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A D.A with a serious mission

Since her election in 2005, Nassau County’s first female district attorney Kathleen Rice has distinguished herself as a mold breaking public official for her get-tough decision to prosecute DWI cases. She talks to CAHIR O’DOHERTY


Published Wednesday, October 14, 2009, 5:55 PM
Updated Thursday, September 2, 2010, 2:06 PM

 

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Her features are unmistakably Irish, but Nassau County, L.I. District Attorney Kathleen Rice, 44, first visited Ireland in 2002. Although in conversation she admits to being “1,000% Irish,” walking off the plane to compete in the 2002 Dublin City Marathon, she was still surprised to discover how at home she felt in the country she was visiting for the first time.

“I’m a redhead and I have freckles and I’ve always thought of myself as the odd one out even in my own family,” Rice, a Democrat, says.  “Until I visited Ireland, that is. I finally saw other women who had more freckles than me! I said to myself, now I know where I come from. I realized I was among my tribe.”

Rice’s paternal grandfather came to America when he was 12 years old in 1892. The eldest of 10 children, his family had been struggling in Ireland and eventually told him, “You’re going to go to America and you’re to make a life for yourself and for all of us.”

He had $20 in his pocket when he came across on a steamer to Boston. “He ended up building a very successful construction company under his own name,” says Rice. “He was able to bring over his brothers and sisters who wanted to come in very short order.”

Rice’s own father, Lawrence, was born in the U.S. and grew up in Forest Hills, Queens where he received a classic Irish American education at Queen of Martyrs, then Frances Xavier, then Fordham University.

Rice’s mother, Christine, whose family hailed from counties Roscommon and Sligo, met Lawrence at Fordham and they got married in 1953. They started the family a year later with the birth of Lawrence Junior, and they moved to Garden City, Nassau County the same year.

 Says Rice, “They proceeded to have 10 kids, as all good Irish Catholic families do. Go fourth and populate the earth, as they say! They really took that advice literally.

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