Tip O'Neill - 14 January 1994

It's been almost a century and a half since the coincidence of the Irish potato famine with Samuel Cunard's first regular steamship service across the Atlantic made Cobh the first compulsory stop after the sailing from Liverpool and made Boston the American port to receive the first great tidal wave of impoverished Irish.

One of these was a bricklayer Thomas O'Neill and the other evening his grandson, who was sitting at home – an old man 81 years old, broad in the beam, a shambling great body topped by a big face, a swatch of yellow-white hair, a bulbous nose and the look of a genial codfish – he was sitting there spending a simple evening. He was eating popcorn and watching a basketball game. Then his hand fell on his lap and an hour or two later a true American original was dead and gone. And perhaps also the domination of the city bred Irish politician Thomas P O'Neill Junior was the name universally called "Tip", a quintessential Boston Irish Catholic Democrat whose first job was that of a 14-year-old trimming hedges for the gentle folk at 17¢ an hour and to his last job was Speaker of the House of Representatives. For 10 years, he was there at the eye of all the political storms and at the controls of the American legislative system.

I realise that's a large sentence and I ought to say it once what the speaker is in the American system and what he's not. Like the speaker in a parliamentary system, he presides over the House he keeps it in order and decides who shall speak from the floor. This role has a combination master of ceremonies and referee, is I believe, just about the extent of a parliamentary speaker's power. In the American system, these are the least of his duties and indeed most of the time he deputises the referee's job to colleagues of his own party while he's off exercising all the other powers that make him the highest ranking officer of the Congress not just of the House, but of the Senate too.

The first striking difference is that he's not chosen to be just a referee, a chairman. The party that wins the most House seats in the previous election, the majority party automatically chooses the Speaker and he becomes the leader, the political leader of his party in the house. Just as influentially as a prime minister, he sets the agenda, he picks parties' members on the select committees and on the powerful Rules Committee, he guides the movement of bills through the committees, weighs their chances of passage on the floor and he alone decides which bills to call up for a debate and which to bury. And if he deeply dislikes a bill, it's tough to bring it to a vote.

Finally, the speaker is third in line of succession to the presidency. If for instance when Mr Nixon resigned, if there had been no vice president in office – and that has happened – then the speaker would have gone to the White House. So the the death of a man who was speaker of the House for 10 years throughout the troublesome Carter years and the resounding Reagan revolution can have left a mark on American politics in history deeper than that of many Presidents. Tip O'Neill's mark is vivid and attractive because he was a jolly, generous, sly, larger-than-life representative of a vanished type, not just a Boston Irish politician, half the Boston city council today are Irish, but a resoundingly successful Irish American populist politician on the national scene.

So how about John Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, Senator Ted Kennedy? Well they'd gone an extra generation from a poor immigrant to lace curtains to college to a tycoon's brood, but all the Kennedys starting with Jack learned the game at Tip O'Neill's elbow walking through one neighbourhood after another day after day calling on Mrs Hennessey and the Italian barber and the Chinese laundryman, helping this man get a job, bailing that man's son out of jail, making a point of going to weddings of all denominations, to be prompt in rescuing people from a tenement fire, help out a sorrowing widow, be in touch with the home baseball team, hire, beg, borrow motorcars to pick up the old, the halt, the sick come election day.

Forget the fat cats for the time being, he used to say, they'll follow the votes, stay with the locals. All politics, his favourite slogan, "all politics is local" and politics is about jobs, when it's not, it's about money – who gets what.

So as a political mentor Tip O'Neill stressed to his protégés one duty they must fulfil all the time, the dispensing of small favours to small people and when the time came to take action on a larger stage, like contriving majorities in the House, you used persuasion first and compromise after which, of course, but always leave the gentle reminder of old political debts and the strong hint of favours yet to come or yet to be withheld.

In the high summer of a famous presidential year 1960 in a hotel in St Louis, a scene took place that sounds like some forgotten episode from Preston Sturges's 1940 film The Great McGinty, which is still the funniest and most savage movie satire on American politics. Three men have just risen from the head table and excuse themselves from a large fundraising breakfast, they were off together to the men's room, which is a very odd thing to happen in life because as John O'Hara once remarked, only women go to the bathroom together.

The man who led the way was an old solid citizen and, to the joy of the other two, a very wealthy supporter of the Democratic ticket, his name was known wherever two or three Americans were gathered together to bend an elbow and quaff this man's renowned product – he was one of America's most famous brewers. The other two, the younger was a long-necked beanpole who looked younger than his early 40s, ropy hair and a mocking green-eyed look. He was one John F Kennedy, the Democrats' presidential candidate. The other man was by comparison a huge man shambling broad-bean, you'd already guessed, with the face of a genial codfish, Thomas "Tip" O'Neill. They arrived at the men's room and the old brewer took out from his pocket a stack of papers and the rest of the scene is told in Mr O'Neill's own words. "How did we do?" asked Kennedy. "We raised 29,000," said the brewer, "I've got 17,000 in cash here and 12,000 in cheques." "Great," said Jack, "give me the cash and give Kenny O'Donald the cheques". "Geeze," I said, "this business is no different if you're running for ward leader or president of the United States." Mr O' Neill of course does not say whether the pocketed cash was duly reported as a campaign contribution.

Even as late as 1960 campaigning was, shall we say looser, than it is today, though nothing like it was in the days of Mr O'Neill's famous predecessor the slow-talking fast-thinking Texas bald head Speaker Sam Rayburn. I remember Mr O'Neill wrote almost with a note of tenderness how he helped the re-election of a young congressman who'd been a good ally. Sam called him into the office reached into the bottom drawer and handed him $10,000 in cash. I always assumed it came from lobbyists and from his rich oil friends in Texas, but the ethnics of the Congress were very different in those days.

Well, different or not, there's no question that Tip O'Neill throughout the great decade when he held more legislative power than anyone in Washington managed with uncanny skill always to stay on the bright side of that twilight zone that separates what is expedient from what is unlawful and he was in politics all his life.

Grandson of an immigrant bricklayer, he grew up in a city, which at the beginning of the century quite glaringly and shamelessly put Irishmen in their place by displaying in employment exchanges and shop windows "Nina" signs, "No Irish Need Apply". The bigotry of the old Yankees and their monopoly of power surprisingly stirred little bitterness in Mr O'Neill, but only the strong urge to introduce the new immigrant Irish, Jews, Italians and other have-nots to the beauty of the ballot box. My first political hero, said Mr O'Neill, was an Irishman named Lomasney who met immigrants at the boat, took them off at once to register to vote before he found them a lodging or a job. On election day they showed their gratitude by accepting a marked ballot and palming the clean one, which was then slipped to Mr Lomasney to be marked off for the guy in line.

Tip O'Neill started as a truck driver, he was shamed by a nun into getting a year or more of college and then he ran for the Boston city council and then for the Massachusetts state legislature and from there to the United States House of Representatives and he was there 25 years before he got the call to ascend the throne of the Speaker. He always said he knew all the tricks but practiced the ethics his father taught him, a clean and honest life remember your responsibility to you fellow men and remember always where you came from, he had very simple ideological aims to lift people in his state out of menial lives and bring them into the middle class. And in Washington, always to remember – and he kept shouting this during the regime of Ronald Reagan who believed government was itself a problem, a nuisance and interference – always remember that government exists first to help the poor, the sick, the old and the handicapped, which is a terribly discredited old-fashioned belief, which Roosevelt's first and second New Deals came to make into law. Roosevelt said, too, Tip O'Neill was like God to me. That's how old fashioned Mr O'Neill was.

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