Steve Greeley
– Classic Irish American
When you think of Irish-American in the finest sense of that storied phrase, think of Steve Greeley.
As executive director of the American Ireland Fund, Greeley’s Irish family roots go back four generations to his great grandparents, who emigrated in the 19th century from Galway, Kerry and Cork. He was born in Somerville, a proudly blue-collar town for much of the 20th century where the Irish settled after moving out of Boston’s inner city neighborhoods.
He grew up with four sisters and a brother in St. Catherine’s of Genoa Parish, whose Irish church was designed by famed architect Charles D. Maginnis, an immigrant from Derry.
St. Catherine’s is considered to be “the gem of the Boston archdiocese” because of its classic forms reminiscent of early Christian architecture. It was distinctly Irish-American in the 1950s and 1960s.
“St. Catherine’s was no different than St. Mark’s or St. Brendan’s in Dorchester when I was growing up,” Greeley says from his office on Congress Street in downtown Boston. “It was heavily Irish, with some Italian and Polish.
“I grew up thinking of myself as Irish,” he continues, “thanks to my mom and dad. We had the big Irish parties at the house, with music and singing, and President Kennedy was very important to my parents, especially my father.”
Greeley has worn his Irish-American pedigree proudly throughout his life, and after graduating from University of Pennsylvania and Harvard Law School he had a successful 29 year legal career in Boston, specializing in commercial real estate.
He and his wife Jan are raising their family – four sons and a daughter – in Scituate, a beautiful seaside town south of Boston that became known as “the Irish Riviera” when Irish-Americans like the Kennedys and James Michael Curley built glorious summer homes there overlooking the Atlantic Ocean.
Greeley does a lot of community work on the South Shore, such as coaching local hockey teams – two his boys are acclaimed collegiate players.
Ireland Comes Calling
But Greeley’s life took a sharp turn in 2008, when he got an unexpected call one weekend from the American Ireland Fund, asking him if he’d like to be the next executive director. Founded and headquartered in Boston since 1976, the AIF has raised over $300 million for projects of charity, peace and education in Ireland and Northern Ireland.
“They were about to hire a national search firm to find an executive director, and my name kept popping up among the national directors located in Boston,” Greeley says.
He accepted the job in September 2008 and since then has been putting his Irishness to work on behalf of Ireland.
In the year he’s been traveling between Boston and Ireland, Greeley has seen first-hand the impact the AIF has had.
“It’s profound and deeply appreciated by Irish leaders and by the Irish people. You go to a place like the Belvedere Youth Club in an area of Dublin where there’s been 120 teen age heroin deaths in the last twelve years. You see the smiling but needy children in after-school programs or summer camp, and it makes you feel good about what AIF does.
“You go to Belfast and you see the integrated schools the AIF has helped to fund. You see the PeacePlayers,” a group that uses the game of basketball to unite and educate young athletes and their communities.
Thanks to AIF support, basketball is now “a non-sectarian sport in Belfast,” Greeley says. “You see players interacting and having dinner at each other’s houses.”
He recalls a woman he met at a luncheon with Ireland’s President Mary McAleese “She was with a group of 75 people from a very small town in Antrim, many of whom had never been to Dublin before. She shook my hand and said, ‘If it wasn’t for the AIF these people wouldn’t be here today.’”
It turned out that AIF had funded a community center in her town after the Good Friday agreement, so people from both sides of the religious divide could meet on neutral ground to get to know one another.
“From that hall, this group materialized into a social club and here they were, down with their cameras, taking pictures with Mary McAleese. It is stories like that,” Greeley says, which speak to the AIF contribution.
In addition to fundraising in New England for AIF, Steve is making a personal contribution too: just as Greeley’s parents passed on a sense of Irishness to him, he is thrilled to be passing along that pride to his five children.
“Every week my daughter Megan talks about a new college she wants to go to in Ireland for four years, not just one semester. And our boys talk about doing our annual family golf tournament on the Irish links next year.”
It’s that kind of enthusiasm for Ireland, passed from one generation to the next, which has made the AIF so successful in the United States and throughout the world over the past thirty years.
American Ireland Fund: irlfunds.org
by Michael P. Quinlin