Notre Dame’s Brian Moynihan named new Bank of America CEO

'I think we Irish try to have a good sense of humor, and I think you’ve got to be serious but not take yourself too seriously.'

Speaking of his Notre Dame years Moynihan told Irish America:

 “My grandfather and my uncle both went to Notre Dame, so I had a great Notre Dame tradition. It was the best place in the world to go to law school. It was a very supportive place and we had more fun than we probably should have had. It’s a great school for a lot of reasons, but the law school was small, you really knew the professors, you really knew the undergraduates.

“I played rugby so it was fun, too. We went last August [2008]. We took my father and mother, and three of my siblings and our children went, so we had about 18 people traveling around in a bus, and it was a lot of fun. We went to Dublin for a few days and then took off down to the southwest. We had a bus driver who had that great Irish humor; we just laughed.

“I think we Irish try to have a good sense of humor, and I think you’ve got to be serious but not take yourself too seriously. I think also that no matter how many generations removed, there’s a little bit of a chip on the shoulder, and that you always [feel you must] prove yourself. There’s no sense of entitlement, no sense of placement, it’s all a sense of you’ve got to go out and work hard to get there.

“It doesn’t all break your way all the time, so you’ve got to just power through it. I think that’s deeply embedded in the culture of the Irish, including the Irish that went around the world, not only to this country but other countries. There’s a common trait, the people all had a sense that they needed to keep pushing forward, and they were never sort of settled. And I think that if you look across generations and look across people and meet people in the current generation in Ireland you see that trait’s still there.”

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Nster.com