Storm Brewing over Ground Zero Cross

You can hear a piece I did for RTE Radio on the lawsuit filed by American Atheists over the inclusion of rubble in the shape of a Christian Cross in the 9/11 Memorial Museum.

There is also an update on latest in the DSK sex assault case.


http://www.rte.ie/news/2011/0728/morningireland.html

Jim O'Malley: An Irish connection to an extraordinary story

Well-known New York immigration lawyer Jim O’Malley tells Vincent Murphy about his part in the extraordinary story of Deo, a student who escapes genocide in Burundi, only to return years later on a mission to help his people.

The airport policemen wanted to see Deo’s passport and visa and ticket. Deo wanted to know where he should go to pick up his bag.

The policemen looked surprised. One of them asked another question. The woman translates for Deo, “The man asks, ‘Do you know where you are?’”

“Yes,” said Deo, who speaks only French. “New York City.”

She broke into a smile, and translated this for the uniformed men. They looked at each other and laughed, and the woman explained to Deo that he was in a country called Ireland, in a place called Shannon Airport.

-          excerpt from Strength in What Remains by Tracey Kidder (2009): Random House

When a young homeless African man walked into Jim O’Malley’s lower Manhattan office in 1995, the Limerick-born immigration lawyer had no idea of the remarkable tale he was about become a character in.

The young man’s name was Deogratias (which translates to “Thanks to God”), and he was brought to the office, by Siobhan McKenna, a friend of O’Malley’s who was a caretaker at a Catholic church in midtown Manhattan.

“He spoke no English, he only spoke French, the colonial language of Burundi,” recalls O’Malley, “She translated his story, and I’d never heard anything like it.

“Actually, I had never heard of the country Burundi in my life. I was aware that genocide had occurred in Rwanda, the neighboring country.

“I just knew what I read in the papers and had seen on TV, but I’d no idea of the dimension from a very personal viewpoint - a person whose family members had been through this, and who had been through it himself.

“It was quite a harrowing story to say the least.”

Deo’s extraordinary story is the subject of the New York Times bestseller Strength in What Remains by the Pullitzer-Prize winning author Tracy Kidder.

Deo

In 1994, when Burundi and Rwanda were exploding in civil war, in which Hutus and Tutsis were slaughtering one another, Deo, a Tutsi, was helped to flee the country.

After several flights, including stopovers in Cairo and Moscow, the young man with no English landed in what he thought was New York, but was actually Shannon Airport in County Clare.

“He thought he was in New York, and got off the plane and asked someone in the duty free shop, how he could get a taxi to Manhattan,” says O’Malley, who ironically grew up in Limerick city just a short journey from Shannon Airport. “To this day we have a good laugh about that. They said: No, you have a few more hours to go yet.”

After arriving in New York with little more than $200 and no English, Deo scraped by. For a period, he lived homeless in Central Park. At another stage, he shared a run-down tenement in Harlem.  For work, he delivered groceries from Gristedes supermarket for $15 a day. It was on one of these supermarket deliveries that Deo met Siobhan McKenna – who spoke French – and once she heard his harrowing tale, she took him to O’Malley’s office to see if he could apply for asylum. The process was complicated, but eventually after going to court, Deo was granted political asylum.

And while this was all happening, Deo’s life was taking another extraordinary turn.  Having heard about his living arrangements, a married couple living in Lower Manhattan, Charlie and Nancy Wolf, who were friends with both McKenna and O’Malley, took the young African student under their wing. They offered him accommodation, and in a remarkable display of generosity arranged for him to go to Colombia University and even paid his tuition. 

“They’re amazing people,” says O’Malley, “He started to live with them here in Manhattan, and they helped him enormously. They helped him go through school, and he enrolled in Columbia University. By this time, which was some months later, I had formally requested political asylum on his behalf, and got him some ID and got him some quasi-legal status while his application was going through the system.”

“He started in Columbia, and was a very bright student. He had been a medical student in Burundi, and did very well in Columbia." After Colombia, Deo went to the Harvard School of Public Health, where he volunteered with Dr Paul Farmer to go to Haiti to study malaria and drug-resistant TB.

Meanwhile, O’Malley was working on translating his asylum status into a green card, and later worked on his successful application for US citizenship.

“We became friends,” says O’Malley, “He has become part of our group of friends and his friends have become our friends.”

At some point, Deo travelled back to Burundi for several weeks, where the violence had died down and a process of reconciliation was underway. But he was appalled by the state of health care there, and vowed on his return to New York to do something about it.

Jim O'Malley

“He described “hospitals” where patients were actually being held captive because they couldn’t pay their bills, so they weren’t released,” recalls O’Malley. “People who had died, their corpses were being held because their family owed money to the hospital. It’s an extremely poor country.”

Deo organized a fundraiser, where he took in  several hundred dollars. Jim O’Malley says he thought that Deo would simply send the money raised – the equivalent of maybe a year’s income in local currency – to Burundi. But the medical student had other ideas. “He said, ‘No, I want to use this now as a springboard. I want to build a hospital’ and we thought: Wow - that’s ambitious!” says O’Malley.

