The Teddy Roosevelt advice to speak quietly but carry a big stick applied in every sense to Frank Durkan. Durkan, a consummate gentleman with a trademark low-key approach to all things could easily have been mistaken for a college professor by those who did not know him, or his stock in trade.
Indeed, Durkan was a more than knowledgeable amateur historian with a passion for the stories of both his native land and adopted country. During his final years a visit to Frank's downtown Manhattan office was like a voyage back to the time of the American Civil War and the Fenians.
But though he was a man passionately interested in history, Frank Durkan, the attorney, was most notably a legal pit bull with a trapdoor mind that was ever conscious of history's harsh lessons. Ally this with an abiding belief that his native country had been wronged for centuries and the Mayo native evolved, over a period of many years, into one of Irish America's outstanding advocates and activists, a fearsome legal combatant and courtroom interlocutor.
In delivering Frank's eulogy at his funeral Mass almost exactly five years ago, attorney Brian O'Dwyer, Durkan's cousin, told mourners that a jury could always tell the difference between a phony attorney and the real deal.
And before so many juries, Frank Durkan showed himself to be the real deal and then some, a lawyer whose sense of justice was as sharp as the Atlantic air that blows over his family's native county of Mayo.
On another level entirely, Frank Durkan was a political activist. Well before the Northern Ireland peace process, a development he embraced with passion and vigor, Durkan knew that without justice in Ireland there would be no peace; without peace there would be no politics; without politics there would never be normality.
With this in mind he set about defending individuals whose fate might have appeared sealed the moment they walked into court. Perhaps it was his self-effacing manner that resulted in Frank Durkan never being quite famous within the broader Irish world. A trawl through the archives of Irish-American publications will not turn up big stories about Frank Durkan the man. But it will reveal many big stories that he had a role in, sometimes unseen and unnoticed.
Well, it's time now for Frank to be noticed and seen, not just in old photographs, but on a sign naming a street in New York, the city that benefited for so many years from Frank's legal knowledge and passionate attachment to justice.
The naming of a street in the Bronx after Frank is in the hands of Community Board
8 which meets this night to decide on the proposal.
Should approval be achieved the proposal will then pass into the hands of the full New York City Council. We have no reason to hesitate and every reason to support the dedication of a street, close to Gaelic Park, to the life, work and memory Frank Durkan, a great Irishman, and a great American.
