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 96th and 1st 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.
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| 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
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