Deo started a charity called Village Health Works to raise enough money to build the hospital mostly with local labor in Burundi. He took a year out of medical school and went back to Burundi, where he lived in a tent while the medical center was being built. The resulting facility is a state-of-the-art hospital, with in- and out-patient services, a unit for malnourished infants, and a community centre. There’s even a model farm, where locals are taught how to grow crops.

“People travel on foot for two to three days, from Tanzania, the Congo, Burundi, and Rwanda to get there,” explains O’Malley, “Witch doctors are the only competition. They refer to the hospital as America, it’s really a remarkable place.”

The charity Village Works is now a fully-fledged organization that is completely self-sufficient. All money it raises goes directly to the running and development of the hospital. Plans are currently afoot to build a new wing with a maternity unit.        

In December 2009, Jim O’Malley and his wife travelled to Burundi, with Deo and the couple who had “adopted” him, to see the hospital built in the mountainous area where Deo had lived before his exile. “When I arrived and saw it, I don’t think I’d ever seen a place as green in my life,” he said, “It’s absolutely beautiful and extremely fertile. The poverty is astounding, but at the same time the dignity of the people is equally astounding. The beauty of the country is spectacular. The population is very dense. Probably it’s the size of Ireland or smaller but it has 8 or 10 million people. Everyone walks everywhere, there are not a lot of automobiles. A bicycle is a big deal to have in a household.”

Deo wanted to show them the hospital, but on a personal level, he also wanted to introduce his four American friends to his mother and brothers who were still living there. “It was an extraordinary experience for me, personally and professionally.  I don’t think I’ve ever experienced anything like it,” says O’Malley.

For a man who has clients from over 70 different countries, here is one that will always hold a special place in his heart.

Read Deo’s full extraordinary story in Strength in What Remains by Tracy Kidder, published by Random House (2009) and available in all good bookstores.

Follow the hospital’s progress or donate to Deo’s charity at www.villagehealthworks.com

Find out more about Jim O’Malley at www.omalleyimmigrationlaw.com

A version of this article appears in the summer edition of Irish Connections magazine

EXCLUSIVE: SPEAKER CHRISTINE QUINN INTERVIEW

Speaker of the New York City Council Christine Quinn talks to Vincent Murphy about her Irish roots, her plans for marriage and whether or not she’ll be NYC’s next mayor.

On the window of her office across the street from City Hall, Christine Quinn has a copy of Ireland’s 1916 Proclamation of Independence. But it’s no valuable historical relic.

“That copy of the Proclamation actually came in a Clancy Brothers album,” she explains – you bought the record, and the proclamation was a freebie. How Irish.

“That used to hang in the kitchen in Glen Cove (where she grew up), my mother had it framed.”

Around the office are several other indicators that with Quinn, her Irish heritage is something she wears on her sleeve. Tiny figureen leprechauns dance in a circle on her mantelpiece, on the wall are photos of the City Council Speaker with Irish actor Liam Neeson in one, and Bono in another.

All four of Quinn’s grandparents were born in Ireland – three in Co Cork and one in Co Clare. “I’m 100% Irish,” she says, “Most people in the United States nowadays aren’t 100 per cent anything – which is neither good nor bad - but it makes that country very central in your household.” Her father, Larry, lived in Schull in west Cork for a time as a boy. He went to school there and made his First Communion there.

“My father once said we were so Irish we didn’t have to try to be Irish,” she smiles, “He always kinda resented those who had to try and put on airs about being Irish.” 

Her maternal grandmother, Nelly Callaghan, or Nelly Shine as she was before she married, came to the United States from Cork on the Titanic. She was one of the few female passengers on steerage to survive when the ‘indestructible” liner met its match in an iceberg in 1912. Her survival is now the stuff of legend, her grand-daughter explains. “She was quoted in a book on the Titanic as having said: ‘When the other girls dropped to their knees to pray, I took a run for it’.

From her desk, Quinn retrieves an envelope holder, which has a story cut-out from the New York Times stuck to its side. It tells of her grandmother and grandfather when they went returned to Ireland for the first time decades later. “Being a good immigrant they didn’t frame it of course, they stuck it here on this envelope holder,” she laughs, “Another copy went on a waste paper basket which my sister has.”

Christine’s parents lived in Inwood after they were married, but moved to Long Island in 1958, two years after Christine’s older sister was born. Christine was born in 1966 in Glen Cove – a diverse community that included, among others, large Italian, Irish and Polish communities. “There were three churches: St Patrick’s, St Hyacinth and St Rocco’s,” she recalls. “We went to St Patrick’s. Occasionally, my mother would go to St Rocco’s which would cause an enormous fight on Saturday night. My father referred to St Patrick’s as the one true church of God,” she laughs.

Christine’s upbringing was strictly Catholic. She went to St Patrick’s elementary school and Holy Cross High School. “I once asked my mother if I could go to Public School and she said No, and I said why? and she said ‘Because that’s the rule!’

