People

Every Wednesday, a platter of sandwiches is delivered to the Irish Immigration Center in Upper Darby for the weekly seniors lunch. Then, the regulars arrive, many of them men and women who emigrated to the United States in the ‘50s, ‘60s, and ‘70s, spending most of their lives separated by a vast sea from family and old friends. They’ve raised new families here and they’ve become old friends, but the weekly lunches are an opportunity to hear Irish voices again, to share memories, and make new ones.

When lunch is over, some of the seniors wrap up the leftovers and, on their way home, visit other seniors, those who are isolated by illness, disability, or lack of transportation.

And it’s those people–the ones who don’t come–that motivated the center’s board to approve the hiring of an Irish social worker who’ll be able to regularly visit homebound immigrants to offer them support and the familiar lilt of home.

“The people we see all the time are the healthiest and in the best shape,” says Immigration Center Executive Director Siobhan Lyons. “We would love to do more for the seniors who come here—but, of more importance—the ones who can’t come here.”

At the end of November, Leslie Alcock, a native of Carlow with a master of social science from University College of Dublin, will join the staff at the immigration center. Her first job, says Lyons—assess the needs of the community’s seniors. Alcock, who has wide experience with various communities, from prisoners to families, will be providing services to all ages, but the impetus for bringing her on is to make sure that Philadelphia’s elderly Irish immigrants don’t experience the same fate as others around the world.

“One of our regular lunch people, Attracta O’Malley, sent me a news story about an old Irish immigrant in New Zealand who died and whose body wasn’t found for a year,” says Lyons. “Just a couple of years ago there was a famous case in New York that served as the inspiration for a survey of Irish senior citizens in New York.”

In 2009, the headlines in New York newspapers blared, “He died alone.” He was 72-year-old Tony Gallagher, a retired carpenter from Mayo whose wife, who has Alzheimer’s, was in a nursing home. The two had no children. Gallagher was found dead in his Queens apartment about a week after he died of natural causes.

Ireland’s unique Immigrant Support Programme, which funds immigration centers around the world, was created in reaction to stories of increasingly isolated immigrants, mainly in England, who hadn’t become educated, married, saved, or assimilated into the culture—essentially becoming ghettoized.

“The inspiration for a lot of these senior programs are the experiences of the London Irish, who emigrated in the ‘50s, sent money home, didn’t assimilate into the English culture, didn’t get married or have families, and by the time they were in their ‘60s they didn’t have a support system,” says Lyons. “Our seniors are better adjusted and assimilated and certainly wealthier than the London Irish, but when a spouse dies they get isolated. Some of them are living in a neighborhood that used to be Irish but is now not a neighborhood they necessarily feel part of. Some have less confidence in their physical abilities and are wary of going out.”

Kathleen Murtagh, one of the center’s Wednesday “lunch ladies,” knows some of those people. A widow and mother of six, she regularly takes them leftovers, visits the homebound, and calls those she hasn’t seen in a while. “We try to keep track of people we know,” she says. “We’re always looking out and reaching out. If there’s someone you normally see and you don’t see them, you check on them. But there are people we don’t know and I think having a social worker who could find them, call or knock on their door, would really help.”

The inspiration for hiring a social worker from Ireland came from Chicago, says Lyons, where an organization called Wellspring Personal Care joined forces with the Chicago Irish Immigrant Support Center to bring Irish social work students to the US as interns to serve the elderly Irish population. Alcock is a graduate of that program.

“I’m familiar with what they’re doing in Chicago and they’re a few years ahead of us in their program, but they’re the model for what we’re doing,” says Lyons.

The Irish government is impressed too. It has funded “The Chicago Irish Project” and encouraged other immigration centers to replicate the design, which also gives field training to Irish social workers whom it hopes will bring their knowledge of senior care back to Ireland.

“I love the idea that we could set up an exchange program between schools in Ireland and schools with great social work programs here, like Bryn Mawr and Temple with Trinity maybe,” says Lyons. “That’s our long-term strategic plan, but right now the first step is for Leslie to sit down the seniors here and start making a list of all the seniors we’re not reaching and for her to go out and see what their needs are. That way we can build up a database of who is out there who needs help and what they need.”

Eventually, says Lyons, she’d like to establish a volunteer program of younger people who would do home visits, run errands, and do small chores like lawn mowing and snow shoveling that the elderly now have to pay for—a financial hardship when you’re on a fixed income. “It will be nice to see the next generation of the Irish community helping our seniors,” says Lyons. “We want people to know they’re cared about.”

You can help Philadelphia’s “Irish Project” by attending a fundraiser on Sunday, November 6, from 3-6 PM at Finnigan’s Wake, 3rd and Spring Garden Streets in Philadelphia. The $40 per person ticket covers a buffet and open bar and live music with the popular Bogside Rogues. For more information, contact Siobhan Lyons, 610-789-6355.

Jamesie Johnston of Albannach, looking healthy.

He’s baaack.

Jamesie Johnston, the popular, long-haired “baron of bass” for the Scottish percussive group, Albannach, literally wasn’t missing a beat on Saturday in Lansdale despite a three-month respite to recover from stab wounds he received after a Scottish festival in Kentucky last summer.

