By Martin McGovern
Special to the BIR
The Emmy-award winning Irish filmmaker Gerry Gregg is the man who produced the first major documentary about the Holocaust made in Ireland. His 2009 production, Till the Tenth Generation, tells the story of Tomi Reichental, now an Irish citizen, who lost 35 members of his family to Adolf Hitler’s madness. Read more
A former agent with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, Paul Doyle knows that people are fascinated by undercover police work. But it wasn’t the dark allure of the criminal element that drove him to pen a memoir about his time busting up drug rings from the Combat Zone to San Francisco; he just wanted to tell his personal story, all of it, his way.
Now free of any connection to the world of violence and drugs, Doyle remains in fine shape – at 64 and a boxer all his life, he looks as though he could put up a decent defense of the New England Diamond Belt that he won in 1967. Read more
By Peter F. Stevens
BIR Staff
(Third in a Series about the Catholic Church and Boston politics.)
In many ways, no one could replace Cardinal Richard J. Cushing of Boston. His death in November 1970 marked the end of an era in more ways than one for the Boston Archdiocese. Under Cushing and his predecessor, Cardinal William O’Connell, the Catholic Church had become a potent political, cultural, and religious force. The church ministered to a wide range of ethnicities, but the Church’s rise in the late 19th century and all of the 20th was inextricably intertwined with the contemporaneous hard-won rise of the Boston Irish. Read more
Cardinal Richard Cushing Left
a Stamp on the Political Landscape
By Peter F. Stevens
BIR Staff
Second of three articles.
“I’m no theologian,” Cardinal Richard Cushing liked to say. His self-deprecating humor notwithstanding, Cushing had no trouble wading into battles theological, economic, parochial, and political. Read more
"When Congressman Curley is in Boston," one of the papers wrote in 1913, "though his political influence is now supposed to be with the federal department heads, he is just as busy pulling favors at City Hall as when he was an alderman and councilor. Members of the present City Council are rarely seen in the building but for favors or other things until a meeting day, but Curley is always racing from one office to another for his constituents. Those who know the Congressman well say that this is the secret of his success in politics so far - that he is always 'on the job' for his constituent." Read more
