Irish America magazine - June/July '08 issue: Irish soldiers in Kosovo, Faiths o’ the Irish, Ireland of a Thousand Welcomes?, Finding Home, U2 Have Gone 3D, The House that Hoban built, Straight from the bottle, Keeping it All in the Family, Holy Wells

By Lauren Byrne

Irish America was in Boston on January 11 to salute its 2006 Business 100 Boston honorees at a special luncheon co-hosted with the American Ireland Fund.

The venue was the Boston College Club, located atop the Bank of America building in downtown Boston, and offering dazzling views of Boston’s harbor front. While guests lunched on Boston chowder, beef steak and creamed potatoes, and fresh fruit tart, Irish America publisher Niall O’Dowd introduced the program. Bridget Hester, the regional director of The American Ireland Fund, extended a welcome to everyone. Brian Burns, Business 100 honoree and the event’s special guest, was the recipient of the Irish Spirit Award, presented to him by editor-in-chief Patricia Harty. Chairman and CEO of BF Enterprises, Inc., the San Francisco-based publicly-owned real estate holding and development company, Burns is also the founder and principal benefactor of the Burns Library of Rare Books at Boston College. He named the library in memory of his father, the Honorable John J. Burns (1901-1957), who, at the age of 29, became the youngest person ever appointed to the Superior Court of Massachusetts, and three years later became the first general counsel for the Securities and Exchange Commission. Accepting his award, Burns commented on the serendipity that resulted in the collection, stating that he acquired much of the now internationally recognized collection (with its emphasis on Irish studies, British Catholic authors, Jesuitana, Catholic liturgy and life in America, 1925-1975, and Boston history) at a time when he couldn’t afford to purchase anything else.

Thomas J. Hynes, president and CEO of Meredith & Grew Incorporated, the Boston-based global property management firm, was the keynote speaker at the luncheon. In his introductory remarks he noted, “I am just a proxy for everyone in this room and countless others who followed the same voyage to the U.S. because of the famine in Ireland.” Tracing the Hynes clan to the Galway O’Heins of the 1600s, Hynes said his American lineage began with the arrival in Boston of two brothers, Bernard John Hynes (his grandfather) and Thomas J. Hynes from Lochrea, County Galway, in 1875. Hard work and night school saw the next generation prosper. When the notorious Mayor James Michael Curley went to jail in 1948, Hynes’s uncle, John B. Hynes, then city clerk, was appointed mayor. He went on to beat Curley in a bitterly fought political campaign and served three consecutive terms from 1950 to 1960.

Hynes quoted a poem Mayor Hynes penned in the 1950s that, he said, summed up his uncle’s twinned love for Boston and his Irish heritage – sentiments no doubt shared by every generation of Irish in Boston: “Don’t you love this city by the open sea/This city that mothered the home of the free?. . .Don’t you love this city where roots go deep/In the soil of the land where the martyrs sleep?”