November 10, 2005, Veterans Day: The Town Hall, Baltimore,

Martin O’Malley with his father Thomas at a ceremony honoring veterans.

The following January, Thomas passed away.

IA44_49 7/17/07 12:50 PM Page 44

O’Malley’sMarch Youngest mayor of a large city at

37, governor at 43; it’s possible that Martin O’Malley, fueled byfamily, Jesuit ideals and Irish history, will march all the way to the White House.

AUGUST / SEPTEMBER 2007 IRISH AMERICA 45

Martin O’Malley is easy on the eye –

very easy on the eye.

He’s handsome, young, and he’s got

talent. He paid his way through college

playing music – Irish music. His band,

O’Malley’s March, has opened for

Shane MacGowan, Tommy Makem,

The Sawdoctors, and the Baltimore

Symphony. And he can speak. He’s an

orator in the truest sense. His speeches

bring to mind Lincoln, J.F.K. and his

brother Bobby, with whom he has been

compared, and Martin Luther King.

O’Malley is Governor of Maryland; he

could be in Hollywood, or winning

Grammy Awards, or at least making tons

of money as an entertainment lawyer.

But he’s in public service.

He accepted the call because of two

factors, family and education.

Born in 1963, and raised in Bethesda and

Rockville, Maryland, the eldest son in a

family of six children, O’Malley grew up in

a household where involvement in the

community was encouraged. His mother

worked for Senator Barbara Mikulski and

nurtured her son’s interest in politics. His

father was a lawyer rooted in civil rights.

O’Malley remembers as a teenager waiting

for his father outside Maryland’s notorious

House of Corrections maximum security

prison. “He went in and he came out, it

must have been the summer, just soaking

wet. He said, ‘The free and civilized people

should never hold even convicted criminals

in a place like that.’”

One of the first things O’Malley did as

governor was close the dilapidated prison,

which was built in 1878, saying it was

“not suited for modern-day incarceration,

much less maximum security.”

But O’Malley is not soft on crime. He

drew criticism recently when he vetoed a

measure that would have opened up the

possibility of parole for low-level, non-

violent drug dealers.

When he was elected Mayor of

Baltimore in June 1999, at the age of

37, O’Malley promised zero tolerance on

drug-related offenses.

“We buried almost a dozen officers

who gave their lives in the line of duty,

and an entire family was firebombed in its

sleep for having the temerity to call 911

about the drug dealers who were making

life impossible for their children in front

of their home.” The pain, when he talks

about this particular incident, is evident

on O’Malley’s face. But he’s proud that

by the end of his two terms, violent crime

was at its lowest levels since the 1960s.

O’Malley’s election over two black can-

didates in a largely African-American city

marked a watershed in American politics.

He was an immensely popular mayor. He

rode on the back of city fire trucks,

worked with sanitation crews, and visited

schools and community centers, rousing

citizens to join his campaign.

“It was really about justice. It was about

all of us being in this together. It was about

the dignity of every individual and about

our responsibility to make our piece of this

world a better place,” he says.

In November, O’Malley was sworn in as

Governor of Maryland, the only Democrat

to beat an incumbent Republican governor.

He continues his “we’re all in this together”

standard, increasing funding for public edu-

cation (O’Malley credits his Jesuit educa-

tion as a huge influence in his life), and put-

ting forward a legislative package to make

state government more accountable and

more efficient.

O’Malley has caught the eye of

Democratic Party elite. He was the only

mayor to speak at the Democratic National

Convention in 2004. He further increased

his credibility with the party when he

filled in for Hillary Clinton in New

Hampshire on June 2, 2007.

People are saying that O’Malley will

run for president someday – it’s only a

matter of time. O’Malley believes that

people overestimate his ambition and

underestimate his conviction. “I’m prima-

rily interested in being the best governor I

can be and as effective as I can possibly

be,” he says.

His wife, Catherine “Katie” Curran,

whose Irish roots are in County Kilkenny,

is a dynamo in her own right. A former

Assistant State Attorney, she is now a

Maryland state judge (her father, J.

Joseph Curran, served as State Attorney

General from 1987-2007). The couple has

four children, Grace, 16, (named for

Grace O’Malley, The Pirate Queen, from

whom O’Malley is descended), Tara, 15,

William, 9, and Jack, 4.

