IrishCentral.com ten Irish American Pulitzer Prize winners

From born newshounds to journalists-cum-political-stars the Iris American winners

Irish American writers are ten-a-penny. Irish-American Pulitzers are no different. They range from born newshounds like Patrick Farrell and Frank O’Brien, to journalists-cum-political-stars like Kennedy and Samantha Power. There’s professional controversialists like Maureen Dowd and the rough-’round-the-edges (and racist-down-the-middle) Jimmy Breslin. And then there’s Jack Kelley. Read on ... 

PATRICK FARRELL

In 2009, Patrick Farrell of The Miami Herald won a Pulitzer for his “provocative, impeccably composed images of despair after Hurricane Ike and other lethal storms caused a humanitarian disaster in Haiti.” Farrell is a second-generation Irish American, his grandfather having come to America in 1906 from Co Cork to settle in Brooklyn and, surprise, surprise, set up a pub. Farrell told Irish America magazine that year that, “I believe I’m a photojournalist (like many photojournalists) who tries to capture moments and tell stories and make them visually compelling. The photographs and experience in Haiti during last year’s hurricane season were the most devastating and important pictures I have shot during my career. Haiti had been relentlessly battered by those storms, and the destruction of homes and the incredible loss of life were stories that had to be told.” But Farrell very nearly didn’t make it as a photographer. “I think my appreciation for everything visual came from an accident on Halloween in 1971 when I was shot in the right eye by a BB-gun and spent a week in the dark behind eye-bandages, and the rest of the month with one eye still bandaged. I believe subconsciously I spent a little more time looking at things, which led me to want to see how I could capture images on film.”
 
MAUREEN DOWD

Maureen Bridgid Dowd, born the last of five to a police officer and a housewife – what could be more Irish? In 1999, Dowd of The New York Times won for her “fresh and insightful columns on the impact of President Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky.” Dowd had already come close to a Pulitzer in 1992, for national reporting, but the award for her series on Bill Clinton is far more Maureen. A sharp and insightful – but mostly provocative – commentator on U.S. politics, she once said of Al Gore that he is “so feminized and diversified and ecologically correct that he's practically lactating.” But it’s not all been plain sailing for Maureen. In May 2009 it was suggested that her May 17, 2009 Times column contained some unsettling similarities to a blog post by another journalist. Dowd, who had excoriated other for plagiarism in the past (Joe Biden, for ripping off Neil Kinnock), claimed she’d heard the offending line from a friend and not from the blog.
 
JIMMY BRESLIN

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