Paul O’Dwyer was born on June 29, 1907, in Bohola, County Mayo, Ireland, the youngest of eleven children. In 1925, at age 17, he emigrated to Brooklyn, New York. He studied at Fordham University and St. John’s Law School becoming a U.S. citizen in 1931. As a lawyer, he championed civil rights causes, including desegregation, Irish republicanism, early Zionism, gay rights during the AIDS crisis, and the rights of Kentucky coal miners.
As a young man, O’Dwyer was active in local Irish American organizations. In the late 1930s, he chaired the Downtown Brooklyn Community Council while practicing law in downtown Brooklyn. After his brother became Kings County District Attorney in 1940, he moved his practice to Manhattan.
Before Pearl Harbor, O’Dwyer strongly opposed U.S. involvement in World War II. As chairman of the American Friends of Irish Neutrality, he traveled across the country to speak to and rally pro-neutrality groups, especially Irish American organizations.
Many of his best-known legal cases involved people accused of Communist activities. During the “Red Scare” of the 1950s, he defended labor leaders and fellow attorneys facing congressional questioning and deportation, supported challenges to anti-union laws in Florida and Alabama, and won redress for New York City teachers dismissed for alleged treasonous sympathies.
O’Dwyer was active in the National Lawyers Guild, became its president in 1947, and served on its national board from 1948 to 1951. He supported both constitutionalist and Irish republican initiatives, and his influence helped prevent the deportation of several Irish Republican Army gunmen, including “The Fort Worth Five” and Vincent Conlon.
In 1968, opposing U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War and backed by presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy, O’Dwyer ran in the Democratic primary for U.S. senator from New York and won an unexpected upset. In the general election, he faced popular Republican incumbent Jacob Javits and lost. He also lost campaigns for mayor, Congress, and the U.S. Senate. In 1973, however, O’Dwyer was elected New York City Council President, serving from 1974 to 1977. Around that time, he championed the Fort Worth Five, a group of middle-class Irish New Yorkers jailed after refusing to answer a Texas judge’s questions about alleged IRA gun running. His pursuit of justice in both the United States and the United Kingdom took an even more visible turn in 1991, when he marched in the St. Patrick’s Day procession with a cane and with his wife, Patricia Hanrahan, alongside members of the Irish Lesbian and Gay Organization, or ILGO.
O’Dwyer publicly opposed library censorship, defended labor union leaders and alleged anarchists, supported the left-wing American Labor Party, challenged racial segregation in New York housing and on Wall Street, advocated for the creation of Israel, organized Black voters in the South, represented striking Kentucky coal miners, argued before the U.S. Supreme Court for the rights of mainland Puerto Rican voters, sued New York City to keep transit fares low, and led an April 1969 antiwar march from Times Square to Central Park.
O’Dwyer supported the illegal transport of weapons to Palestine in the 1940s and to Northern Ireland in the 1970s, and he acknowledged knowing about the smuggling routes.
Paul O’Dwyer died on June 23, 1998, in Goshen, New York.
By Geraldine Fitzgerald
Photo Credit: “Paul O’Dwyer 1968” by Roger Doherty is licensed under CC BY 2.0
