[caption id="attachment_71708" align="aligncenter" width="600" caption="Irish-language student and Republican Party member Ed Shevlin was presented with the Thomas Manton Irishman of the Year award by the New York City Council Speaker Christine Quinn."]
Ed Shevlin is climbing the “Mount Everest of Irish culture” and enjoying every minute of the ascent.
That’s his metaphor for taking on the language of his ancestors as part of his drive for a college degree. The New York City sanitation worker needs six credits for the degree’s language component, but he has done 18 so far.
Shevlin recalled the reactions of people to his initial decision: “‘It’s an impossible language.’ ‘Don’t do it.’ ‘It was beaten into us.’ And loads of other people who never came near it heard it was terrible.
“But I’m thick-headed,” he said, with a laugh.
His obstinacy led him to Lehman College for the language courses, as part of his Irish studies degree with the SUNY-affiliated Empire State College. “I concur with what everybody said. It’s a bit confounding,” he said.
His did a foundation course at the National University of Ireland, Galway, in 2009, the year he took on the challenge. “I got a B plus,” he recalled. “Grading is very tough in Ireland, so I was very gratified with that.”
On a return trip in 2010, he found he could make his way around the Gaeltacht without using English.
“We Americans stand out like a sore thumb and we know it,” he said, “When I start speaking Irish they’re always surprised.”
And then, last summer, the Fulbright Commission for Summer Language Study gave
him a grant to study in Ireland for six weeks. The Fulbright has won him fame beyond his Rockaway neighborhood, where he once had a motorcycling column in the Wave newspaper. There have been profiles in the New York Times and the New York Daily News. The Times piece revealed that Shevlin, who had once been briefly married, won the heart of a fellow biker and Irish-language enthusiast from New Jersey, Mary Ellen, via the Match.com dating website.
In March, his girlfriend and his Cork City-born mother Margie were among those present to see Shevlin, a member of the Republican Party, awarded the Thomas Manton Irishman of the Year Award by New York City Council Speaker Christine Quinn. He gave a speech at the event at the New York Historical Society, which reportedly was very well received.
“I was wearing a nice suit of clothes. I felt very good and a few hours later I was in my green uniform throwing garbage in the back of the truck,” said the college student who does a 6 a.m. to 2 p.m. shift each workday.
Turning point
In 2013, Shevlin will have done 20 years with the Sanitation Department and he will also have his degree by that point. He will then make a decision about whether to retire and do postgraduate work fulltime, with a view to trying another career later. He already has an associate’s degree, which he finished with a very high GPA, 3.83.
The sanitation worker is making up for the academic underachievement of his younger days. He’d won a place at Xavier High School in Manhattan but lost it when he struggled there.
“I hated high school,” he said. “I didn’t pay attention there.” He summarized the advice he got from his Jesuit instructors: “Go to public school, get your grades up and we’ll let you back.” It never happened. He finished a half credit short of a high school diploma (which he rectified at age 30 before he took the civil service exam).
Shevlin began a career in bartending, and eventually was co-proprietor of the Raintower Bar with two friends. His own personal drinking began at age 14 and things came to a head not long after he turned 40. “I used up my drinking privileges,” he said.
The turning point was 9/11 and the funerals and the drinking done at wakes and afterwards. The hard-stretched FDNY pipe band relied on other Emerald bands, including Sanitation’s, in which he was a drummer.
“After 9/11, the depressant aspect of alcohol took center stage with me,” he said.
“I was angry at Muslims,” he added about his feelings at that time.
Shevlin went to the department’s employee assistance unit for help. “I don’t want to stop again,” he told staff there. “I want to do it right the first time.” He suggested that he go to Veritas Villa upstate and so a week later, he began a month’s stay.
“I dedicated my future sobriety to the memory of two of my friends: Vinny Kane and Steve Belson [who died on 9/11],” he said.
Shevlin still plays drums, though nowadays with County Tyrone. His Bronx-raised father was born in New Jersey to parents from Glasgow, who in turn were the children of migrants from Tyrone and Monaghan.
Ed Shelvin Sr. was a vice-president at Chase Manhattan Bank. “He is a pretty smart guy. He did very well with the bank,” said Shevlin, who has two younger brothers, one a cop and the other a computer analyst, also living in Rockaway.
Irish issues
The sanitation worker was on the committee of the Rockaway Irish Cultural Committee for several years from the 1980s, and was president in 1989-90. During those years, its festival raised more than $20,000 annually for local charities. It also focused on the immigration issue, tapping Congressman Bruce Morrison and activists Sean Minihan and Sean Benson as grand marshals in successive years.
There is some history of activism on Shevlin’s mother’s side in Cork. His great-grandfather, family lore has it, was a co-founder of the stonemasons’ union and also a member of the republican police force during the War of Independence.
These days, Shevlin is vice-president of the Rockaway Republican Club and would have voted for Rick Santorum had there been a primary contest in New York. Irish politics is somewhat different to America’s, he believes. “Even the right-wing of Ireland is left of our left here,” he said, adding that he supports Sinn Féin because it is the only party calling for Irish unification.
He was asked to participate in a Sinn Féin conference in 2009 as a member of the United Grand Council of Emerald Societies. Listening to that party’s president, Gerry Adams, move between Irish and English influenced his decision on the language component for his degree.
“It occurred to me as I listened to Gerry that I could get a lot of access to politicians and people in general back in Ireland for my scholarly research, because I was going into history,” he said.
Before that, German had been a serious option as he had had some knowledge of it from school and travel.
Much of Shevlin’s traveling in recent times has been done courtesy of his Harley Davidson or those he’s rented abroad, as he did in Britain on a trip that took in both islands in 2006. He likes also to make journeys to places out West called Rockaway and raise funds for charity in the process.
“All your problems are left in the wind,” he said about biking.
He and Mary Ellen biked upstate this past Friday to an immersion weekend – no English for three days – held by Daltaí na Gaeilge.
“I can’t foresee a time when I will not be learning the Irish language,” Shevlin said.
