The Irish roots behind the woman aiming to sweep Kamala Harris into power

‘The Wild Atlantic Way doesn’t even come as far as us,” laughs Sarah O’Malley down the phone from the Seaweed Centre on the Gaeltacht island of Lettermullen. “That’s how remote we are.”
Lettermullen, part of an archipelago of islands off the western tip of Galway, is slightly to the west of Gorumna island, the ancestral home of Kamala Harris’s Irish-American campaign manager, Jen O’Malley Dillon.
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It is fitting that the media-shy power broker behind the presidential campaigns for Barack Obama, Joe Biden and now Harris hails from immigrants from a tiny island so far off the beaten track it isn’t even included on the country’s coastal tourism trail.
When O’Malley Dillon made history as the first woman to manage a winning Democratic presidential campaign she received well-wishes from the Connemara islanders, while the Irish embassy in Washington tweeted: “Congratulations Jen! Your great grandparents from Gorumna would be deeply proud, as the people of Galway are today. Go néirí leat!”
The chain of rugged islands off the Connemara coast, some interconnected by causeways, are the last stop on the Atlantic frontier before you eventually hit America.
According to John Bhaba Jack O’Chonghaola, a local historian, O’Malley Dillon’s relatives came from Tiernee on the northern tip of Gorumna. “She’s related to the Connollys, the hurlers,” he says, referring to John Connolly, the All-Ireland winning Galway hurling captain who gave an epic speech in Irish in 1980 which ended with the cry: “People of Galway, we love you.”
Although O’Malley Dillon rarely gives personal interviews she wears her Irish-American roots proudly, according to those who know her.
“She is married to another Irishman, Patrick Dillon — you can’t get any more Irish than Jennifer O’Malley Dillon,” observes former Irish diplomat Ted Smyth.
“Her great-grandparents were Galwegians, immigrants from Galway, so she’s a pretty typical Irish-American from Boston.
“I’ve met her at Washington Ireland progammes where she was on the board for a long time,” he adds, referring to the programme in which students such as Leo Varadkar came to Washington.
“She talks happily about her Irish connections and, of course, that was a point she could relate to Joe Biden on very well and she was very close to him.”
In her X handle the mother of three describes herself as a “Mom! Chair, Harris for President. Campaign Manager, Biden-Harris 2020. Forever @JoeBiden”. The social media site occasionally gives a nod to her heritage such as the tweet in 2015 when the marriage referendum passed. “Proud to be Irish American every day but especially today! #MarriageEquality #GráISTheLaw”
In the White House O’Malley Dillon holds such sway that she was name-checked by both Biden and Harris in the first public event at Democratic campaign headquarters in Delaware the day after Biden dropped out of the presidential race.
Biden, who had Covid, called via teleconference to tell staffers to embrace Harris. “The leadership of this campaign has been amazing,” he said before naming O’Malley Dillon first on a roll-call of five campaign leaders.
Shortly afterwards, when Harris addressed staff members, she also singled out O’Malley Dillon. “I want to thank Jen O’Malley Dillon. Where is she, Jen?” said the White House briefing release.
Before the Biden campaign, the Boston-born veteran of Democratic politics, known as a pragmatic fixer, worked for every Democratic presidential nominee since Al Gore in 2000 apart from Hillary Clinton.
Smyth, who is president of the Advisory Board of Glucksman Ireland House NYU, believes O’Malley Dillon has played a significant role in the reversal in the fortunes of the Democratic Party’s presidential hopes.
“I would call her almost the heart and soul of the Democratic Party. She does everything behind the scenes,” said Smyth, who is also chair of the Clinton Institute for American Studies at UCD.
“She doesn’t take the credit, she doesn’t do television, she is not out there. She is just a quite selfless force for years going way back to the Al Gore presidential election.”
Scott Lucas, professor of international politics at the Clinton Institute, believes she has a pivotal role in getting Harris elected. “Behind the scenes, she is one of the most important people you can have there,” he said.
Ensuring that Harris was a candidate in the ascendency would have taken an extraordinary feat of planning, Lucas added.
“To do that you have to have a rollout. You’ve got to do it across all platforms. Everybody talks a lot about TikTok and other social media platforms but you’ve also got to be in control of the radio, TV platforms, and you’ve got to have your eyes on all that.