 “I didn’t come out until I was about 25, which is not that early in one’s life.”

With religion playing such an important role in her family, it’s not surprising that dealing with her sexuality was a difficult experience.  “I think that was part of what contributed to me taking a much longer time than it takes some people to realize the truth of their sexual orientation,” she says. “I didn’t come out until I was about 25, which is not that early in one’s life.”

Christine had lost her mother to breast cancer when she was 16, so it was all the more difficult to breach the subject with her father. When she finally told him she was a lesbian, it brought major tensions. “When I told my father he said, ‘I never want to hear you say that again’.  And I said, ‘Look, I’ve done what I have to do, I’ve told you, what you do with it is up to you’. Then there was some period of time where we didn’t see each other and didn’t talk.”

This distance was particularly strange for both of them, as her father was the kind that turned up at every baseball game, every softball game, every science fair. Eventually, the love between a father and daughter won through, and his attitude evolved over time and got better. Now her father is one of her closest advisers and biggest supporters.

In his 80s, he’s still a key part of her political team and those tough times seem a distant memory. “Now, he marches in the Pride parade and uses ‘we’ sometimes when he’s talking about the LGBT community,” she smiles. “We made him join the Gay and Lesbian Independent Democrats. He jokes when he’s at the GLID meetings that it stands for the Gaelic League of Independent Democrats.”

It’s been an eventful few weeks for Quinn. On the Friday before we meet, she secured a deal on New York City’s budget on time – one that despite the financial difficulties included no tax increases, no threatened teacher lay-offs and no fire house closures. But even as she held the press conference to announce the success, news was coming from Albany that would bring an even bigger smile. The State Senate had passed a bill legalizing gay marriage – an issue on which she had been a leading campaigner for years.

“It was remarkable. The disappointment in 2009 was significant, when it didn’t pass. So to have it come completely full circle in a relatively quick amount of time is just amazing,” she says. “And it really happened in somewhat of an Irish way because people never lost faith, they never gave up hope, they kept working and working in a political sense and changed the landscape and changed the number of votes.”

Marriage Equality is not just a political issue for Quinn – it’s also personal. She plans to marry her partner, lawyer Kim Catullo in Spring 2012. “It’ll be a party, a celebration,” she says, although exact plans have not yet been made. “It was funny. Someone said to me: Congratulations on your engagement, and I was like… What?” she says, pointing out that they’d talked about marriage for years, it was not something that they just decided after the law was changed. “You know, we’ll be together 10 years in September. So it had passed the point of having a romantic moment with someone down on one knee, or you know a ring stuck in the middle of a chocolate mousse or something. It was just, when this happens, we’ll do it, was the operating assumption. I respect people who go to other jurisdictions and do it, but we didn’t want to do it anywhere but our home town.”

"What is more to the core of a celebration of Irish heritage than the struggle to get to be who you are, and to be free in who you are?"

Another long-running bone of contention for Christine Quinn is the continuing exclusion of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) community from New Yorks’ St Patrick’s Day Parade. Is she tired talking about it? “If one can be tired of not marching, I’m tired of not marching” she says. With marriage equality now a reality, and with changes expected next year on the Parade’s organizing committee, she has renewed hope that the long running controversy can be sorted out.

“I’ve always had hope and real belief that the parade will change, sooner rather than later. But after Friday (when the marriage equality bill was passed), how could you not believe that?” she says. “Having such a diverse group of Senators vote for the Bill will help move all things that are stuck as it relates to discrimination or misunderstanding or bigotry. I think this will help, not just for LGBT people, but for all kinds of people, this law will help to dislodge those logjams. And certainly the parade is a logjam.”

I suggest to her that most people in Ireland don’t understand it, and that St Patrick’s Day has long since become a day that celebrates Irish-ness, not just Irish Catholicism. “Right,” she says, “I think most folks don’t see it that way anymore. It’s a celebration of Irish heritage. What is more to the core of a celebration of Irish heritage than the struggle to get to be who you are, and to be free in who you are? And to get to celebrate who you are in a way you want to and you believe God wants you to and expects you to? I mean, that is at the core of what hundreds and hundreds of years of struggle have been about, and unfortunately too many people to count have lost their lives for it. So to have something that is in name about Irish-ness, and say some Irish people are better than other Irish people, is just not at its core, what I believe being Irish is about”.

Quinn, despite her clear passion for Ireland, never got the chance to visit the Emerald Isle until relatively recently. Her first trip to Ireland was in 2003, but she has been back several times in more recent years, including with her father to west Cork, and Schull, the town he used to live in. “He always said it was the most beautiful place in the world but I was skeptical,” she says. “Now look, he and his brother talked about the tenement they lived in on 96^th and 1^st like it was the Taj Mahal! But Schull was just gorgeous. Beautiful.”

“Well who wouldn’t want to be the mayor of the city of New York?” 

Since becoming the first female speaker of the City Council in January 2006, Quinn has established herself as one of the most powerful figures in New York politics. She was elected as speaker for a second term in January 2010. And now most observers say she’s well placed to take over the “other” office in City Hall, once Michael Bloomberg vacates it in 2013, especially after the implosion of Anthony Weiner’s political career. 

