Maureen Dowd: Fighting Irish girl

By

Niall O'Dowd,

Irish America Magazine

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A 2-year-old Maureen Dowd dressed up in her shamrock dress for St. Patrick's Day

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Somewhere in Australia there’s an Irish lad called Rowan McCormick who broke Maureen Dowd’s heart. When she went back in the early 1970s to visit her homestead in County Clare, hard by the majestic Cliffs of Moher, she met him and fell madly in love.

Her older sister Peggy remembers that she was seriously worried they might never see Maureen again. “She was totally in love. We didn’t think we would bring her back,” Peggy remembers.

The Dowd family had traveled over with their mother to keep her company. Their dad, Michael, was national chairman of the Ancient Order of Hibernians, and the annual convention was being held in Ireland.

Sadly, like most summer romances, Dowd’s didn’t work out, and her beau departed for Australia. But when she was Down Under a few years back on a book tour she put out an all-points bulletin and he came running.

Alas, he was married now and settled down. Dowd still sounds disappointed.

It is quite an image – Maureen Dowd, scourge of every president since Poppy Bush and, arguably, the most powerful journalist in America thanks to her must-read column in The New York Times – talking of the road not taken, living a quiet life as a barkeep’s wife back in Clare.

Maybe that image isn’t so fanciful, though. Spending a few hours in the back of a midtown Manhattan restaurant with Maureen and her sister Peggy is akin to catching up with relatives in a snug bar in the west of Ireland.

After lunch the theater crowd drifted away to the matinee performances and left the world to us. The Dowd sisters are very close, finishing each other’s sentences, adding a detail here and there.  

The talk is soon of Ireland. Peggy is the family historian, and the stories flow like a familiar river.

Peggy has her Irish passport; Maureen covets one. The focus is memories of their father Michael, a son of Ireland who bestrides their lives still, though he is long gone.

Michael from Clare was the son of a poor farmer in a poor country, the second child in the family named Michael after the first died.  He was booked on the Titanic in 1914, but his mother cried all night and he couldn’t leave her.

The woman who took his place in the doomed liner survived and they met up years later. Though still a young woman, her hair had turned pure white from the fright of that awful night, or so says the family lore.

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