I met with Governor O’Malley in

Washington, D.C., on May 29. We talked

for several hours. An edited version of

that conversation follows.

Interview by Patricia Harty l Photos by Jay L. Baker

IA44_49 7/17/07 12:50 PM Page 45

46 IRISH AMERICA AUGUST / SEPTEMBER 2007

So why public service?I went into public service because I

grew up in a house where that was consid-

ered an honorable and important thing to

do. My parents met putting together a

Young Democrats newsletter. Both of

their parents had been very involved in

the Democratic Party. On Mom’s side,

from Fort Wayne, Indiana, her dad was

the chair of the party through the

Roosevelt years. My dad’s father was a

ward leader in Pittsburgh during the

Roosevelt years.

My mom had her collection of cam-

paign buttons and pictures of John F.

Kennedy. My father was someone who,

albeit a lawyer in private practice, raised

us to be involved in the public affairs of

our community and country. So that’s the

motivation in my heart.

I worked for Barbara Mikulski as her

field director in 1986 when she was run-

ning for U.S. Senate and afterwards she

brought me up to the Hill so I could see

beyond the campaign.

Then, when I was in college, I worked on

the campaign of Senator Gary Hart and that

was a very empowering experience as well.

Some of my friends, because of their

disappointment over his withdrawing in

1987, were turned off. That actually drove

me to be more involved.

Was there a time when you consid-ered going in another direction – saythe music business?

I went to law school because I wanted

to be just like my father, who was a

lawyer. I have three brothers and all four

of us are lawyers, so that tells you a little

something about the force of my father’s

character. The Jesuits at Gonzaga High

School used to say “expectation becomes

behavior,” and my father expected that we

would, of course, do what we wanted

to do, and no doubt that would involve

becoming lawyers and being involved in

the public life of our community [laughs].

So the Jesuits were also an influence.It’s what Father Quigley at Georgetown

talked about, “that tomorrow can be bet-

ter than today and that each of us has a

personal and moral responsibility to

make it so.” I do think my Jesuit educa-

tion was important.

I would come from a lily-white neigh-

borhood every day with a lot of other

lily-white kids and we file down the

street from the train station on our way to

high school. We would go by St. Aloysius

Gonzaga Church, in the basement of

which, Fr. McKenna, a modern day saint,

ran a mission and a soup kitchen for

homeless men. He tried to get them into

jobs and face up to their addictions. It

made an indelible impression on many of

us, and it certainly had an impression on

me, when every day I walked by that

mission and then went to class.

As Mayor of Baltimore you were ableto connect with the largely African-American population. Why was that?

I think that an awareness of Irish history

and an awareness of the Irish-American

experience enabled me to shed some of the

baggage that most of us who are white in

America have when it comes to communi-

cating and establishing understanding with

our neighbors of color.

I grew up in Bethesda, Maryland, and if

you go to the Rockville Library, my name

is on a little card somewhere – I took out

every book in that library on Irish history,

and read every book I could possibly find

on Irish history. Whenever you read a

people’s history long enough, you become

aware of the triumph of the human spirit,

and the sort of universal eternal truths that

are the core of the human experience.

It is fairly obvious that education, orlack of, and poverty go hand in hand.Where do you weigh in on Brown ver-sus Education and the recent ruling bythe Supreme Court?

With the caveat that I didn’t read the

cases when they were briefed and I’m

certainly not an expert, it disturbs me

greatly to see the direction in which the

court is moving, especially for Chief

Justice Roberts to say “the way one stops

discrimination is to stop discriminating.”

Well, that’s a wonderful thought, and it

also completely ignores a very painful

300-year history that sees tremendous

gaps in education and disparities in terms

of health and concentrations of poverty,

which have stemmed from slavery and

the subordination of people of color.

While I do think that we have made

progress, we still have a long way to

go before we can say – whether it’s

about minority business development or

achievement in education — we are

beyond the need for some affirmative

steps for healing and making real, equal

opportunity to all people in our country.

On the same day as the SupremeCourt decision, the Immigration Billwas shot down.

It was a bad day.

I was very disappointed. Our failure to

reform immigration in a comprehensive

way is a real tragedy on many scores, not

only for the families it affects directly, but

also for us as a country.

There are worse problems than people

wanting to come to America, and that is

people no longer wanting to come here

because we cease to be the tolerant, open

place that we have always proclaimed

ourselves to be.