“Well who wouldn’t want to be the mayor of the city of New York?” she says. “Some people say it’s the best job in the world. Some say it’s the second best job, after the president of the United States. Either way, it’s an amazing position. And I love this city. I’ve been honored and really, really lucky to get to serve it. And I hope that I find ways to continue to be able to serve it.”  But for now, she says she’s focused on her job as speaker, and on helping President Obama getting re-elected.

As speaker, her priority for the next 12 months is to keep the budget balanced, and help stimulate job growth. “We’ve done a lot of that in the past 12 months,” she says pointing to programs aimed at helping small businesses, and in the area of food and technology that the Council has introduced in the past year. She also points to having addressed some of the housing problems in city, from creating new affordable housing to dealing with buildings left run-down because of the economic and real estate crash.

Quinn with (R to L) author Colum McCann,  former Arts Minister Mary Hanafin, actor Gabriel Byrne, and Culture Ireland director Eugene Downes at the launch of Imagine Ireland in January 2011

Alongside all of this, Christine Quinn has been a major supporter of the Irish and Irish-American causes, whether supporting arts and culture, or economic efforts or local community projects. That’s why she’s being honored as Irish Examiner USA’s Woman of the Year at a reception in the Irish Consul’s residence this Thursday. 

“I feel very strong about my Irish heritage, so to get recognition from the Irish Examiner is very, very important to me,” she says, “I hope it’s a recognition of the degree to which I’ve tried to make the work I’ve done as an elected official very Irish work. By that I don’t mean work that has only helped Irish people. But I mean work that’s infused by hard work, and a sense of pride and sense of faith and sense of the importance of community, and communities being allowed to have the freedom to express themselves, and people having opportunity to work and be with their families and live the Irish-American dream, whether or not they are Irish-American”.

“You know, also being the first female Speaker of the City Council, I think any moment where you can have a Woman of the Year in any community is important. So I feel honored to be one.  Because I think even though its 2011 and women have risen to great heights, there are still challenges for women out there. So to have moments where we can remind young girls that they can be anything they want as long as they work hard and never give up is great.” 

This feature first appeared in Irish Examiner USA of July 5th 2011

Dublin Contemporary 2011 – A Terrible Beauty is Born

The biggest contemporary art exhibition ever held in Ireland takes place in Dublin later this year. It aims to put the Irish capital firmly on the map as an international center for the visual arts.

When you think of contemporary visual arts, Dublin is not a city that immediately comes to mind. But now an ambitious bid is being launched, supported by the Irish government, to change all that. The first Dublin Contemporary festival takes place for eight weeks during September and October this year, and will showcase Irish artists alongside some of the cream of talent from all five continents. But can Dublin Contemporary really make a mark, along the lines of the Venice Biennale?

“The ambition for it is to be a blockbuster exhibition – that’s the kind of budget we have, and that’s the kind of goal we have set out for ourselves,” says lead curator Christian Viveros-Faune. “And it is supposed to repeat, it’s a Quinquennial, which is it happens every five years,” The New York-based curator and writer was headhunted by organizers to take over the running of the festival, following the departure of the original artistic director Rachel Thomas at the start of this year.

Viveros-Faune is a former director of the prestigious Chicago Arts fair NEXT and VOLTA NY in New York, and has written for several prestigious art publications including Art in America, Art Review and The New Yorker. He insisted on having Jorge Castro as his co-curator, a Brussels-based Franco-Peruvian artist, curator and former UN and EU diplomat. Castro has curated exhibitions at the Venice Biennale, and major exhibitions in Spain. The pair took over the reins in February, just seven months before the massive project was due to open, and immediately changed the theme.

“I would have never considered taking the job to do somebody else’s show,” says Viveros-Faune, “That was really one of the stipulations that we wanted. We were never filling in. We were doing our own exhibition. Thankfully, the previous group had really not done a tremendous amount of work, and they really only had a couple of artists on board. So we almost had a blank slate to work with, which in this case turned out to be a blessing.”

The theme they chose Terrible Beauty—Art, Crisis, Change & The Office of Non‐Compliance, addressed the “elephant in the room”, he says. The title of the show is taken from the famous WB Yeats poem Easter 1916 in which he responded to the dramatic political developments of the time. It’s hoped Dublin Contemporary can also highlight art’s potential for commenting on current events in Irish life.  “I think any major cultural event in Ireland has to identify the overarching social, cultural and economic issue that not only the nation is facing, but the entire world is facing," says Viveros-Faune, “What we want to do is basically explore the connection between art and these kinds of crises - art and life in a certain sense.”

Although the final line-up of artists has yet to be confirmed, Viveros-Faune says there are several who are confirmed that have the potential to be really exciting. “Richard Mosse, for example, is an Irish artist that has been taking tremendous photographs in the Congo, at some significant personal risk, I should add. They are significantly more than just ordinary photographs. They are taken with an infra-red camera in the day, and they actually make the 20-year-old “generals” look almost feminized because they seem to be sporting pinkish or fuchsia uniforms. So that’s one example of terrific work.”

