Sheila Lynott

An Interview With The Irish Examiner's 2010 Woman Of The Year

"Tell me I can't do something, and you'll be sorry!" Sheila Lynott says with a laugh, drinking a cappuccino at Eamonn's Bar and Grill. "It's like raising a red flag to a bull. My dad's like that; I am my father's daughter."

Her father is a farmer in Moygownagh, Co. Mayo. Bright energy animates the brunette's every gesture, and she often interrupts her quick speech with a laugh. Lynott is the Irish Examiner's second annual Woman of the Year. Sheila is on the board of and First-Vice President of the Irish Business Association of New York, Inc. (IBO), Account Manager for Century Business Solutions, a firm which distributes and maintains Sharp equipment, and partner in Maguire's Pub in Queens.

She succeeds Theresa Crowe, the Irish Examiner's first annual Woman of the Year. The award honors someone who has contributed greatly to the Irish and Irish-American community in America.

"It is very important for the Irish Examiner newspaper to give an award for the recognition of people in the Irish community," says Publisher Paddy McCarthy. Editor Grahame Curtis agrees: "It's an honor for us to be able to celebrate and recognize the person chosen."

The award ceremony and party will be held upstairs Eamonn's on Wednesday, July 7 at 5:30pm.

Given how much she's achieved since coming to New York on a Morrison visa in 1993, it's tempting to tell Sheila not to figure out a way to clean up the Gulf of Mexico. She loves projects that help someone out, and the less time and money available, the better.

That's how she helped the Cross Border Orchestra (http://www.thecboi.org), youth orchestra made up of children ages 12-24 from Northern Ireland and Ireland, Protestant and Catholic, play Carnegie Hall in 2005 with two months notice. "They got a lot of big mouths on the ground, mine being one of them, and filled it!" she says. Today she is their Treasurer.

For Happiness Is Camping (http://www.happinessiscamping.org/), a sleepaway camp for children with cancer, where doctors and nurses from Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, Montefiore and others donate their time, she helped to raise nearly $60,000 to build a rec room that's temperature controlled. At this camp, each sick child can take a well sibling, so that nobody feels too left out.

Sheila loved visiting. "I couldn't tell the difference between the sick child and the well child. They were all so incredibly happy, well looked after. I met two kids from Ireland there; one of them used to have really long hair and is completely bald now, the other had been bald but it had grown back. I now get how Lady Diana must have felt going to hospitals."

She has no children herself yet, saying that at 40, "I'm no spring chicken" - but she just got married last August and quips, "I'm having plenty of fun practicing... It's in God's hands."

As one of the founding committee of the Irish American Disaster Relief Organization (IARDF), founded after 9/11 to help the Irish and Irish-Americans who'd fallen through the cracks, she commissioned Belleek Pottery to make a special commemorative plate which was sold at fairs throughout the Northeast and at different events.

Each year she picks a different project or two. Last year her projects included bringing the Mayo GAA Football team to New York, the Cross Border Orchestra to Lincoln Center, and her wedding.

She married Colm Hourican, a finished carpenter from Longford she met on a project at Maguire's Pub in Queens, in Mayo. "He's a patient man, like St. Joseph, and he needs his patience around me!"

She asked Father Tom Basquel from Queens to perform the ceremony. With Father Tom, she'd helped organize Irish nights at St. Mary's of Winfield, dinner dances with the profit going back into the community.

She helped raise money for the Irish Lobby for Immigration Reform Movement (ILIR) to get buses together to bring people to Washington for a rally on Capitol Hill.

"I remember with such pride, I got to shake Bruce Morrison's hand and say thanks a million, I am a product of what you fought for for ten years. Now I am helping the next generation."

Sheila played Camogie herself as a child. You'd never know it from her pretty smile - but "those are veneers, dear!" she says, and tells the story of having stitches on the top of her head sewn up without anesthetic.

Sheila's mind is always racing. She does sudoku rather than listen to music on her commute - she doesn't even own an ipod - and likes the television show "The Amazing Race" with its puzzles and clues.

