Siobhan Lyons and her dog, Breac.
Siobhan Lyons had a fairly typical reaction to the news that she was going to be inducted into the Delaware Valley Irish Hall of Fame. Typical for her, anyway.
“I thought I had woken up in an alternate universe,” laughs the executive director of two major Irish organizations in the Philadelphia area—the Irish Immigration Center and the Brehon Law Society.
Why? She’s only been on the job for three years. “I’ve been going to the Delaware Valley Irish Hall of Fame dinner every years since I started at the Immigration Center and I’ve seen the kind of people they honor,” she says. “Kathy McGee Burns, Tom Keenan [who will be inducted with Lyons on Sunday, November 11] and Kathleen Murtagh [inducted in 2011]—Kathleen has been helping everyone in the community her entire life. I’m not surprised they won it. These are people who’ve been here a long time and done great things.”
But the people she sees every week at the Immigration Center think Lyons has done great things in a short time. Kathleen Murtagh, a regular at the Wednesday senior lunch at the Immigration Center in Upper Darby, was one of 30 people who signed the letter nominating the young Dublin-born Lyons.
“Siobhan fit in with us quickly,” say Murtagh, who was born in Mayo. ”She is a gentle, quiet, happy and congenial girl; always willing to listen and give advice and guidance to the seniors. I would describe her as a sweet, intelligent and caring person. Siobhan has been continually welcoming to each and every new member. She arranges many programs, great lunches, wonderful trips, musical events, and she does it all effortlessly. We are thankful to God to have her in our midst. She is a well deserving Hall of Fame honoree.”
How she got in their midst is a story of best-laid plans going astray—or, perhaps, turning out better than she ever imagined. Lyons, whose father, Brendan, made a career in the Irish foreign service, graduated from the School of Oriental and African studies in London with plans to work in the Middle East. She even learned to speak Arabic. During her peripetatic childhood, she had lived in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, when her father was stationed there. (The Lyons family—including three brothers and a sister—also spent time in Washington, DC; Nairobi, Kenya; and London.)
But instead, she wound up in the Irish diplomatic service—in Irish Aid, the same department where her father had worked (“I was cleaning out some files and found some of his files!” she says). Her job: monitoring how Ireland’s financial contributions were being spent by the European Union. No need for Arabic there.
What brought her to the US was her then-husband, a Canadian, who came to New Jersey for a job. That’s where Lyons’ passion for immigration reform began. “People are always amazed at the problems I’ve had with my own visa,” says Lyons. “When we moved to the US I foolishly thought that with my background and experience, I would have no problems getting a job in post-911. If we had looked for two minutes at the US visa system, we wouldn’t have come. I’d worked in other countries and thought I would get a job and they would apply for a visa for me and that’s how it would work—the way it does in the rest of the world.”
Her husband got a work visa, but she didn’t. That’s when she learned that spouses don’t automatically get the right to work under restrictive US immigration laws. “In the US, they try to attract skilled professional workers, but their spouses have to commit career suicide,” she says.
But she could volunteer and she did –with Princeton Project 55, a nonprofit founded by consumer activist Ralph Nader to encourage Princeton grads to give back to the community.
Then she did get a job—with the World Affairs Council in Philadelphia, which applied for a visa on her behalf. “They had never hired a foreigner before so they didn’t know what was involved—and they probably won’t ever again,” she laughs.
Then, a fortuitous meeting with Philadelphia attorney John O’Malley at Judge Jimmy Lynn’s annual St. Patrick’s day breakfast at The Plough and the Stars on Second Street led to the Immigration Center. “We were introduced by Jim McLaughlin of the Irish American Business Chamber and Network and as Jim was introducing me, I could see John’s eyes glazing over. When he heard that I used to work for the Irish government, and had experience with grant writing and project management, his eyes lit up. He said, “Oh my God, you’re just the person we’ve been looking for.”
O’Malley was serving on a board set up by the Irish government to rejuvenate the Irish Immigration Center in Philadelphia. They were looking for an executive director. Lyons got the job.
While the immigration center does work on immigration issues—including helping Irish with their visas—it’s far from the only role it plays in the region’s Irish community. The senior lunch is part of the fundamental mission of Irish-supported immigration centers across the country, the outgrowth of the tragic experiences of the London Irish in the ‘50s. Most of them men, they went to England to work, sent money home, but many were left alone—they didn’t marry, have children or assimilate into the English culture. Many died alone. So the Irish government established a worldwide outreach program to help. It’s the only country that still keeps tabs on its diaspora.
