The First Word: Celebrate With Concern

Father Finucane has a warm and friendly face, and a welcoming Irish smile. And he’s not at all the type of person to guilt you. But every time I see him, I get a stab of conscience.

It isn’t anything that he says; indeed he’s a most affable chap, a wonderful storyteller and raconteur. It’s what he does. He’ll talk about it if you press him — the famine in Somalia, the floods in Venezuela, the poverty in Haiti, and earlier wars and starvations and stories from his days as a young priest in Bangladesh.

More likely he’ll just listen. Although he can talk Irish history too, and maybe it’s his keen sense of our past suffering that prompted him to start Concern, the Irish-based relief organization whose volunteers are to be found in every troubled spot in the world.

I saw Father Finucane a couple of weeks ago at the New York Plaza Hotel. He was a guest at our Irish Americans of the Century celebration, which I’m happy to say was the party to end all parties.

We cheered Michael Flatley whose wonderful talent has brought Irish dance to the world stage. Listened to Maureen O’Hara recount her Hollywood days. Watched some great archival footage of the champ, Jack Dempsey, and heard from his daughter Barbara how he’d always kept some clay from Ireland in a drawer to remind him of his roots.

We cried at the footage of JFK’s trip to Ireland, not just for him, but for all the great leaders we have lost over the centuries. We saw in his smiling face the beauty and poetry of our race, and we gloried at the warm welcome he received in Ireland — that of a family for a returned son.

But we didn’t concentrate too much on our sorrowful past as we applauded our accomplishments and our ability to overcome. The poverty and starvation, the discrimination and the transportations — all our travails were a faint ghost in that glittering room of beautiful people.

We have come a long way since Kennedy’s ancestors first set out for America. Like so many, they were, in the words of Rose Kennedy, “poor and disadvantaged … but with a willingness to work hard … and seize gratefully on any piece of good fortune that came their way.”

And good fortune has surely smiled on us at last. As we enter the new millennium, Ireland’s economy is booming. Irish Americans have reached the uppermost rungs of the corporate ladder, and the much hoped for peace in Northern Ireland has a real chance of flowering into a wonderful hybrid born of two traditions.

So we celebrated as only the Irish can. And it was easy to put away all thoughts of Father Finucane and Concern — to lose his face in the crowd.

But then George Mitchell took the stage. The former senator who pulled off such an amazing feat in Northern Ireland once told me the story of the early Irish settlements in his home state. “They walked to Maine,” he said. They were refugees from an earlier famine in the 1830s who had taken the cheaper passage to Canada, docking in Grosse Ile high in the St. Lawrence River. Without money for further passage, they walked to America trying to stay clear of the vigilante groups along the border.

And on this night of all nights, Mitchell once again served to remind me and all present of what’s really important.

He recalled that as he headed off to college, at age 16, he was told by his father that when he succeeded in life, he should not forget that “every human being has an obligation to help those less fortunate.” And remember, his father added, “the greater your success, the greater the obligation.”

I tried to catch a glimpse of Father Finucane as I listened to Mitchell’s words, but I couldn’t see him. I imagine he was nodding in quiet agreement.