“There’s a collective called the Bruce High Quality Foundation, from America, and they are looking to investigate the connections between art and life. They are currently touring art schools here in the States – and essentially they want to kick-off their European tour in Dublin, hopefully Trinity College. And then, you know, Lisa Yuskavage is one of the biggest living painters in the world, she has a show at the RHA.”

Others artists confirmed include Nina Berman (USA), Tania Bruguera (CUB), Fernando Bryce (PER), Chen Chieh-Jen (TW),  James Coleman (IRL), Dexter Dalwood (GBR), Wang Du (CHN), Omer  Fast (ISR), Goldiechiari (ITA), Patrick Hamilton (CHI), Jim Lambie  (GBR), Brian O’Doherty (IRL), Niamh O’Malley (IRL), and Superflex (DEN).

The curators are hoping that the festival will viewed as a fresh new upstart on the contemporary arts circuit that is looking to be immediately relevant. They’ve promised that the art on view will bring in people who are not specialists in the visual arts and will be “very provocative”. Much of the art will be in on display at a cluster of buildings on Earlsfort Terrace, while others will use some of the well-established art institutions across the city. The festival is already leading to some interesting collaborations involving some of those institutions.

Meanwhile the city of Dublin itself will be used as a canvas, with street art inspiring and provoking public interest. Over and above the numbers attending, and the coverage Dublin Contemporary 2011 gets in the media, there is one other way that Viveros-Faune will be measuring its success. “That is the fact that we are putting on the biggest exhibition of contemporary art that Ireland has ever seen. And I think that in itself is going to raise the bar on efforts after 2011 and hopefully inspire some artists, and young potential commentators, and people who are not yet interested in the arts to possibly become more engaged. Those things are not so readily quantifiable immediately but they do have a lasting significance.”

Dublin Contemporary 2011 takes place Sept 6^th – Oct 31^st.

A version of this article appears in the summer edition of Irish Connections magazine

SELLING IRELAND TO AMERICANS

Meet the man whose job it is to sell Ireland as a vacation destination to North Americans - Joe Byrne, head of Tourism Ireland North America

“You can be a very busy fool when you have a job like mine in America,” says Joe Byrne, the Carlow man who heads up Tourism Ireland on this side of the Atlantic. “You can go after every target market and every city and all age groups and you can go after all interest levels and all hobbies.” But that would waste time and money, so Byrne and his colleagues, have done a lot of research to find out precisely who is most likely to actually travel to Ireland.  They call them their “Best Prospects”.

“First of all they are baby boomers, so people 45 years of age and upwards,” he explains, “That’s not to say we don’t have younger people who go to Ireland – we do. And that’s not to say we don’t bandwagon every now and then on an opportunity to go after them. But in terms of where we put our focus, it’s baby boomers. We’re talking sight-seekers and culture seekers. These are the things they are most interested in doing when they are going on vacation to anywhere. They are college-educated and above-average income, defined as $75,000+ which eliminates a lot. And they are actually clustered in 15 cities in the United States. So that allows us to focus on these. They are interested in the finer things of life, and they are past visitors to Europe. Then we have three niche markets that we focus on. The first is golf, the second is business tourism, and the third is the Irish, and Scots-Irish diaspora.”

All in all that leaves a target market of about 12.5 million Americans. These are the people who have expressed an interest in travelling to Ireland at some time in their life. And Joe’s job is to turn that “some time” into now. This job, you would think, has not been made any easier by the developments of the last few years. Ireland has been receiving all the wrong kind of attention because of the banking crisis and the EU-IMF bailout. Open The New York Times or Vanity Fair or whatever publication you choose, and all you’ll find are references to crippling debts, severe austerity measures and an angry population worried for their future. You might think that convincing people to spend thousands of dollars on a trip there just got a whole lot more difficult. But luckily, that’s not the case.

“We actually got a bit worried about it,” says Joe. So worried in fact, that Tourism Ireland commissioned research to find out how all this negative publicity was impacting on perceptions of Ireland as a world-class vacation destination. And it brought good news. 81% of people had been immune to the storm of negativity that we Irish have been so focused on. “They asked: ‘What publicity? What problems are you talking about?’, said Byrne, adding that even among those who were aware of it all, there was encouraging news. “We asked would this affect your intention of travelling to Ireland, and there was a resounding No.” It appears that Brand Ireland is too strong to be shaken by a financial crisis.

Even as the IMF officials crunch the numbers at Government Buildings in Dublin, the attractions that make Ireland great are still there outside those four walls. The spectacular countryside, the terrific golf courses, the rich cultural and artistic traditions remain. “I would have to say that Ireland does have an extraordinarily strong brand image in the United States. Other countries which are far bigger than Ireland do not have the same level of awareness as a vacation destination,” says Joe Byrne. “They don’t have the same emotional attachment that Ireland has for an awful lot of Americans.

