Last modified: Sunday, March 16, 2008 11:30 PM EDT Attleboro City Hall's changing shade of green By Mark Flanagan Sun Chronicle Staff Today - St. Patrick's Day, lest we forget - "everybody's Irish," so they say. In Attleboro politics, there was a time when that appeared almost as true literally as it was figuratively. Thirty years ago, for instance, a reporter covering city hall could crank out a column in the St. Patrick's season by merely typing in a local roster of pols with Irish names. That was when Gerald Keane was mayor and Frank Gillan was holding the gavel as city council president. And as dominating as those two were, they weren't even known as the most powerful Irish politicians in town. That superlative went to Jim Sullivan, magistrate of Attleboro District Court. Judging in part from clippings from a history of mayoral campaigns prepared for a commemorative edition in 1971, it looks like the Attleboro mayor's office was an Irish-American bastion from the time John McIntyre was first elected in 1938 until Keane left in 1984. All the mayors in between had surnames that you would find commonly in counties Cork, Kerry or Mayo: Francis O'Neil, Cyril Brennan, Thomas Piggott and Raymond Macomber. And in the years before McIntyre, the city's top office went from first Mayor Harold Sweet, of an old Yankee family, to Philip Brady, the Harvard Law School-educated son of an Irish 49er, to George Sweeney, then Fred Briggs and Stephen Foley. Briggs was a Yankee and Foley Irish, while Sweeney illustrates the danger of trying to guess someone's ethnic background from their last name. "Sweeney" is common throughout the British Isles, and I can't determine from the clips where Attleboro's Mayor Sweeney's family originated. It's a safe guess, though, that Sweeney also knew how to say "merci" for a vote. The tide turned his way in the 1922 election with a rousing speech at St. Joseph's Church Hall to a crowd of 500 members of the Franco-American Society. Next to the Irish-Americans, this was the largest ethnic bloc in the city. Each accounted for more than 30 percent of the city's population. Franco-American support was probably critical to Foley, as well. He ran a funeral home - now Foley-Hathaway - on South Main Street that served the predominantly French parishes of St. Joseph's and St. Stephen's churches. And Brennan, the city's 16-year mayor, probably found campaign opportunities to mention that his children attended St. Joseph's School, in the same way that successive candidates found ways to mention a Franco-American in-law. Without a roster of all who have ever served on the council, I can't say for sure, but I don't believe Irish-Americans ever constituted a full majority of the council or school board. The trend was for a balance of Yankee, Irish and French office-holders, leavened with representatives from other nationalities in Attleboro's rich ethnic mix: Italian, Swedish, Portuguese, German and Polish among them. The peak of Irish-American control may well have come during the '50s - the Brennan years, when names like Lee, Fitton and Casey dominated the council. For the past four years, Kevin Dumas, a native of St. Joseph's parish, has held the mayor's office. The council president had been Barry LaCasse, former councilman of Ward 6 - aka St. Stephen's parish - who has now been appointed director of budget and administration. Ethnically, Franco-Americans are having their day at City Hall. As for Irish-Americans, there's a Sullivan, a Heagney and a Kirby on the council and a Moran on the school board. Out of a list of 24 elected officials in the city, that's a small share of Irish names compared to years gone by. We don't miss the old days. Indeed, isn't it time for some of Attleboro's larger minority population and new ethnic mix - Asian and Latino - to pick up more of the burden of city leadership? Demographics and political motivations have changed with the times. The "green" in Attleboro politics today has come to refer to proposals like hooking up a windmill to power the sewage treatment plant, not the shamrocks of yesteryear. MARK FLANAGAN is Opinion Page editor of The Sun Chronicle.