Irish-Catholic-Democrat

Abstract

Abstract In the rank-order of American cities, Albany was second only to Boston in the proportion of the population reporting themselves to be of Irish ancestry in the 1980 US Census.1 Nearly all those people to whom we spoke in Albany, and who identified themselves as Irish, said that they were Roman Catholics, despite the care we took in our methodological procedures to guard against any bias in our assumptions about what might constitute Irishness in Albany. This makes Albany an atypical place, since across the country as a whole, only 33 per cent of the Irish-ancestry population are Roman Catholic. Albany also has a history of ward politics and clientelism that is very reminiscent of Boston and New York.