So in a fiercely competitive marketplace, how does he make Ireland stand out? “There is what we say, and there is the way we say it. And the two are integrated,” he explains, “And the way we say it emphasizes the distinctiveness about Ireland. There are no countries in the world that are promoting themselves that don’t say that it’s a beautiful place. And we’re saying Ireland is a beautiful place. And there is no country in the world that’s promoting itself here that’s saying its people are not friendly! And we’re saying the Irish people are friendly. But there are very few that can claim what is distinctively, uniquely, culturally rich and worthwhile about Ireland. And it’s based around the fact that we don’t take ourselves too seriously. There’s this concept of ‘the craic’.  Of being interested and interesting and warm and welcoming and affording an opportunity to be more involved in an authentic experience. So it’s that tone of how we communicate that says an awful lot about what we are saying about the place as well.”

“It is built around the spectacular fantastically beautiful places for which we are known and loved, and the warm welcoming rich Irish people, but wrapped together in this unique distinctively Irish sense of fun and welcome and warmth and wit and mischief and roguery.”

Byrne says despite what many people think, the old leprechaun/blarney shtick doesn’t work anymore. “It doesn’t work in terms of persuading people to come to Ireland. It just doesn’t. And you would have to say there are probably a few nations involved: there’s Ireland, America and then there’s Irish America. One of the challenges that we have is that for Americans who are interested in coming to Ireland some time and should be interested, they get their impressions of Ireland from Irish-America rather than necessarily from Ireland itself. And a lot of that is what we call ‘paddy-whackery’ and not all of it is actually conducive to persuading someone who is interested or should be to actually go now. There is a certain stereotypical association which people believe is an association with Ireland, and a lot of it is to do with excessive drinking, and a lot to do with the paddywhackery that you see on St Patrick’s Day.”

Byrne says that while they bask in the limelight that St Patrick’s Day offers, they are keen to use the opportunity to display those aspects of the country which are strong enough to pull people to Ireland. “It’s the fact of Dublin being a city of literature, of Derry being the UK’s city of culture in 2013. It’s the spectacularly rich sporting and cultural events that take place. That’s actually what pulls people in.”

A trip to Ireland is a significant investment for any US holidaymaker – the average stay costs in the region of $5,000. And any difficulty in convincing people to travel over the past few years had less to do with Ireland’s economic problems, and more to do with the economic difficulties here in the States. But consumer confidence is now returning, and in a funny way Ireland’s problems, which have dramatically reduced hotel prices for example, can actually help convince people to go. “It means that now we have people who would traditionally have stayed in certain forms of accommodation who are now adding a night or two in a Castle hotel as well,” he said.

Another unexpected boost has come from President Obama’s decision to visit Ireland. “This an example of Ireland being in the spotlight through no credit of Tourism Ireland, but we can use the opportunity to focus on things that are grist to our mill, to highlight some aspects that we know our target market is interested in.” Obviously, one of those is the tracing of ancestry – an important motivating factor in the decision of many to travel to Ireland. “Irish ancestry is important, certainly. And there are forty million people with Irish ancestry in the States, give or take a couple of million,” says Byrne.

But perhaps surprisingly, only a third of American visitors to Ireland have Irish heritage, two thirds have no direct link, and Byrne says they are careful to remember this in their promotions. “In our marketing activities we want to be very careful that we don’t in any way send out a signal to people who don’t have Irish ancestry, that Ireland is a great location if you are Irish,” he says. “We want to send out a message that Ireland is a great vacation destination whether you are Irish, or whether you have different heritage. That does not stop us from sending out an over and above message to people of Irish ancestry, and we do that.”

For those of Irish descent who do go to Ireland, most are several generations removed. “They are not Irish born, only about 3% are Irish born, and only about 3% have actually a parent born in Ireland. So you are talking about grandparent or much further out than that. Therefore it’s a link, but it’s more notional.”

Byrne has been selling Ireland as a holiday destination for most of his adult life. A graduate of UCD, he worked briefly in RTE before taking those audio-visual skills to Bord Failte where he produced marketing videos. In the 1980s, the father-of-two was manager of Bord Failte’s  Paris operations, with responsibility for all of southern Europe. In the late 90s he came to New York as head of Bord Failte here. But he was soon called back to Dublin, as a new initiative to promote the entire island of Ireland as a tourism destination was being put together as the peace process began to bear fruit. Renamed Tourism Ireland, the North-South co-operation “took off from day one” and after five years working in Dublin, Byrne was once again appointed to head up the efforts in the USA and Canada.

Over the years, he’s witnessed many changes in the tourism industry. Major challenges have hit travel agents and tour operators as people began to book and research their own holidays using the internet. Nonetheless they both remain crucial allies of Tourism Ireland in influencing the choice of destinations for holidaymakers. “The first time the escorted bus tour market was written off was 30 years ago,” says Byrne, “And then 20 years ago it was written off again. I’m happy to say there will be more people on escorted bus tours to Ireland in 2011 than in any other year in the past. Escorted bus tours have moved with the times. The stereotypical image of the coach tour is just that – a stereotype. They are much more active and participant than they were in the past.”