On June 5, an intoxicated fan stabbed Johnston in the mid-section and thigh, puncturing his lung. Johnston had been attempting to eject the man, who had become belligerent, from the cabin where the band was relaxing after their show.

“It took a good two or three months to recover from that,” Johnston said, as the band was setting up for the first of half a dozen sets they would play at the annual Molly O’Ween street festival at Wood and Main streets, outside Molly Maguire’s pub. “Three weeks out I was so out of breath I couldn’t do anything and with the wound in my thigh it was hard to walk. I like to jog and exercise most days, so it got depressing.”

The punctured lung kept Johnston from returning home to Glasgow, Scotland. “I was on a no-fly thing because I couldn’t be in a pressurized cabin,” he explained. Band mate Jacquie Holland stayed with Johnston for a time while he recuperated in the University of Louisville Hospital and later at the home of a friend.

He refused blood transfusions and rehab. “I ate healthy, took lots of vitamins and stayed as active as possible,” Johnston explained. “I just wanted to get on with it so I would get up and move about as much as I could.”

On Saturday, only his fifth gig since rejoining the band in September, he appeared none the worse for wear, rocking and jumping as he hammered out the heart-pounding rhythms that make Albannach (the Gaelic word for Scotland) one of the most popular bands on the Celtic circuit. They appear every year at the Mid-Winter Scottish and Irish Festival in Valley Forge, at Molly O’Ween, and occasionally at Brittingham’s Irish Pub. They’re managed in the US by Bill and Karen Reid of East of the Hebrides Entertainments in Plymouth Meeting.

Like many who’ve been through a life-threatening experience, Johnston considers himself lucky to be alive. “If I’d been stabbed an inch to either side, it could have been much worse,” he said. “I’m very lucky.”

Tom Farrelly

By Kathy McGee Burns

You’d never know by his accent, but Tom Farrelly is from Virginia. That’s the Virginia in County Cavan, Ireland, a small farming town of 4,000 people halfway between Belfast and Dublin.

It’s not without its celebrity. Jonathan Swift wrote “Gulliver Travels” while visiting there. But it’s also where the Farrellys, James and Margaret (nee Lynch), raised their 10 children. Fourth from the top was Tom, a successful businessman who will be honored this year at the 11th Annual Delaware Valley Irish Hall of Fame for his longtime work in the region’s Irish community where he serves on the Irish Center board and has been elected president of the Cavan Society five times.

Thomas Edison once said that “genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.” This describes Tom Farrelly—hard-working his whole life and successful at all he does. While at school, he worked on the family farm and at the Park Hotel, a 100-acre estate on Lough Ramor, as a “Jack of all trades:” growing flowers and vegetables, and working as a handyman, waiter, bartender, even a maitre’d.

Between school and his job, he walked miles every day. His boss, Mrs. McDonald, took pity on him and lent him a bicycle. He was then known as the “king of the students”– the only kid with a bike.

There is no telling how many miles you will have to run while chasing a dream.
Tom, who left school early, worked for a time at various bars in Dublin and, like every young man at the time, longed to go to America where his sister, Sarah, lived. At the age of 19, Tom left Ireland for Overbrook, Delaware County, where his sister lived. He recalled being shocked to see grass growing. All the postcards he’d seen at home showed only high-rise city buildings.

He took an astounding array of jobs: bookkeeper at Provident National Bank, landscaping with the Travers Brothers, night shift at the Acme, dairyman in Ardmore, after which he opened his own business, Shamrock Farm, a landscaping concern also known as Farrelly Brothers.

Tom met other Irish immigrants at the many dances that were so much a part of Philadelphia many years ago. (He told me a cute story about his car, a Crown Vic which he called Victoria. Someone once asked him why he never brought a girl to the local dances. He said he didn’t have a girl. The man said. “Well then, who’s Victoria?”)

It was at one of those dances that he met a pretty, petite blonde named Christine Scanlon, from County Galway. And it all unfolded like the song:

“So I took her hand and I gave her a twirl
And I lost my heart to a Galway girl.”

He and Chrissy have been married or more than 40 years. (A story they tell proves that it was meant to be: After they met, Chrissy agreed to let him pick her up from her job at Stouffers Restaurant. He sat in his car, out front and waited and waited and waited. She stood out back and waited and waited and waited! Fortunately, they finally figured it out.) They’re the parents of two children, a son, Tom, Jr., a daughter, Irene, and granddaughter, Kaitlyn Marie.

When I asked Tom who he admired most, he didn’t even stop to think. “My parents,” he said. “They had nothing for themselves but yet the children wanted for nothing! They might have been poor but they thought they had everything in the world.”

Tom’s story is the epitome of every immigrant’s dream—to  create a good life in the land of opportunity. His business is thriving. His friend, fellow landscaping contractor and Irish Center President Vince Gallagher, says Tom has “built up an amazing business” and includes high profile clients such as Villanova University.

But even more, he says, “Tom has helping hands He would never turn anyone down. Whenever there is a benefit, Tom is the first to show up.”

