Boston Mayor Thomas Menino won a fifth term Tuesday after a campaign against his toughest challenger in 16 years, City Councilor at Large Michael Flaherty. Menino has served longer than any Boston mayor. Could this be the end of Irish Dominance in Boston/Massachussets Politics or merely an anomaly? 

Boston, NYC, Detroit Keep Mayoral Incumbents 
USA TODAY; By Larry Copeland; November 4, 2009 
 
Boston Mayor Thomas Menino won a fifth term Tuesday after a campaign against his toughest challenger in 16 years, City Councilor at Large Michael Flaherty. Menino has served longer than any Boston mayor. The non-partisan race showed how changing demographics affect a city's politics, said Charles Stewart, chairman of Massachusetts Institute of Technology's political science department. Italian-American Menino and Irish-American Flaherty made appeals to minorities. After the primary, Flaherty announced that Sam Yoon, a losing candidate, a Korean American, would be his deputy. "Flaherty brought in as his running mate, so to speak, Sam Yoon, a Korean American, and he was attacking Menino for appointing a cabinet that was too white," Stewart said. "You're thinking, this isn't your father's Boston."

http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2009-11-03-mayors-race_N.htm

The first Irish to arrive in Boston, in the early 18th century, were Protestants from Ulster and were thought of by the local gentry as "members of a barbaric, inferior, and unmanageable race." By the time of the potato famine of the 1840s, these Protestant Irish had assimilated into the population and thought much the same about the new Irish, overwhelmingly Catholic, who emigrated to avoid starvation. In 1847 alone, Boston was inundated with 37,000 immigrants and the locals were appalled by the newcomers' unsanitary practices, indolence and propensity for drink. The prejudice shibboleth of that time read, "No Irish Need Apply," (which was shortly followed with "No Dagas, or Wops Need Aply, by even Irish) and in 1854, the Know-Nothing Party of Massachusetts promised to 
eliminate "Rome, Rum, and Robbery.
 
" But with the urging of Boston Bishop Fitzpatrick, Irish Catholics learned to fight bigotry with the ballot. We are introduced to the featured players: He lovingly documents its growth from the time of scalawag James Michael Curley, mayor, congressman, governor and prominent rogue;  to that of more modern leaders like Raymond Flynn. Hugh O'Brien, the first Irish-born mayor of Boston; John F. Fitzgerald and Patrick J. Kennedy, ward bosses and the grandfathers of JFK; James Michael Curley, and John F. Kennedy, who completed the cycle of Irish political hegemony when he defeated Brahmin Henry Cabot Lodge for senator in 1952. 
 
O'Connor has written a scholarly yet colorful account of a breed he convinces us is vanishing. He finishes appropriately with a question mark on the future of the Irish in Boston politics. The only criticism is one of omission. O'Connor ignores Billy Bulger, the long-standing senate president, (who's brother is on the FBI Most wanted List) as though only mayors count. Alongside the works of the late Tip O'Neill, this will provide a thorough history of Boston politics.  
 

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