealth and power in the city. They were often sceptical of new immigrants, the Irish in particular. 

Frank Kelly was, in his era, the youngest-ever Boston City Councillor elected. He later served as the Lieutenant Governor and Attorney General of Massachusetts. Johnny was also a Boston City Councillor and was eventually chosen by his peers to be president of that body.

In the next generation, Dad’s younger brother, Brian Donnelly, my godfather, spent three terms in the Massachusetts House of Representatives, seven terms in the United States House of Representatives and subsequently worked closely with Ambassador Madeleine Albright at the United Nations, prior to being appointed United States Ambassador to Trinidad and Tobago by President Bill Clinton.

In short, politics really was the family business and, since I was young, I had – with no small amount of ambition or ego – envisaged myself as the one destined to carry on a proud tradition. One thing Dad constantly stressed was the respect he had for politicians who started at the bottom and worked their way up. As such, he wouldn’t have me trying to parlay what was a strong name brand into skipping entry-level politics. In truth, however, there was another, far bigger obstacle to my going to the front of the queue. It was one of my own making. And it’s one that may shock those who have heard me talk or read what I’ve written about American politics over the past two decades.

I was a fully signed-up, card-carrying member of the Republican Party.

Strangely, it was my father’s oft-expressed disgust with the Democratic Party that at least partly led me to willfully abandon a central institution in our lives and in the lives of so many others in the Boston Irish community. Above all, it was the huge distance that had sprung up between the party and the other main institution for most Boston Irish, the Roman Catholic Church, which gave rise to the discontent. My father was far from alone in finding himself isolated from national and local Democrats who embraced the socially liberal agenda that rapidly gained currency from the 1960s on.

Our family may have been Americans, and proud of our Irish heritage and close familial ties there, but above all, we were Catholics. As such, it was very hard for us collectively to stomach the divergence between what leading Democrats, including Senator Edward Kennedy, said about abortion (to name one topic) and what our Church teaches us. As a young, practising Catholic, it enraged me. And upon discovering what Republicans – Pat Buchanan was one whose speeches during his insurgent 1992 primary challenge to President George HW Bush and regular media contributions I found compelling – had to say, I gravitated to the GOP and joined the party shortly after my 18th birthday. This was my version of teenage rebellion. Sad but true.