The Luck of the Irish

The luck of the Irish gave the City of Dublin its most popular mayor last year when the name of City Councilman Robert Briscoe, a Jew, was drawn from a hat to settle a tie in the voting. The fact that the new chief executive of the capital city of Roman Catholic Ireland belonged to an alien faith made Briscoe a headline name throughout the world, and the new Lord Mayor's winning, puckish and amiable personality did the rest. This spring, after he returned home from a triumphant tour of the U.S., extolling Ireland and Israel (the United Jewish Appeal paid for his trip), Briscoe's place on the Irish scene seemed reasonably secure. But Irish politics are never that simple.

As election day approached once again in Dublin, the opposition Fine Gael Party sought a way to defeat Mayor Briscoe, who belongs to Premier de Valera's Fianna Fail. Playing both sides against the middle, Fine Gael forsook its own candidate to throw its electoral weight behind a promising independent and thereby make sure that Mayor Briscoe failed to get the clear majority of the corporation votes which he needed for reelection. The result was another tie vote, 21 to 21, so into the hat once again went Briscoe's name, together with that of the independent candidate—City Councilman James Carroll, an oldtime plasterer who once worked on interiors in Manhattan's Empire State Building.

Last week, as the name of the winner and new Lord Mayor was drawn from the hat, the luck of the Irish went against Robert Briscoe.