A JUDGE FOR ALL

Journalist Michael Daly's long-awaited book on the life and death of Father Mychal Judge, the first reported fatality on 9/11, is in many respects the work of a lifetime. Part eulogy, part celebration, it's the most intimate portrait of the beloved fire chaplain and the Irish American community he loved yet written. CAHIR O'DOHERTY talks to Daly about the inspirational life of a man many already consider a saint.

THERE may be as many Father Mychal Judges as there are people who remember him. Try to assemble the strands of his life and you'll be amazed by how varied they are, yet one theme remains - Father Mike was known and loved in every borough of New York City, by rich and poor, firemen and clergy, parade organizers and protestors, macho men and drag queens, gay and straight, and all of them Irish.

Working as a top columnist at the New York Daily News for over two decades, Michael Daly knows all about the tribes of New York Irish, be they orthodox, dissenter or reformed, at least as well as Mychal Judge did, which makes him the ideal chronicler of Judge's life and work.

Daly's own father was born outside Dublin but originally hailed from Cork, and his mother was a Canadian of Irish extraction. It's a background that has allowed Daly to interpret between occasionally competing strands of Irish life in the metropolis, and this he does with a rare degree of clarity.

Reading Daly's new book The Book of Mychal: The Surprising Life and Heroic Death of Father Mychal Judge (St. Martin's Press) page after page, is to be caught off guard with unforgettable stories told so vividly they seem to recreate Judge's life before your eyes.

"I started out with the guy I knew," Daly told the Irish Voice during an interview. "I met Mychal in 1994. At the time there was a fireman called John Drennan who was terribly burned in what Judge called 'a big fire in a little house.'

"Drennan held on for 40 days before he died, and Mychal was there the whole time. That's where I first got to know him. He was a unique guy. A lot of people thought he was as close to Jesus as anyone they'd ever met. And if Jesus laughed a lot, well then yeah, maybe."

Judge had a wonderful habit of turning up when he was most needed, finding exactly the right words, and saying them with obvious feeling too, and people loved him for it.

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