One of the puzzles she seems to enjoy resolving is how to achieve in America. When she arrived in 1993 she had only about £150 pounds in her pocket. She had been working in Leeds for five years, in the office of a construction company. She went there right after her Leaving Cert, and had completed one year of college at night when she won the lottery to come to the states.

She moved in with her Auntie Kathleen, in Woodside. Seventeen years later, she still makes her home there, just one block away.

She had been in the States only three weeks and feeling lonely when she decided to join a group of people from St. Sebastian's Church who were feeding the homeless up and down the FDR Drive. It changed her life.

"My most prized possession is a vase a homeless man has given to me," she says. "I brought Emerald Sweets for him every week, and he saved and minded that vase, just a plain glass vase, when I went to Ireland for two weeks. He's a veteran who lived in an office project, and through red tape about which office was paying the landlord he ended up on the street for three months."

When she took leftover sandwiches to a homeless shelter near Grand Central afterwards, she remembers feeling bewildered by all the hands raised for sandwiches and thinking "who makes me god, to decide who's hungry tonight and who's not?" It brought her back to her sense of Irish history, reminding her of the poorhouses of Ireland after the famine.

She helped organize, with Ronan Downs, Celtic Care boatrides to raise money to feed the homeless along with other projects. She worked on that for five years.

And it strengthened her desire not just to help other people, but to pull herself up.

Her first job was at a publishing company, through an English contact. "I hadn't even heard of the IBO at this point! If I'd known then what I know now..." she trails off.

The IBO is "a common ground place for people of Irish and Irish-American heritage to come together, help each other out along the way," she explains. It is networking but much more. "If someone needs a fundraiser we get on board, the arts help each other out."

Following the publishing house, she worked at the Custom Shop (http://www.customshop.com/home.html) for five years, in office management. This company offers custom designed shirts and suits for men, so, says Sheila, "I can dress a man better than I can dress myself!" She handled the contracts for all of the stores in 50 states-good preparation for her work as an account manager at Century, where she handles anything to do with any of the equipment in any of the offices.

And where another hard worker might take weekends to recoup, Sheila hostessed at the Pig & Whistle Times Square (http://www.pignwhistlets.com/).

After the second year she wanted the summer off-and made a deal that she could keep her job if she got someone to cover her shift.

Every Sunday someone would come in, "I'm Sheila's friend, I'm Sheila's friend's sister, I'm Sheila's sister's friend... the envelope was always made out to Sheila but somebody different would pick it up. When I returned in the fall one of the staff said, 'Holy Sh**! I thought you were the figment of somebody's imagination!'"

She says she inherited that drive from her parents. The eldest of six on the farm, she says, "when I go home now, I have to get the wellies on, there's some herding to be done. We joke that Daddy waits for us to come home to be sure there's plenty of work to be done!" More seriously, she says, "I think the work ethic is an Irish thing." But even people who are serious about work don't always choose to work on their weekends - that comes down to ambition and energy, again.

When she was first partner at Maguire's she would leave her desk job at 5:30pm, go down to the bar work there in the office until nearly midnight. On a weeknight. She still can be seen at Maguire's on weekends very often.

"I still get calls when the alarm goes off at 4 in the morning from the security company."

A friend needed help - that's how she became a partner.

Peter Maguire's partner was going back to Ireland three years ago, and he asked her to step in. "I had no bar experience whatsoever!" They began a refurbishing project.

"Then Peter went home in the middle to go to a wedding and left me to gc the whole job!"

Carpenter Colm Hourican was "the go-to guy". He built the guitar-shaped table in the center of the bar.

"When I saw how he could mold wood like that, that was it, I was sold," Sheila says with a wide smile.

If you've noticed that these businesses are all very different, you're right. For Sheila, good business practice translates across fields. She wants to have her own business someday. "When, more than if, I do move to Ireland, I can't see myself working for anybody else there now."

Originally she and Colm had a five-year plan, but with the troubled economy they are extending their stay.

That's good news for the Irish and Irish-Americans here though.

Just keep telling her things she can't possibly accomplish, and maybe she'll stick around.