“You have got to have your audience research stuff in place, where you know which audiences you’re going to go to. And you have got to make it look like a well-oiled machine.”
From talking to people who know her, Lucas is told that she is a “tough operator” who rewards loyalty and “especially competence” in her staff.
After masterminding Biden’s successful 2020 election campaign she was appointed deputy chief of staff at the White House. “It was a remarkable thing, he had such trust in her that in 2020 she was the first non-family member to head up one of his campaigns,” said Smyth. “For Kamala Harris to engage her as a campaign manager shows that trust translates and she is there for the unity of the party.”
Known for her strong political instincts and a late-night custom of returning calls while riding her Peloton bike, she spent the past three decades honing her skills as a political organiser. “She has good old-fashioned Irish persuasive skills. She knows the country like nobody else. She was John Edwards’s Iowa state director, [she was] out there in the battlegrounds,” said Smyth, who served in the US during the Carter and Reagan administrations.
This week, back in the west of Ireland, O’Chonghaola remembers O’Malley Dillon’s relatives visiting five or six years ago and looking up their roots. They are not the first family with a famous relative to turn up at the heritage centre to plot their family tree.
“Everybody wants to be Irish and to find out where they come from,” said the founder of the Lettermullen and Garumna Heritage Centre, which is filled with artefacts of island life.
The father of Peter Flaherty, the former mayor of Pittsburgh, is also from Lettermullen. “His sisters were around this year and they’re up on their nineties,” O’Chonghaola says.
He remembers that Halle Berry, the actress, was around “about 18 years ago”. “She would be from Lettermullen and she would be related to the great sean-nós dancer, Pádraig Bradley. His mother would be Berry.”
Although he says he doesn’t watch too many films, he regularly sees Martin McDonagh, who spent many childhood summers in his father’s home in Lettermullen, the most western of the five islands. McDonagh co-produced Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, a 2017 crime drama that won two awards at the Oscars. “He would be around often. John Michael, the brother, who wrote The Guard, would be around too.”
At the Seaweed Centre, which houses community projects such as a café, a visitor centre and a workspace for local people, they are used to hearing illustrious names associated with the islands.
“Do you ever watch Dallas?”, asks O’Malley before explaining that Patrick Duffy, who played Bobby Ewing, spent a few days on the islands a few years ago.
O’Malley, who runs the seaweed baths, then casually mentions the names of two more Hollywood legends. “Down in a place called Caladh Chulain, John Huston the filmmaker used to have a house.
“It’s right next to a beach we call Huston beach. Down the same road, we jokingly call Hollywood, the father of Martin McDonagh, the director filmmaker playwright, his dad is from there.
“When he was up for the Oscars for his Three Billboards film, we put three billboards outside Lettermullen for him. He brought his Oscar into Lettermullen National School. As much as he is private, he is very local so he brought in the Oscars,” she said.
O’Malley said that it gets quite tempestuous in winter on the edge of the Atlantic. “We get the big waves, the big winds, it’s really dramatic in the wintertime and in the summertime it’s really beautiful,” she says.
“There are kids all around in kayaks and jumping piers. The tourists that we get, many of them have done the holidays in Spain, they are looking for something different, a more relaxed way of life.”
It is unclear if O’Malley Dillon has visited her ancestral island but she has criss-crossed the country on a university tour of Ireland. “She went to UCD, DCU, Trinity, Queens, she has seen all over Ireland,” Smyth says.
He says that the influence of leading Irish-American aides such as O’Malley Dillon behind the scenes in the White House should not be taken for granted.
“In some ways, Irish people underestimate the power of Irish-Americans in Congress or the White House administration, they open doors all the time.
“In her case, she is doing it very much behind the scenes, you see her at every one of the receptions for the Irish and on St Patrick’s Day.
“She is always happy to be introducing people at the top level. Access is everything in Washington where you have scores of countries trying to get in.”
It appears that O’Malley Dillon has something in common with her ancestral island in being somewhat of an unknown entity to the wider public while being valued by people in very high places.
The islanders who stayed behind on the Galway coast are certainly aware of the privilege of living in the wildest of Atlantic ways. “When people say ‘It’s quite beautiful’, we say ‘We know!’,” smiles O’Malley.