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A Politician Molded by Irish Rebels, Jesuit Ideals
"People always overestimate my ambition and underestimate my conviction," the Democratic candidate for governor says.
(By Susan Biddle -- The Washington Post)
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"You just don't sit there in passive silence when you can contribute some ideal," says his mother, Barbara O'Malley, a longtime Capitol Hill receptionist for Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski (D-Md.). Her husband, Tom O'Malley, who died in January, was a trial lawyer, "a modern-day Atticus Finch and a great man," Martin O'Malley says.
In his campaign, he cites the Jesuit ideal of being "a man for others," instilled in him at Gonzaga College High School, a few blocks north of the Capitol. While there, he also experienced an ethnic awakening that helped shape the public figure he is today.
Picturing a Better Tomorrow
His football coach, Danny Costello, a proud Irish American, enjoyed listening to Celtic folk songs in his office, especially the subgenre known as rebel music.
The lyrics recall centuries of oppression in Ireland, honoring the heroes who warred against England and championing the struggle for a unified republic, for an end to British rule in the province of Northern Ireland. Rebel bands such as the Wolfe Tones, Costello's favorite, poeticized the militancy of the Irish Republican Army.
For O'Malley, in the fall of 1979, here was Celtic music that stirred him. In his coach's office, the Wolfe Tones sang for human rights; of patriots bleeding in the streets under royal rifles; of "The Men Behind the Wire" in the Maze, the notorious British prison near Belfast.
"There's probably not a book in the Rockville library on Irish history that I didn't sign out in high school," he says. Searching for the stories behind the lyrics, he found a history filled with defiant chieftains and rebel poets, a millennium of Irish perseverance rich with misty and majestic verses.
For his senior yearbook quote in 1981, he turned to Patrick Pearse, a poet and republican rebel shot by a British firing squad after the Easter Rising in 1916.
"Wise men, riddle me this: what if the dream come true?"
It's from "The Fool," a poem about faith, about "attempting impossible things, deeming them alone worth the toil."
"It says to me that . . . in order to make a better tomorrow, you have to be able to dream and picture it in your head," O'Malley explains.
Running for mayor in 1999, with his city's homicide toll regularly topping 300 a year, O'Malley vowed to cut the annual body count to 175 or less. But he hasn't come close. Totals have been hovering above 250, and Ehrlich, in the campaign, has hammered him on it.
It's not a broken promise, O'Malley says. He calls it "a goal dreamed but not realized." He says what counts are faith and persistence.
