[caption id="attachment_67594" align="aligncenter" width="600" caption="Ray Kelly. "]
"Kiwi desperately wanted to become legal."
Boston Globe columnist Kevin Cullen wasn't relaying some piece of information that he had obtained while reporting the slaying
of Ciaran O Conghaile, the 36-year-old Irishman who was gunned down near his home in Boston's Dorchester neighborhood a little less than three weeks ago.
Cullen knew this at first hand because the man known locally as Kiwi had told him so.
Cullen, the Boston native, and O Conghaile, the undocumented Irishman who wanted to be as native to this town as the law would permit, had been friends.
"Kiwi worked in underpinning," said Cullen.
The information was being passed across the table in the Eire Pub, a popular Irish gathering place in Dorchester where a columnist might pick up a tip, or a story from a cop, a fireman, a construction worker.
Cullen had been working the O Conghaile shooting story but he needed little in the way of background information for it. "Underpinning," as he explained, was one of the toughest jobs in the construction business. It involved getting under the foundation of a new building, or one being rehabilitated, to do all that was necessary to ensure that the foundation did its job.
This was no small task, and never an easy one.
So Cullen was of the view that Kiwi, a quiet spoken man not given to over excitement, might have told his assailants ( who are still on the run) to take a hike because his work had bestowed on him a degree of physical strength that tends to elude people who sit behind desks for a living.
The only problem was that Kiwi's courage and strength in standing up to what investigators reckon could have been a gang of thugs bent on robbery, was no match for the fact that one of the thugs was carrying a gun.
Kiwi, Cullen explained, had earned a nickname more befitting a North or South Island New Zealander than an Aran Islander because someone in the area had decided that it was the nearest he could get to O Conghaile's rapid fire and Irish language pronouncement of his name.
"So it ended up being Kiwi," he said.
Cullen, through Kiwi, had obtained a close up glimpse into the shadow world of the undocumented Irish. As the story went, Kiwi's last visit home to see his family was over a decade ago and had been spurred by a family tragedy. His brother had been swept to his death by a wave that was rogue even by the standard of the Aran Islands.
After 9/11, O Conghaile, like so many undocumented Irish men and women, hunkered down and did his best to hold on to his job and go about his life unobserved.
The way it is in this post-9/11 world is that's it's extremely risky to leave the U.S. and get back in without a red light going off.
Long gone are the days of the old I-94 forms which all too often seemed to become detached from passports, thus giving U.S. authorities no way to accurately record a departure from American soil, and so no way of being absolutely sure that the individual had overstayed his or her visa.
The I-94 is no more. And the penalty now for overstaying is as sky high as a risky flight home: a ten year bar if you overstay your allotted six month visiting time by a year.
Kiwi was well into the ten year bar territory so he wasn't going anywhere until Washington made things right for the undocumented and came up with a path to legalization for guys like him.
But waiting for Washington to come up with something like that is lately akin to waiting for a rain forest to grow on Kiwi's Inis Meain. So Boston had become Kiwi's new home, his island in an uncertain sea. And the longer he stayed and worked in it the more he had to potentially lose by taking a trip back across the Atlantic to see his family on that small island sitting off the bigger one.
This is the same for all the undocumented. Over time they establish lives, set up a home, a business. They can even pay taxes without risking investigation.
But this can all evaporate if the journey to Ireland is made. So countess journeys are not made, even if the reason to do so be the death of a parent or sibling.
Now Kiwi has made the journey, and the bitter irony is that it was for a funeral. His own.
PRESIDENTS UP CLOSE
Now that we have been reminded that the Irish presidency is actually a job that someone would throw verbal mud for it's an appropriate time to brush up on an little Irish presidential history. And IF is happy to recommend "Lives and Times of the Presidents of Ireland," by Dublin-based Kevin Kenna, a retired chartered accountant who has taken to penning tomes. The book is a concise and entertaining read with and abundance of facts, election statistics anecdotes and illustrations in its 277 pages.
The book, of course, covers the eight presidents who have served to date. A ninth will be elected this week so it will require an updated edition at one point.
The Irish presidency is a constitutional job, but just try keeping politics from its front door. In more recent years it would be fair to say that the profile of the job has increased exponentially, mainly due to the two Marys, Robinson and McAleese. It remains to be seen how the profile and image of the office fares under president number nine.
Kenna's book is available from Dufour Editions at factotum@DufourEditions.com or by calling (610)458-5005.
AN IRISH TUSSLE
It's still a couple of years away but the battle to succeed Michael Bloomberg as mayor of New York has the potential to be a heavily Irish affair. Despite his denials of interest in the job, the city's top cop, Ray Kelly, the latest Quinnipiac opinion poll found that voters in the five boroughs would like to see Kelly in the mayor's office.
Kelly topped six possible rivals in the poll with 25 percent. The next most popular name in the poll was that of City council Speaker Christine Quinn at 17 percent. Comptroller John Liu, an honorary Irishman if ever there was one, was at ten percent.
"With the election two years off, experts say the numbers largely reflected name recognition," reported the New York Post.
Of course, if Kelly sticks to his nightstick and doesn't run that would appear to put Quinn in the lead position. Watch this space as they say.