Tourism Ireland has also moved with the times. Its Facebook page has 120,000 fans and DiscoverIreland.com is the most visited European tourist board website in the US. Social media now plays a crucial part in spreading the word about Ireland. Joe says the balance of power is very much with the customer now, and real life testimonies are crucial in promoting a destination. “If I say something, people will say: ‘sure that fella is paid to say Ireland is a great destination!’ But if a Joe Byrne who is not working with Tourism Ireland says ‘I went to Ireland and had a great vacation’, it’s treated with greater credibility than anything I would say.”

Fortunately, Joe need not worry too much. Most of the comments on Facebook about Ireland are incredibly complimentary. And research conducted by Tourism Ireland shows an incredibly high satisfaction rating among those who make the trip to Ireland. “I handle directly all of the complaints that come in here,” says Joe Byrne, “I read all of the letters. And nobody has written to me in the past two years! I keep on looking at the post and nobody writes. We have really great satisfaction levels. I say that not to just wallow in it, but to say we do have a world class product that meets and exceeds expectations. And it does mean that we have an army of satisfied visitors. A big part of our current strategy is to turn that army into a proactive army of ambassadors and evangelists who will spread the word about Irish tourism.”

A version of this article first appears in the summer edition of Irish Connections magazine

POP UP PIANOS

Art project puts pianos on the streets of New York

Vincent Murphy reports on a new public art project in New York which aims to bring music to the masses

http://www.rte.ie/news/2011/0627/morningireland.html

Michael Noonan: The Man in the Hot Seat

Ireland's new Finance Minister Michael Noonan talks to Vincent Murphy about the bailout, his first 100 days in the job, and how the Irish overseas can help the recovery

“I’m on my third Taoiseach, you know,” laughs Michael Noonan, when I ask him how he’s coping with the toughest job in Ireland right now.

“I was there with Garret Fitzgerald and I was there with John Bruton. And I’m now there with Enda Kenny. So I’ve held a number of ministries. And I’m glad to be given the opportunity again to make a contribution.” Fine Gael has not been in government for a long time – but in their new Finance Minister, they have a wily pair of hands. Noonan has been around the block – several times.

And now the Limerick man is facing his biggest challenge – taking over the reins at the Department of Finance as Ireland struggles with an unprecedented debt and banking crisis. “Things got into a crisis in Ireland, and all I can say is I’m going to work every day to get us out of it,” he says.

In many ways his hands are tied as Finance Minister, with the State effectively locked-in to the IMF/EU/ECB rescue package agreed by his predecessor. The day before we meet, during an interview, Noonan re-opened the debate on burning senior bondholders at Anglo Irish Bank and Irish Nationwide. He said, as Anglo was no longer a bank in any real sense, he believed losses should be imposed on the bondholders. His comments were front page news on the Financial Times in Europe next day, alongside reports of the escalating crisis in Greece.

And as a result, he was trying to dampen the fire, when we met, arguing that his comments had been given a weight they didn’t deserve, because of what was happening in Greece. “We are saying publicly that everything that has been given to us as a country, or has been given to us in our banking system, that we’ll repay to the last cent. And that’s our commitment to the senior bondholders everywhere,” he said. He added that, while his comments were accurately reported, he wanted to frame them in the context of the continuing review of the rescue program.

There is estimated to be around €3.1bn in the relevant Anglo bonds and around €600m in Irish Nationwide bonds. “Everybody knows about Anglo,” he says, “I mean, Anglo is Anglo. And all I’m saying is there are issues that haven’t been fully resolved but that we are not going to make any kind of unilateral move. We are going to discuss these issues with the IMF, European Commission and European Central Bank. And the discussions aren’t imminent either. You know, this is something for the Autumn. So we are not even looking for meetings on these issues at the moment.”

It was a fascinating snapshot of the kind of pressure the new Finance Minister is under, and how careful he has to be with the words he chooses, and how the global financial markets hang on his every utterance.

"We have been working day and night on it, you know,” he says, “I’m hardly seeing home, or hardly seeing the constituency"

Noonan was in New York and Washington last week for over 16 meetings with business leaders and opinion makers. His message was simple – the new government in Ireland is sticking to the terms of the bailout deal. “It’s like a contract,” he explains, “where there are literally dozens of conditions, and when you fulfill the conditions on a timeline, you are allowed to draw down money. You can draw down money to pay the day-to-day needs of the State, whether it’s the health service or paying the teachers or the Gardai, and then there is another side where you can draw down when you need to capitalize the banks. So I was confirming that we’re committed to the program, we’re sticking by the program and we’re going to see it through.”

US Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and the top officials at the IMF were among those who took time to meet the Minister during his visit to Washington. Noonan was also keen to draw attention to the differences between Ireland and Greece, as the world’s attention is focused on Athens. “We keep saying Ireland is not Greece, and people understand that, but when it comes to issues like this, the international financial media tend to box us together,” he says.

