Even if Malachy wasn't Frank McCourt's slightly younger brother, he would he no less of a character, and would still deserve the six column, half page tribute he got in the March 12, 2023 print edition of the New York Times by Sam Roberts.
Brother Frank was the high school creative writing teacher at Stuyvesant High school who famously blossomed late in life as an author who earned a Pulitzer Prize for his memoir of his mother and family life in Limerick, Ireland, "Angela's Ashes." I don't think any dry eyes finished reading that book.
The New York Times wrote a profile piece of the ailing Malachy on March 10, 2023 when Malachy was hoping to make it to just one more St. Patrick's Day. In 2022 Malachy was ailing in a hospice, but not ailing fast enough to be discharged into the hearse parked out back. He was discharged from hospice care to home care, so he did make it to 2023's St. Patrick's Day, but not 2024's. Unless you die on St. Patrick's Day you are destined to die in between St. Patrick Days.
Malachy pretty much made it through life in the United States full of blarney, which of course is baloney with a brogue, which pretty much let him get away with just about anything he told you. Facts never got in the way of a good story, and why should they? It may not still be a good story then.
I never met Malachy, or saw him in an East Side watering hole. But I know his kind. Years and years ago the former NYC city councilman Matthew Troy was giving a talk to us auditors on ethics of all topics at Empire BlueCross and BlueShield.
I may have been the only one in the gathering who was old enough to know that Matthew Troy was disbarred as a convicted felon for embezzling from his clients' accounts. He did 55 days in jail and was now out long enough to petition to get his law license back.
Now Matthew Troy was not from Ireland, but he was Irish-American enough to tell one entertaining story after another, all contemporaneously.
My favorite one was that as Queens County (one of NYC's 5 boroughs/counties) Democratic party head he had a say in who got nominated to judgeships in the county. One afternoon a retired NYPD police captain makes an appointment to see Mattie. He puts a briefcase on Mattie's desk, opens it, revealing the money it is filled with.
The retired police captain tells Mattie, "I want to be a judge." Mattie, in his telling, thinks for just a bit, then asks the retired police captain, "are you at least a lawyer?"
Mattie closed his talk with his motto: "I always tell the truth, unless I can't." I never forgot it.
Malachy was an unelected Matthew Troy. He was a gadabout (you're not going to come across that word too often.) as described in his obit headline:
Malachy McCourt, a Memoirist, Actor and Gadabout, Dies at 92
There doesn't seem to have been any animosity between Malachy and his brother Frank. Malachy would tell anyone who listened, "I was blamed for not being my brother. I now pledge to all those naysayers that someday I will write "Angela's Ashes" and change my name to Frank McCourt."
Malachy played a bartender as a recurring role on the soap opera "Ryan's Hope" and was the real thing as the owner of what the obit tells us was the first singles bar in the 1950s, Malachy's on the Upper East Side.
I never heard that one, but it would be very interesting to have what could be considered to be a "singles bar" in the 1950s when most bars in New York City had a policy of not serving unescorted women at he bar, lest they be hookers looking for Johns. In the late '60s I noticed a hardly visible sign tucked behind a Blarney Stone bar that no unescorted women would be served.
If Matthew Troy liked to say he always told the truth unless he couldn't, Malachy would tell you, "I couldn't wait to hear what I had to say next."
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