Martin O’Malley couldn’t figure out why the president of Ireland wanted to meet him. It was 2000 and he had been elected mayor of Baltimore just a few months earlier.
Going to work every day was like “drinking from a firehose”, he says, such was the scale of the city’s problems with a sky-high crime rate and drug problems.
“This particular morning, along with a gazillon other things I had to do, I was told that the president of Ireland was visiting. My chief of staff told me she wanted to see me,” he says. He didn’t believe him.
Why would she request a meeting with him? he asked.
“She wanted to meet the first Irish-American mayor to be elected in a majority African-American city,” he says now. The Irish embraced their own wherever they were in the world, Mary McAleese explained.
O'Malley recalls McAleese's visit fondly ahead of his three-day visit to Dublin, which begins today. He is due to meet Taoiseach Enda Kenny, attend a dinner marking the 50th anniversary of John F Kennedy's visit to Ireland and deliver a speech, The US-Ireland Relationship: Past, Present and Future, at Iveagh House.
O'Malley, now governor of Maryland and talked about as a possible Democratic presidential candidate in 2016, identified with his Irish heritage long ago. His great-grandfather – also Martin O'Malley and a descendant of Grace O'Malley's Clare Island clan – left Maam, Co Galway in the 1870s for Arizona before finally settling in Pittsburgh.
O’Malley grew up listening to Clancy Brothers records and there wasn’t a single Irish history book in his local library in Maryland he didn’t devour, he says. He started playing Irish music in a band as a teenager and still rocks out with his band every St Patrick’s Day at the governor’s residence in Annapolis.
Irish agenda
O'Malley believes the tribulations many Irish endured to make it in America resonates with other nationalities and is the reason why many Irish made successful politicians.
“There is among the Irish, by and large in America, a keen and heartfelt awareness that we are a nation of nations and we have all been strangers in a foreign land at one point, so that gives to Irish public servants in America, not always but for the most part, a certain ability to relate to others,” he says.
In his early years in politics, O'Malley pushed the Irish agenda. While working on the 1984 presidential campaign of Democrat Gary Hart, he drafted a policy paper on the US taking a role in brokering peace in Northern Ireland, seeking all-party peace talks and the appointment of an envoy.
That Irish policy, the first time it was supported by a Democratic presidential candidate, was endorsed in that election by Hart's rival Walter Mondale and in the Democratic campaigns of 1988 and 1992.
Higher office
In more recent times, O'Malley has been responsible for one of the most prolific legislative sessions of any governor in the US, marking the 50-year-old politician as one to watch for higher office.
Maryland has abolished the death penalty, introduced same-sex marriage and passed some of the country's most restrictive gun-control laws. He has succeeded at a state level what President Obama has failed to achieve at a federal level, balancing tax increases and spending cuts to almost wipe out a $1.7 billion deficit he inherited in 2007 and still invest in education and infrastructure.
Republican rivals accuse O'Malley of box-ticking a liberal wish list for a run at the White House. He sees his policies as "affirming the dignity of individuals," which, he says, is good for innovation and entrepreneurship.
O'Malley's policies are also rooted in pragmatism. His position on the death penalty was "in the category of doing what works and no longer doing what was wasteful," he says. It was no longer working as a crime deterrent. On the gun laws, he wrote to every gun licence-holder to say what they were being told by the National Rifle Association was wrong and assured hunters he wasn't coming after their rifles.
Crime reduction
Adopting an idea from New York city's strategy on crime reduction, O'Malley introduced a customer-service strategy called CityStat that made the city government accountable by asking citizens to call a telephone number if services weren't up to scratch. They were guaranteed a response within 48 hours.
Baltimore subsequently recorded the biggest crime reduction of any major US city in a decade. The city's bleak portrayal in TV series The Wire is a historical representation, says O'Malley.
As governor, O’Malley is applying the same customer-service standards. StateStat should offer customers what they expect from a shop or a bank, he says.
He believes a bill overhauling the US immigration system, currently before the Senate, may be a chance to “revive that American way of finding common ground and compromise”.
The proposed legislation by a bipartisan Senate group, which would help an estimated 50,000 undocumented Irish become US citizens, has a “50-50” chance of passing, “perhaps better”, he says.
O’Malley is not rushing to announce that big step towards the White House, a race that next time is expected to require a war chest topping $1 billion. He doesn’t know what he plans to do next, he says, after he leaves his term-limited role as governor in 2015.
But the hints are there — he believes there is a new performance-driven, results-oriented way of governing “bubbling” up from America’s cities and states that is “really, really needed at a national level.”
“However much good President Obama is able to achieve in his remaining three years, there will be plenty of work for us to do as a country once his term of office is over.”
