A lifeline for elderly Irish immigrants

The elderly program now draws more than 400 Irish-born seniors into weekly and monthly activities in Quincy, Canton, and Brighton, keeping people involved and connected.

President Mary McAleese of Ireland, speaking yesterday at a brunch in Dorchester honoring the outreach program, said the work is especially valuable for the Irish diaspora.

"Thank goodness there is that space that helps the Irish find each other easily because we can't live without each other," McAleese said. "That's one of the great characteristics of the Irish. We need company, we enjoy company, we are at our best in company."

"This is designed to address something that cuts our hearts," she told a gathering of several hundred people at Florian Hall in Dorchester, a storied home for Irish clan gatherings. "We do not like to see people living in loneliness."

The Pastoral Centre's three-year-old elder program is one of several recent initiatives to aid aging Irish-born people, in Ireland as well as abroad. McAleese, whose presidential role is largely ceremonial, has played an active role for the aged. She cosponsored a new "senior help line," a telephone service established in Ireland to give lonely elderly people a way to chat with others and get support. That help line has recently been extended to New York, and the goal now is to create a Boston-based branch in the fall, staffed by local volunteers, said Cora Flood, the outreach coordinator for the Pastoral Centre.

Among those making use of the center's weekly services is 67-year-old Ken Smyth, who came to the United States on vacation 40 years ago and never left. Smyth, who lives in South Boston and comes to the Quincy center on Wednesday mornings, said Flood had helped him get his Irish pension. "I didn't even realize I could get one," he said.

Another increasingly relevant payment for emigrants is the "centenarian bounty" - a letter from the Irish president accompanying a payment of about $3,500 for Irish-born people who reach the age of 100. Two of them were at Florian Hall yesterday to greet McAleese and her husband, Martin.

The centenarians were identified, as was everyone at yesterday's event, by name and home county: Mary Fitzgerald, County Kerry (and now Melrose), and Catherine McAteer, County Fermanagh (now of Medfield).

McAleese said that reaching 100 is ever more common in Ireland. "There's going to be a president of Ireland soon who will spend the whole time doing nothing but writing centenarian letters," she said.

McAleese has been in Massachusetts since Sunday, when she gave the commencement address at Mt. Holyoke College. She has been visiting cultural and immigrant organizations here at a dizzying pace, and last night gave the keynote address at the premier Irish community event in Boston: the annual dinner of the Irish Immigration Center, held at the Westin Copley Place Hotel.

Sister Marguerite Kelly, executive director of the Irish Pastoral Center via County Galway, said in an interview that the elder program was created after the successive deaths of two Irish immigrants who had no support network. "We said, 'this can't happen in the Irish community.' So we created the senior outreach to get older people together."

In addition to weekly entertainment and gatherings on weekday mornings in Quincy and Brighton, a monthly event is held at the Irish Cultural Centre in Canton, with a Catholic Mass said by Father John McCarthy (Limerick), who is the center's chaplain.

McAleese (Antrim) told the audience: "It's one of the great characteristics of the Irish that no matter where we are from, whether Roscommon or Cork or Antrim or Galway, once we are in a place like Boston we go to a lot of bother to establish places and spaces where we can be clans to one another, clans without frontiers, friends and families to one another."