He’s also a Gaelic Athletic Association supporter (for 35 years) and its honorary president in 1988; a longtime supporter of the McDade School of Irish Dance, president of the Old Timers group at the Irish Center and president of the Cavan Bowling League.

Tom is also emcee of everything—a job he earned by his quick wit. There’s only one problem. He’s been the emcee of the Delaware Valley Irish Hall of Fame awards dinner every year. This year, as an honoree, he’ll have to be replaced. But we’re looking forward to a very funny acceptance speech.

Tom Farrelly will be honored, along with Kathleen Murtagh (profiled last week) and John Donovan, at an awards presentation dinner on November 13 at the Irish Center, 6815 Emlen Street, Philadelphia.

Kathleen Murtagh

This is the first of three profiles of the 2011 inductees into the Delaware Valley Irish Hall of Fame, written by Kathy McGee Burns, president of the organization, that we’ll be running over the next few weeks. First up is the Mayo Association’s Kathleen Murtagh. All three inductees, including Tom Farrelly of the Cavan Society, and John Donovan who serves on the board of the Philadelphia Irish Memorial, will be honored at a dinner at the Irish Center on November 13.

As I was interviewing Kathleen Murtaugh, I became mesmerized by her golden red hair, radiant blue-green eyes and the way, as she told me the story of her life—happy moments and sad—she was expressive, even bubbly, and joyous. It struck me that this was the lovely aura that draws so many people to this generous, warm-hearted woman.

Kathleen was born in Carracastle, a Roman Catholic parish which envelops parts of Mayo and Roscommon, and borders on Sligo. It is known for its 20 ringed forts. She was the fourth child (one son and four daughters) of Ellen Attracta Cawley (Aclare, Sligo) and Bernard Gavin (Swinford, Mayo).

Her parents had both left Ireland, at different times, to go to America. By a quirk of fate they met each other in Germantown. It seems that Ellen’s sister, Margaret, was married to Bernard’s brother, Patrick. They fell in love and wedding bells rang out on Easter Monday, 1928, at St. Francis Church. They settled in Germantown. The Gavins’ stay was shortened by Bernard’s health issues so the family with toddler, Brian, went back to Ireland. They went on to have four more wee ones, all girls, Margaret Mary, Helene, Kathleen and Linda.

When we talked about the homes in which the Gavins lived, Katheen, with an impish grin, told me several of them were haunted. One, in particular, Palmfield House, had been the family stead of Sir Anthony McDonnell (1840’s). He went on to be the first Catholic to ever serve as Under Secretary of Ireland. It was said that McDonnell’s father had hung himself and still roamed the halls.

Fortunately, Kathleen’s family settled on a farm, 38 acres, in Swinford, where they grew everything, from vegetables and fruit to hay. The land sustained them with their cows, pigs, turkeys, geese, ducks, and one horse. They all worked the farm.

Kathleen confessed that she had a childhood nickname: Jamjars. As a 10-year-old, she would go from cottage to cottage to collect jam jars and then resell them for 2 cents. Her sisters, laughingly, accused her of being the first recycler in Ireland. She was educated at the Cloongullane National School and the Convent of Mercy.

At age 18, her brother, Brian, an American citizen since he was born in the US, decided he wanted to move back. Their father, she said, saw what the future held for the family and decided that if one went, they’d all go. He didn’t want the heartache so many Irish experience, seeing their children leave one by one. So the Gavins sold every thing, said goodbye to their friends and sailed to America on the famous ocean liner, the Mauretania. They all stood on deck to wave hello to the Statue of Liberty. (Later, having sailed into the harbor, Kathleen’s first impression while driving through the Holland Tunnel, under all that water, was sheer terror.)

The young woman didn’t take long to set off on her new American adventure. She took a two-year business course, at $5 a week, at Immaculate Conception School and went on to work at many jobs. But it was at a Sunday night dance that she met her future husband, She met her husband, John (Jack) Murtaugh at a Sunday night dance. Sound familiar? They married in 1955 and had six children; Jack, Brian, Kevin, Maureen, Helene, and Kathleen. Jack, who owned a plumbing and heating business where Kathleen worked as his secretary, was an accomplished musician who played with some of the best, including local favorites Tommy Moffit and Pat Campbell.

Then tragedy struck. Jack Murtagh was accidentally killed in 1971, leaving Kathleen alone to raise their children, who ranged in age from four to 14, something, she said, she managed to do “with the help of God.” Even with all of that responsibility, she saved every Sunday for her aging parents. She spent the day at their home, lovingly cooking, cleaning and entertaining them until their deaths in 1985 and 1986.

In 1985, Kathleen met Charles McCartin, who remained her best friend until his death. He introduced her to the Mayo Society (she’s been a loyal, favorite member ever since) and they enjoyed Irish dancing and socializing at the Commodore Barry Club.

Along with her involvement with the Mayo Society, Kathleen is president of the St. Bernadette’s Senior Citizens Club, active with the Irish Immigration Center of Philadelphia, a volunteer for the St. Patrick Fathers and Holy Rosary Sister. She also stays busy at home—just keeping pace with her 18 grandchildren and nine great grandchildren for whom she is a positive role model with her philosophy: “Help who I can.”