Doherty’s way

This attention to detail has served him well in the New York City Comptroller’s Office, which he joined as a young political operative in the 1980s with short-term goals in mind.
He’s the type who could tell you who James Buchanan’s vice-president was (John C. Breckinridge) and someone whose eyes light up scanning a page of figures. But for Doherty, the director of corporate responsibility at the Comptroller’s Office, there’s a bigger picture — the pursuit of justice.
“Money talks,” he said, referring to the clout New York’s investments have.
Doherty is perhaps best known for his work on fair employment practices in Northern Ireland, but his job involves much more than that. This year, for example, the Pension Policy Division of the Comptroller’s Office “submitted shareholder proposals to 113 companies on 14 social and environmental issues and eight corporate governance/executive compensation issues.”
Doherty, who was born in Amityville, L.I., and raised in nearby Massapequa, has strong family ties to the north and west of Ireland.
His father was brought to New York as a child in the 1920s. His grandfather had been active in the War of Independence in Derry City, but decided to emigrate with his young family not long after the defeat of the anti-Treaty IRA, leaving Irish politics behind forever.
Doherty’s maternal grandfather was from Galway and his grandmother came from Pettigoe, Fermanagh, which straddles the border with Donegal.
“One part of the town square is in the Republic and the other is in the UK,” he said.
He recalled that a cousin, a butcher, had to work with two currencies for years. For him, it sums up the “economic irrationality” of the border.
Doherty’s parents were both raised on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, which was then heavily Irish. The neighborhood’s most famous family, though, was German Jewish. The Marx Brothers were raised just a block away on East 93rd Street. “By the time my parents showed up they were big stars on Broadway,” he said.
Another local, James Cagney, who was quarter Norwegian and three-quarters Irish, was not yet a star, but he’d also left by then.
A couple of decades later, Doherty’s father and many other World War II veterans raised in the tenements were ready to move on, too. And they could thanks to the GI Bill.
“They’d heard about Long Island in the movies,” Doherty said. People also knew that Katherine Hepburn and Cary Grant had homes there. Of course, the new suburbanites would go out not to mansions but to rows of box-like houses in massive developments.
“But that was an economic step up for so many people,” Doherty said.
His father, who died in January, worked on the railroad and later in college administration. His mother was a secretary. She died two years ago.
Both were active and in good health until near the time of their passing in their 80s, he said. He has one brother, Kevin, a composer and musician living near New Hope, Pa.
Doherty won a scholarship to Hofstra University, but long before that he’d been “very involved and very interested in politics.” He campaigned for George McGovern and against the Vietnam War, though he was too young to be drafted.
His heroes were JFK, RFK and Eugene McCarthy, and further back, FDR, Eleanor Roosevelt and her Uncle Teddy, a Republican defector to the Progressive cause. He volunteered for Ted Kennedy’s 1980 campaign and in later years took time off to work for Jesse Jackson and Howard Dean.
But it was Gary Hart’s exciting presidential bid in the 1984 primaries that changed the course of Doherty’s life. He volunteered for that campaign after he’d qualified from graduate school at Columbia University (where Barack Obama was then an undergraduate).
Doherty met some key Democratic operatives and became reacquainted with others he’d previously known, some of them connected to City Comptroller Harrison Goldin, the state’s most prominent Hart supporter. When he was offered a job at Goldin’s office, it was against the backdrop of a likely mayoralty bid by the comptroller.
He wasn’t there long when someone wrote a column in a paper in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, suggesting that if New York could apply the so-called Sullivan Principles (devised by civil rights leader the Rev. Leon Sullivan) on U.S. corporate investment to South Africa, couldn’t they be also applied to Northern Ireland?
“I was given the assignment because I was the Irish guy in the office,” Doherty remembered.
He made enquiries, calling amongst others the Irish and British Consulates. He received from the British a huge file and a letter referring to “New York’s investigation” into fair employment practices in Northern Ireland.
Doherty soon realized that his initial calls were the investigation.
He was invited to lunch by a British diplomat who told him the problem was that Catholics lacked the Protestant work ethic. Doherty was amazed at the official’s frankness in expressing his opinion. “We’d already established in conversation that my family was from up there,” he recalled. He was also told that the problem was with the working classes, as the Catholic and Protestant middle classes got along fine.
“It was really a Raj mentality,” Doherty said.
He went back to the office to report “We are pushing an open door.”
The MacBride Principles, named for Nobel Peace Laureate and former Irish Foreign Minister Sean MacBride, became a “perfect vehicle” for many Irish-American activists in the years after the hunger strikes.
“A lot of people did not want to get involved supporting violence, but at the same time they wanted to really do something,” Doherty said.
Eventually the campaign became a national movement and in 1998 the principles were passed into law by Congress.
In addition to Goldin, Doherty worked under Elizabeth Holtzman, Alan Havesi and incumbent William Thompson.
“I’ve been very happy that I’ve been able to work with four very committed people,” he said.
Others are quick to praise him.
“Pat has played a key role in the campaign to stop U.S. dollars subsidizing anti-Catholic discrimination in Northern Ireland,” said the Rev. Sean McManus of the Irish National Caucus. “He is one of the most effective Irish-American campaigners since the time of the Fenians in 1858”.
Bill McGimpsey, a New York area-based engineer of Unionist heritage, said that he always enjoys his conversations with Doherty. “He is a keen student of Irish history,” he said.
McGimpsey added: “Pat’s concern about Northern Ireland with regard to equality for all and his tangible assistance in achieving economic prosperity in the post-Agreement period makes him unique.
“He has friends in the Orange and Green communities,” he said.
In terms of success, Doherty and the Comptroller’s Office can point as an example to Short Brothers in Belfast, which has seen a threefold increase in the number of Catholics working there since the 1980s, and is close the reflecting the city’s religious demographics.
Since 1989, the office has reached agreement with 88 U.S. and Canadian companies, 22 since Thompson took over.
A status report published in November 2006 stated: “New York City’s five public employment pension systems, with investments that to date total $9 billion in over 260 companies that do business in Northern Ireland, empowers the Comptroller, as custodian of their funds to monitor employment practices of those firms and to urge companies to implement the MacBride Principles.”
Doherty is particularly proud of his office’s achievements across the board in what has been a conservative era. The GOP has occupied the White House for 20 of the 28 years since Ronald Reagan was elected president, something he said is responsible for the inadequate regulation of corporate America, and the inadequate enforcement of what laws do exist.
Doherty, who is single and lives in Babylon, L.I., has never had any inclination to work in the private sector.
“This is public service,” he said.
And in that service, he has accepted invitations to speak at conferences throughout Asia and Europe, as well as in various parts of the U.S.
“It’s an enjoyable job,” he said. “It’s exciting.”