IRISH AMERICA IRISH AMERICA

Parades in Southie. His own family
immigrated in the 1850s to upstate New
York and grew vegetables.
Our meeting took place on the afternoon
of June 15, at the newly constructed
Bank of America Tower at Avenue on the
Americas in Midtown Manhattan. The
massive steel and glass structure – a one
billion dollar project – located on Avenue
of the Americas – would seem to signal
Bank of America’s confidence that it will
this. But it is a tribute to those hardscrabble
ancestors, and perhaps because he
had inherited some of their tenacity and
understanding “that it doesn’t all break
your way all the time, so you’ve got to
just power through it,” that Moynihan
took time out from his hectic schedule to
talk to Irish America, and agreed to give
the Keynote Address at our annual Wall
Street 50 dinner on August 24.
Your family came over when?
In the 1850’s. Both my parents come
from small towns in upstate New York
where the Irish part of their families had
farms and then opened some stores. My
grandfather was a lawyer up there. My
dad went to school and became a chemist
to work for DuPont. I’m one of eight
children, number six. My parents moved
to a little town in Ohio, called Marietta,
the month before I was born.
to go to law school. It was a very supportive
place and we had more fun than we
probably should have had. It’s a great
school for a lot of reasons, but the law
school was small, you really knew the professors,
you really knew the undergraduates.
I played rugby so it was fun, too.
Do you think Rev. John Perkins,
Notre Dame’s president, was
right to invite President Obama
to give the commencement
speech?
I think he was right, his reasoning was
right. I think at the end of the day one of
the challenges for a place like Notre
Dame is to ensure that they maintain their
willingness to have the debate. I think
going back to Father Hesburgh [“Father
Ted,” the man who led the University of
Notre Dame for 35 years], the reason
why the university has had such an
weather this current financial crisis.
As I receive my visitor’s pass from
Security and find my way into the inner
sanctum of the largest bank in the United
States, passing through a futuristic set of
glass doors, I cannot help but think of
Moynihan’s ancestors being processed
by immigration officials after landing in
New York. They could hardly have foreseen
a future that included anything like
TOP LEFT: Brian and his father Robert,
near the Lakes of Killarney.
ABOVE: Brian with his wife Susan,
daughter Mary, and son Christopher.
LEFT: Brian and Mary on the family’s trip
to Ireland in 2008.
After doing your undergrad at
Brown you went to Notre Dame
Law School.Was that a different
experience?
Very different. Brown was a great
school but it was very heavily Eastern. My
grandfather and my uncle both went to
Notre Dame, so I had a great Notre Dame
tradition. It was the best place in the world
impact on political leaders and others in
this country, is that they’re willing to
have debates even though they have a
heritage and a particular point of view. It
served them well.
When were you last in Ireland?
We went last August [2008]. We took
my father and mother, and three of my
siblings and our children went, so we
had about 18 people traveling around in
a bus, and it was a lot of fun. We went to
Dublin for a few days and then took off
down to the southwest. We had a bus
40 IRISH AMERICA AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2009