Galwayman loves life in the Big Apple – but without ever losing sight of home

Paul Finnegan’s profile picture on Twitter is a play on that popular Carlsberg advert; a photo of a maroon t-shirt with white text mimicking the beer’s logo, it reads: “Galway – probably the best city in the world”.

“I traded one great city for another,” his bio adds.

The former refers to Galway, where he was reared; the latter is New York, where he recently became president of the influential networking Irish Business Organisation of New York.

He loves both, but was born in neither. His roots are firmly in Galway and the borough of Queens is home, but Paul was actually born in Phoenix, Arizona – to secure citizenship!

His father was John William Finnegan, from Woodquay, whose connections were from the Oranswell/Moycullen direction. His mother was Maura Horgan, a Kilkenny woman, whose mother was Mary Margaret Murphy from Monivea.

They lived in Arizona during the 1950s and ’60s while John William, an engineer, worked with General Electric. They planned to return to Ireland in the summer of 1965 when John William landed a job in the Engineering Department at UCG (now NUIG) but postponed the move for months so Paul could be born in the US like his two brothers and sister.

“My father was savvy to the way immigration laws were changing and he thought it would be to my advantage if I was born in the United States. The law changed in 1965 – it pretty much took away all the easy pathways Irish people had of coming to the US legally,” explains Paul.

Born in November 1965, three-week-old Paul was in the Woodquay kitchen of his grandmother, Delia Finnegan (née Sullivan), on Christmas Day that year and remained in Galway for the guts of 20 years.

His paternal grandparents, John and Delia Finnegan who’d spent years in the States before settling in Galway City in the 1950s, had a butcher’s shop on Newcastle Road. Then they bought a house in Woodquay and rented out a corner shop to Danny Griffin.

After about six months in Woodquay, Paul’s family rented a house in Shantalla, on the old Séamus Quirke Road, next door to Hernon’s farm, and close to UCG.

They moved to Renmore when Paul was six and he stayed there until he was 20. He was educated in Scoil Fhursa initially, then the Jes National School for two years, and then Scoil Chaitríona, Renmore, for fourth, fifth and sixth class where his mother got a job teaching. He went to The Bish Secondary School and studied engineering at UCG.

For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.

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