Whatever happens to Greece will have a major impact, not just on Ireland, but on the whole Eurozone. But Noonan knows Ireland is not in any position to direct events. “In the real world, it’s the stronger nations in Europe that will make the decisions about Greece,” he explains, “Now, the definition of the stronger nations are the Triple A countries – those that have a triple A credit rating. Finland is one of those even though it is a small country, Slovenia is one of those even though it’s small.  Ireland won’t have a very strong voice in designing the solution, and our primary interest is to ensure that any solution arrived at doesn’t damage us.”

While Europe is dealing with the Greek crisis, Ireland’s attempts to have the terms of its bailout deal reviewed will have to wait. The government is keen to have the interest rate it is being charged reduced, but is facing some opposition from France and Germany, who are looking for changes to Ireland’s low corporate tax rate in return. That’s non-negotiable as far as Noonan is concerned: “It’s part of our industrial relations policy, and we will not negotiate it away under any circumstances.”

While in the US, Noonan was also keeping a close eye on negotiations over the sale of Anglo assets here. These are properties worth up to €11 billion – a mix of hotels, shopping centers and apartment blocks, mostly in the North East, from New York up to Boston. As part of the wind-down of Anglo, the government hopes to sell these assets. “These are very good assets now. These are not impaired assets at all. All this stuff is leased or rented and is generating income. So these are very attractive on the market. We’re trying to reduce the size of the banks by disposing of their assets abroad.”

By coincidence, it’s exactly 100 days since the new government was formed on the day we meet. I ask him to rate how he believes he’s done. “Very busy,” he says, before listing off what he’s undertaking since taking up the position.

“We totally restructured the banking system in accordance with the program. We did that in the first three weeks and made all the necessary announcements and we’re implementing that now with a view to making the banks fully recapitalized in line with the new stress testing by the 31^st July.

“We’re looking for private money in Bank of Ireland. We’ve commenced the legal merger of EBS and Allied Irish Bank, we are talking to people to sell off the insurance arm of Irish Life and Permanent.

“On the bondholders, we have gone to court and made arrangements and offers, for subordinate bondholders and we had the first success in that two weeks ago when we got agreement from 86% of the bondholders in AIB to accept the discounts offered. That’s worth, by the time the second tranche comes through, almost two billion to the Irish taxpayer.

“And we’re proceeding the same way now with Bank of Ireland. We want to see if we can arrange debt for equity swaps there. We’d like to keep Bank of Ireland as a publicly quoted bank, with majority private ownership. And then we’re moving on to EBS and Irish Life and Permanent.

“So we have, not only made the initial announcements about the structures, we are systematically implementing them and that’s a huge quantity of work in the first 100 days.

“The second thing we did then was we renegotiated the program that had been agreed by the previous government and we got some major concessions on it. Particularly, room to implement the jobs initiative because we had to change things around on the program to get that implemented.

“We also, on NAMA, got an agreement that assets below €20m in value would remain in their parent banks and wouldn’t be switched to NAMA which was very important.

“And we’ve got a review build in after 2012, and we got an extension on the time for the bailout, so it’s getting the deficit down to 3% by 2015 now.

“And of course, for the jobs initiative then, we had to put a Finance Bill in place. And we had to implement that.

“So systematically, we are ticking the boxes and we are meeting the commitments in the program on a timeline.”

“I hope that most of the decisions we make will be good ones and that the ones that aren’t good ones, we’ll have the sense to admit it early and change”

It’s a thankless and tiring job.

“We have been working day and night on it, you know,” he says, “I’m hardly seeing home, or hardly seeing the constituency – that work is being done with the help of other people. But it’s Dublin all the time in the Ministry doing the job that’s required.”

He says the new government is very conscious of how difficult it is for young people to find work in Ireland. But he argues that things are still not as bad as they were in the 1980s. “Back then there were only around 900,000 people at work. But this week’s figures have 1.8 million people at work – it’s nearly double. So even at the bottom of the cycle - and it looks that unemployment has bottomed out now - there’s 1.8m at work. And they’ve gone up the skill chain as well, the people who are at work.”

He said foreign direct investment is strong in Ireland, with the IDA successfully attracting companies, particularly form the US. Exports are booming, and he expects a Balance of Payments surplus this year. And he’s also targeted tourism as a key sector for recovery. The numbers visiting Ireland have declined 30% over a three year period, and Noonan sees regaining that lost ground as a priority. With that in mind he has an appeal to Irish Americans. “You know, people often say to me: You have trouble at home. What can we do? We feel that the crisis is too big and we can’t make any contribution to the solution,” he says. “Well my message is, if you can convince one friend to visit Ireland this summer, do. There’s a lot of Irish abroad, and if they can convince one person to come, it will swell the numbers.”

Noonan says he believes things are beginning to build up again in Ireland.  “I hope that most of the decisions we make will be good ones and that the ones that aren’t good ones, we’ll have the sense to admit it early and change,” he says. “We’re very conscious of building morale and confidence. We’re moving on. So far, so good.”

This article first appeared in the Irish Examiner USA June 21st issue