And in the sort of mean-spiritedness

that killed the immigration reform com-

promise, I think you see a vision of

America that is totally 180 degrees the

opposite of the Statue of Liberty and the

words emblazoned there, and what those

kids in Tiananmen Square admired and

were willing to die for. It’s really sad.

America seems to want to build awall around itself.

Richard Florida who wrote The Rise ofthe Creative Class and The Flight of theCreative Class talks about that sort of

walled America where we used to assume

that we would always have adequate num-

bers of engineers and doctors; that we

would always be on the leading edge of

health care discoveries and scientific

advances because we’re a place where

people like Albert Einstein and other great

minds wanted to come to live in a free

society where their talents could be used to

the fullest for the betterment of themselves

and their families but also, hopefully, for

mankind. In the world’s eyes that image

has been greatly tarnished.

Do you think the anti-immigrantsentiment is related to 9/11 and issuesof homeland security?

I think that making investments in

security would greatly tame the xenopho-

“We need to find our voice and speakfrom the foundation of Americanprinciples, which are really universalprinciples of all humanity. I think thatif we do that we can get back to theAmerica that we carry in our hearts.”

IA44_49 7/17/07 12:50 PM Page 46

bia. When people are scared it’s easier for

some politicians to make a group of

people all scapegoats or all the enemy.

You have been outspoken on home-land security.

I found myself having to navigate

through those rocks when there was a

proposal by Dubai to take over the Port of

Baltimore. I fought it tooth and nail and hit

it with everything I had. I think there are

some responsibilities that are still very

fundamental and which only we can fulfill

for ourselves, and one is security and we

are not doing it. We haven’t taken the steps

we need on border security, or port securi-

ty, or airport security. If you read the latest

9/11 Commission Report, we are scratch-

ing our heads and wondering why five

years later most metropolitan areas still

don’t have interoperable communications,

or better plans in place to fight pandemic

flu, let alone some bio-terror attack.

There seems to be more emphasis onwiretapping individuals than on thebigger picture.

It’s a very scary time. It’s just after an

attack that the Constitution is in the great-

est danger. That was true in World War

Two and it’s true now in the wake of

terrorism. I do think that we are starting to

wake up a bit; whether it’s the wiretapping

or the allowing, promoting, adopting of

torture as an acceptable tactic.

My father was a World War Two veter-

an. He had 33 bombing missions over

Japan in a B-24 Liberator and I went to

see him at the house where we were all

raised, and he was sitting alone on the

back porch. I sat down across from him.

He held up the paper with the Abu Ghraib

headlines and pictures of the hooded

prisoners who were being tortured by the

American Army and he said, with tears

welling in his eyes, “Are you proud of the

great country that I’m leaving to you.”

Bruce Springsteen in the last presidential

campaign said that America’s government

has strayed too far from America’s values

and it’s time to pick up the pieces and move

forward. “Because the country we carry in

our hearts is waiting.” And I do think that

people are finally, in greater numbers, feel-

ing that way. But we need to find our voice

– the opposition party – and speak from the

foundation of American principles, which

are really universal principles of all human-

ity. And we need to be very clear and plain

in addressing those, and I think that if we

do we can get back to the America that we

carry in our hearts.

Have you endorsed a presidential candidate?

Yes. Definitely. I’m very committed to

Hillary Clinton. I endorsed her publicly in

late April. And I endorsed her privately at

your Top 100 event in March. I do feel that

she, uniquely among those running in a

strong field, has the ability to restore

America’s credibility and standing in the

eyes of the world, virtually overnight, with

her election.

These Bush years have been so disas-

trous for America’s security and America’s

moral leadership in the world that we have

so much ground to make up. For my kids’

sake I want to do it as quickly as possible,

and I think that Hillary’s a strong and dis-

ciplined person. I think she has the respect

because of her role as first lady, and

because of the terrific job she’s doing as a

U.S. senator. I worked with her on home-

land security issues and there was no U.S.

senator better, from a mayoral perspective,

than she. No doubt informed by the attacks

of September 11 on New York.

What about Iraq?

I think we need to get out of there as

quickly as we can. Our men and women

did their job and they need to come home.

Their continued presence only puts them

in further jeopardy and makes them a

target and it makes us less safe, not more.