It’s the Irish way, says Lyons.
“I really think that the Hall of Fame honor isn’t for me, but for the work we do here,” says Lyons. “Taking care of the most vulnerable people in our population, the older people, the prisoners, and people in trouble. This is something that really resonates with the Irish community. Part of what the lunch is about is making connections between people—it’s not for people who might not have lunch otherwise, but for them to connect with their Irish heritage, to meet with each other and feel part of the wider community. ”
This year, Lyons found the money to hire a social worker, Leslie Alcock of County Carlow, to work with the seniors. She’s done home visits, gone to hospitals, sat down with families to help them look for options when they needed to find a home for a relative. One case she handled was a woman who was being kicked out of a nursing home. Leslie was there to facilitate things.”
She’s now working the county board of the Ancient Order of Hibernians and the Ladies Ancient Order of Hibernians to find a place in the Northeast or South Philadelphia to establish a regular senior lunch there. A second lunch is held at the Irish Center in Mt. Airy once a month—usually with music provided by Irish Center President Vince Gallagher.
“This is one of the things I’m thrilled about because it was something that [The Irish Center’s] Sean McMenamin has been talking about for a while. They approached us to kick start it, and at first we provided the food, but now they’ve taken it over. We send out the mailing and bring our group to the Irish Center. Some of them hadn’t been to the Irish Center for 20 years. For most seniors in our area, most of their issues are transportation related. One of our goals next year is to have a much larger budget for transportation.”
Just as the immigration center has lawyers who volunteer their time to work with the undocumented and others with legal problems, there are regular speakers who come to talk to the seniors about issues that face them, including “how to navigate Medicare and make wills,” says Lyons.
As she did with the Irish Center and the AOH, she has actively reached out to other Irish organizations in the community. “Often we all work at cross purposes,” she says. The Medicare specialist was an Ancient Order of Hibernians contact; Brehon Law Society members are another regular resource. Lyons is executive director of the Brehons (“All part of my strategy to get Irish organizations to work together!” she says) and worked the past two years to plan symposiums, first in Ireland and a few weeks ago at the Rittenhouse Hotel in Philadelphia, to bring lawyers and businessmen from both sides of the Atlantic together to discuss an issue of mutual interest—how they can do business together.
The fledgling symposium is so prestigious that Ireland’s Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Enda Kenny flew in for an overnight to attend this year. He met with Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett at a private dinner at the Union League; Corbett has designated next year’s symposium in Ireland an official state trade mission to build business links between Ireland and the US. Pennsylvania already has its fair share of Irish businesses. While here, Kenny visited Irish-owned Zenith Businesses, which makes systems for pharmaceutical manufacturers, in Whitpain, Montgomery County.
But Lyons isn’t all work. She works hard, but plays harder. She’s a competitive runner with the Fishtown Beer Runners in Philadelphia, where she recently bought a house. She’s also done rock climbing and learned how to fly with the greatest of ease on a trapeze at the Philadelphia Circus School in Mt. Airy. Only bad weather kept her from a sky diving appointment this year.
Last year, she was a crowd favorite at the imaginative fundraiser thrown by the Delco Gaels, part of the youth league of the Gaelic Athletic Association, “Dancing Like a Star” in which she was paired with singer Enda Keegan for a cha-cha, swing dance and freestyle. “So now I’m taking ballroom dancing lessons,” she says laughing. “I loved it.”
And she is doting mother to Breac, a speckled, cock-eared daschund-chihuahua mix she jokingly calls “the immigration reform dog” and who goes with her just about everywhere. (He’s also a regular at the seniors’ lunch, though he won’t be coming to the Hall of Fame dinner.)
She remains humble—and even a little abashed—about her Hall of Fame induction. But she’s so proud of it that she asked her stepmother, Josie, to fly in from Panang, Malaysia, where her father is head of Panang Medical College (he was once the Irish ambassador to Malaysia) to be with her at the dinner, which will held at the Irish Center on Sunday night.
“This honor is going to hold me accountable for what I do in the future,” Lyons says. “I’m going to spend the rest of my life living up to this award.”
