York Among Boston Irish Honorees

Retired Boston College men’s hockey coach Jerry York ’67 will be among the honorees at the annual Boston Irish Honors luncheon on October 28 at Boston’s Seaport Hotel.

Sponsored by Boston Irish magazine, the event recognizes families and individuals in Boston’s Irish community for endeavors in public service, business, and leadership. Past honorees include United States Labor Secretary and BC alumnus Martin J. Walsh, U.S. Senator Edward Markey ’68, J.D. ’72, Irish American Partnership Board of Directors member Mary Sugrue, former Democratic National Committee Chair Paul Kirk Jr., and former Boston Globe publisher Mike Sheehan.

York retired last spring after 50 years as a Division I hockey coach, 28 of them at BC. He is the winningest coach in NCAA hockey history—his 1,123 wins include a recordsetting 41 NCAA tournament victories—a five-time NCAA champion, and a member of the National Hockey League and U.S. Hockey halls of fame. York, who was the Schiller Family Head Hockey Coach at BC, cultivated a reputation as a caring mentor who supported his players during and after their time at BC. He coached four Hobey Baker Award winners (given to college hockey’s best player), 17 NHL first-round draft picks, 12 Stanley Cup champions, and scores of players who went on to successful careers in the NHL. He also coached multiple Olympians and mentored dozens of individuals who went on to serve as NHL coaches, general managers, and presidents of hockey operations.

A star player at Boston College High School before coming to the Heights, York was named First-Team All-America in 1967 and won the Walter Brown Award for the top American-born player in New England that same year. He scored 134 points as a player (84 goals, 70 assists) and led the Eagles to a 60-29 record, the 1965 Beanpot title, and a second-place finish in the 1965 NCAA Tournament.

Other honorees at the luncheon include Cronin Development President and CEO Jon Cronin and Mary Swanton, executive director of the Irish Pastoral Centre.

—University Communications

War of Independence. Guerilla attacks, government-sanctioned executions, and other brutal acts were carried out. The economic damage was substantial, which affected negotiations for the border between the Irish Free State and Northern Ireland.

Civil wars are by nature a traumatic national event that can leave long-lasting psychological and emotional scars. But as Aiken writes in Spiritual Wounds, the impact of the 1922-1923 war on Irish people has been a complicated and often misunderstood matter. In the years afterward, politicians and other public figures stressed a process of healing “the wounds of war” over remembrance, while school textbooks and other historical publications mostly omitted references to the civil war. This led to the “unspeakable war” characterization (associated with journalist Eoin Neeson, who chose it for the title of his 1958 series of articles on the war)—a belief that there was a “code of silence” about the war, she notes, despite the fact that many civil war veterans had published or otherwise shared their accounts, and later generations also contested the notion of total silence about the conflict.

“The wealth of this body of testimony suggests that the silence of the Irish Civil War was not necessarily a result of revolutionaries’ reluctance to speak,” Aiken writes, “but rather due to the unwillingness of the architects of official memory—journalists, historians, politicians—to listen to the tes-

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timony of civil war veterans.”

Sullivan Millennium Chair and Irish Studies Director Guy Beiner, whose research—cited by Aiken in the book—explores how popular conceptions of national and local history are shaped not only by collective memory but also what he calls “social forgetting,” praised Aiken as an innovative, forward-thinking scholar.

“Síobhra is one of the most original and interesting new voices in the field of Irish studies today: She’s an historian who also works with literature and is fluent in Irish. In Spiritual Wounds, she challenges longheld assumptions that ‘embarrassment’ is the reason why the Irish Civil War has been so neglected. Female survivors or relatives of veterans were especially marginalized, and some of them worked out their war-related trauma and experiences through writing fiction, which does not appear on the ‘A list’ of Irish literature. Síobhra dug deep to find these writings, and they help put this chapter of Irish history in a new light.

“The Irish Civil War’s impact was farreaching and well worth examining, especially as we conclude the centenary commemorations of the Irish Revolution. All of contemporary Irish politics was framed by the war, for example, and the conflict spurred emigration of anti-treaty Irish— some of whom came to Boston.”

For information on this and other Irish Studies events, go to bc.edu/irish

Boston College and Haley House celebrated their historic ties on October 5 at the Burns Library with a program, “Reflections on Compassion in Action.” Panelists included (L-R) parttime Philosophy faculty member David Manzo ‘77, the first BC PULSE student to volunteer at Haley House; Mary Lou Bozza ‘03, former Haley House development director; Kathleen McKenna, Haley House co-founder; Bing Broderick, recently retired Haley House executive director; Reggie Jean, current Haley House executive director; Carl Long, Haley House board chair; and Ilona O’Connor, Haley House volunteer and program organizer.

For more about this event, see https://bit.ly/bc-haley-house-celebration.