It depletes our National Guard and I

would like to see them brought home as

quickly as possible.

They were not sent there to prevent a

civil war, they were sent to take out

Saddam Hussein and they’ve done that.

I’ve sadly been to more funerals as gover-

nor in six months, line of duty funerals,

than in seven years as mayor of Baltimore.

That’s saying something.

Certainly the Clinton White Housewas crucial in the Northern Irelandpeace process. You wrote a song aboutNorthern Ireland, “Song for Justice.”Is it time to write a new song in light ofthe new power-sharing Assembly?

Yes. It probably is time to write a new

AUGUST / SEPTEMBER 2007 IRISH AMERICA 47

Top: O’Malley, who has been outspoken on homeland security, meeting with Major General Bruce Tuxill.Bottom: Being sworn in as Governor of Maryland in the presence of his wife Katie and his sons, William (right) and Jack.

IA44_49 7/17/07 12:50 PM Page 47

48 IRISH AMERICA AUGUST / SEPTEMBER 2007

song. It’s amazing how far things have

come from a situation that just so recent-

ly many would have said was hopeless

and intractable and impossible, and I’m

just glad that I was able to live to see it.

I was 20 when I wrote Gary Hart’s

position paper on Northern Ireland. I had

to go through great machinations to get it

in front of him, but I knew he felt that the

only way to get the logjam broken was

through American involvement, and once

he got it he signed it.

Hart become the first major presidential

candidate to endorse the idea of a U.S.

peace envoy and all-party talks – those

were the two core elements, which were

new at the time. Then, once Hart won New

Hampshire, Mondale was, in essence,

forced to adopt the same position and

thereafter it was always something that

was expected of Democratic candidates. It

was the same position that Bob Kerrey

had in 1992, and that Bill Clinton had.

Whether it was writing positionpapers, or songs, or keeping NorthernIreland alive as an issue, Americanswere crucial to the peace process.

I’m very proud of the American role in

that. I’m happy that I lived to see it. It also

gives me great comfort now because

whenever I get frustrated in working with

my Republican colleagues I look at Ian

Paisley and Martin McGuinness and I say,

“By God, if they can do it, so can I.”

Yes. It’s time to write a new song.

Will you have time to play a new song?I haven’t been playing much. We have

recorded the guts of an underground CD.

It’s called Banished to the Basement, but

we don’t know if it will ever see the light

of day. I’ve just had to put the band on

the side. There was no time for it during

the campaign, and of course, you know

your opponents will key on the things

that others see as positive attributes and

try to lampoon and turn them into nega-

tives, so I’ve just gotten away from it.

The last six months have just been a

real roller-coaster of adjustment to the

new job and to a much broader, more

diverse group of people that I serve, and

it’s just hard to stay current with the band.

I really do miss it.

I do think that playing music is a bit of

an international language, understood

inherently by all people, and it helped

me bridge racial divides as mayor of a

majority African-American city. Whenever

I would visit schools, kids would come up

to me and say “Hey, Mayor, I play the

clarinet.” “Hey, Mayor, I play the drums.”

There was that sort of commonality. In

Baltimore when I was mayor no one had

any problem with it and I think people

actually appreciated it. They give you a

little more freedom at that level, I think,

than as governor.

Your band O’Malley’s March hasopened for Shane MacGowan.

Yes. I think that Shane’s magic is his

ability to capture the energy and the pas-

sion and the anger and the empathy and

the sweetness altogether and to express it

in the right language.

The other thing is he likes the old stuff.

As new as he makes it, it is still rooted in

tradition and that’s hard to pull off and

that’s what I really respect him for. When

I gave him one of my CDs when we

warmed up for him, as nervous as can be

in his presence, he looked on the back and

asked, “You write these?” I said I wrote a

few of them but I prefer the old stuff, and

he said, “I prefer the old stuff too.”

I don’t know what came first, the [Irish]

history or the music. My mother used to

play the Clancy Brothers records, not just

on St. Patrick’s Day, and she was German.

Where do your O’Malley ancestorshail from?

My O’Malleys were from up in the

mountains between Galway and Mayo in

the valley where The Quiet Man was

filmed. If you keep going through Cong,

the road up through Ouchterard and you go

out to where Peacock’s is, and if you bang

a right and go through that pass it will

dead-end right there at Maam. And half the

houses in Maam are owned by O’Malleys.

