Truly Irish, But With an International Flavor

Irish expatriate and Port Chester-Rye Brook Rotary Club president Vincent Coakley has a very simple reason why the Rotary's Saint Patrick's Day party will be held today at the Copacabana in Port Chester with the accent on Brazilian food, not corned beef and cabbage.

"Because back home in Ireland St. Patrick's Day is an international celebration that is celebrated with international food, not corned beef and cabbage," said Coakley. "In fact, corned beef and cabbage is an Irish-American tradition because it was difficult to get true Irish-style cured ham here so they came up with a substitute."

Coakley ought to know. He came to the United States from Ireland's Claremorris in County Mayo in 1985 with a degree in civil engineering. He returns home several times a year to visit his four brothers while a fifth sibling, his sister, lives not far from him.

"I came to America for the simplest of reasons –it gave me an opportunity to really develop as a successful engineer," he said. "I came to this area because of its reputation as the home of excellent restaurants featuring eclectic international cuisine. And I came to Rotary for a simple reason as well –I didn't really know anybody after nearly 20 years here, and Rotary gave me the chance to meet similar, upward mobile, service-minded professionals."

"That's the reason Paul Harris, a lawyer, originally established the first Rotary Club in Chicago in 1905, so he could meet like-minded individuals interested in community service with the same kind of small town values that he had," Coakley said. "It was originally called the Rotary Club because meetings rotated from member's offices to member's offices."

Within 20 years, Rotary had gone international with more than 200,000 members in more than 20 countries. The first local Rotary was chartered by 14 members from Port Chester in 1921.

The Rotary has been doing good things locally and internationally ever since. The organization goes well beyond networking and socializing with fund-raising and charitable works an important part of its regular Tuesday luncheon meetings at T&J's Trattoria in Port Chester, and their first Tuesday of the month breakfast meetings at 600 Westchester Ave, Rye Brook, in the Executive Dining Room of the former General Foods building.

"Rotary is a lot of what I do," said Coakley, who is going into his second year as president.

Out of those Rotary meetings have come various fund raisers, according to Coakley. The Rotary held a recent drive that raised $6,000 for Haitian relief, with the money being donated to an organization called ShelterBox, which provides packages filled with survival supplies for disaster areas.

Rotary also recently honored Bharat Patel and his son, Jay, the restaurant entrepreneurs behind Tandoori Taste of India, for donating food and cooking for various Rotary fund raisers that twice helped raise $6,000 for relief efforts in India following two natural disasters there. The Patels also twice cooked up meals and donated the food for more than 100 homeless people at Port Chester's Don Bosco soup kitchen.

Coakley is also proud of the Rotary Ambassadorial Scholars program which provides scholarship grants of around $25,000 for graduate level studies to promising area non-Rotarians –a program that sent a young Joe Carvin, now Rye Town Supervisor, to Senegal in the early 1970s, according to Coakley, who is also a member of such benevolent associations as the Human Development Service of Westchester and One World United and Virtuous, so named by Benjamin Franklin way back in its founding days.

Coakley comes across as an Irishman's Irishman, according to fellow Rotarian John Dick, who has been organization secretary for more than a quarter-of-a-century.

"Vinny has that Irish brogue, that Irish sense of humor, and that Irish gift of gab," Dick said. "We kid him that we can never ask him to say a few words at any function because he can't say  anything in a few words. We also kid him about being president going well into his second term now because it takes him twice as long to learn how to do something and get it right. But all kidding aside, he's a great worker, a real take charge, can do kind of guy, very civic-minded and a real do-gooder."

"Everybody loves Vinny, he's a one-of-a-kind Irishman, so kind, loving, always doing good, all the good things that are Irish are wrapped up in Vinny," said the former Mary Beth Healy, a third-generation Irish-American whose roots go back to County Mayo. Mary Beth is better known to Rotarians as Mrs. John Dick, the aforementioned Rotarian who has deep Scottish roots.

"If you walked into a room, and had to pick out an Irishman, it would be Vinny being Vinny, dynamic, selfless, interested in everybody and everything," Mary Beth said. "He has a  knack for making people who have never met him before feel as though he has known them all his life and they have known him all their lives because that's how interested he is in people. He's that magic. He just exemplifies all that is best about the Irish."

"He's a tremendously hard  worker who has done so much good for his fellow man as illustrated perhaps best by all his work in helping organize those Rotary fund-raisers for Haiti while helping expand the local organization's international outlook with things like taking the Rotary's St. Patty's Day luncheon to the Copacabana to give it a Rio de Janeiro Brazilian flavor," she added.

Coakley doesn't have a favorite local Irish restaurant or pub, preferring instead the moveable international feast that is dining in and around Port Chester. But he does love the Irish tradition of the pub and St. Patrick's Day.

"The pub, or public house, became an Irish social tradition because not everybody had enough money to stock their homes with  liquor and beer, but they could usually come up with the price of a pint or two so when they had to entertain, it was off to the pub," he said.

"As for really celebrating St. Patrick's Day, well in Irish-Catholic Ireland, St. Patrick's Day makes for a nice little celebratory break in the middle of the traditional Lenten fast season," Coakley added.

Though St. Patrick's Day only comes once a year, every day is a day that Coakley is glad that he is Irish, albeit with an international flavor.