Do you have any cousins over there?I do. I have the storybook relationship

with a long lost cousin. We make up for 120

years of not writing to each other by

e-mailing. He’s a schoolteacher whose name

is Thomas O’Malley and he helped hook me

up with the whole family genealogy.

My great-grandfather kind of stepped

out of a blank page. All we knew was that

he was from Galway, as many people in

Pittsburgh were. I got his death certificate,

found out his father’s name [Thomas] and

his mother’s, and wrote over to Galway

for death certificates. I narrowed it down

– there were only two Thomas O’Malleys

with sons named Martin born approxi-

mately the right time. Only one of them

was born in the exact year, the one who

immigrated to America.

Pierce, the former bass player for The

Sawdoctors, lives near Clonbur, and so I

caught him after a show. I said, “Look, I

think my family comes from a little cross-

roads called Kilmilkin, do you know

where it is?” And he said, “I do, and I will

take a photo of your ancestral home.” And

like the gullible Yank, I said, “How will

you know which one is mine?” And he

says, “There are only three of them. And

I’ll take a wide angle.”

Pierce arranged for me to have dinner

with Thomas O’Malley, who told me that

the Martin O’Malley in his family had

immigrated to England to Newcastle-on-

Tyne. “I said was he a miner?” And he

said, “Yes, he was a miner,” and I said,

“Well, that’s what he did in America as

well.” And then Thomas said, “He would-

n’t have settled by any chance in

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania?” And I said,Governor O’Malley joins Leo Moran of The Sawdoctors on stage at his inauguration party.

IA44_49 7/17/07 12:50 PM Page 48

“Yeah, that’s where my father is from, and

there’s three hundred other O’Malleys

here to this day because he did.”

Thomas turns to his sister and he says,

“Therese, get out the picture of ‘Question

mark’ O’Malley.” So Therese pulls out a

picture of this well-groomed guy in a high

collar with a big mustache, and his eyes

look like an amalgam of my father and my

father’s brother, and pictures I’d seen of

my grandfather. He said, “This photo we

got out of what would be his [Martin

O’Malley’s] long-deceased brother’s fam-

ily photo album, along with that letter

from Newcastle. We can identify everyone

else but we couldn’t square this guy.” And

there at the bottom of the picture it said,

Stanton Studios, Forbes and Market,

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Thomas said, “Is that your great-grand-

father?” and I said, “It absolutely is.” And

he said, “Have you seen a picture of him

before?” I said, “No, but there’s no doubt in

my mind that that’s my great-grandfather.”

Are you hopeful for the future?I am. I suffer from being an optimist.

The nice thing about Maryland is that it’s a

pretty manageable state. We have about

five and a half million people, where some

other states have huge challenges in job

loss and loss of population. Our challenges

are the opposite, because of the great insti-

tutions, the centers for scientific learning

and discovery, and the NSA [National

Security Agency]. We’re growing by leaps

and bounds – we have thousands of jobs

slated to come here from the most recent

base realignment that happened with the

military installations, and what gives me

optimism is the notion that we have the tal-

ent in Maryland to unleash what Jeffrey

Sachs [director of the Earth Institute at

Columbia University] calls the weapons of

mass salvation – the cures to malaria,

dysentery, TB, or other horrible things that

from an American perspective are entirely

preventable and yet kill tens of thousand of

people every month, all around the globe,

many of them children. That’s how our

nation regains its moral leadership of this

world. It’s not from the smart bombs, it’s

from the smart, compassionate hands and

heads that come together in this place.

What are your thoughts on thefuture of America?

We go through bad phases but I do think

we move forward. I do think this period of

American history will be regarded as an

aberration. I do think that however it gets

deconstructed, wherever the blame falls,

for the bad things that have happened and

the good things we chose not to do, that this

period of American history will ultimately

be regarded as a detour from our principles

and not, you know, some sort of inevitable

cycle of the rise and fall of empire. Because

we’re not an empire, we’re a republic and

that’s the truth that we’ll return to.

AUGUST / SEPTEMBER 2007 IRISH AMERICA 49

IA

Top: Martin O’Malley with his parents, Thomas and Barbara.Bottom: Proud parents, Martin and Katie with their children Grace, Tara, Jack and William.

Above: Martin O’Malley, the governor’s great grandfather who immigrated from Galway.

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