Maine
U.S. Navy warship to be christened in Maine for Irish war hero from Long Island who served in Vietnam
Gratitude was in the heart of Colleen Walsh-Irwin as she and her extended family gathered in Bath, Maine, to witness the christening Saturday of the USS Patrick Gallagher, a Navy warship named after her uncle, a decorated U.S. Marine who lived on Long Island.
“It’s such a great honor and tribute to my uncle, who sacrificed so much for the United States, and he wasn’t a U.S. citizen,” Walsh-Irwin, 58, of East Northport, said of her uncle, Lance Cpl. Patrick “Bob” Gallagher. She spoke by phone from Maine a day before the christening of the ship, a DDG 127 guided-missile destroyer.
“It just makes us feel so grateful,” Walsh-Irwin said, referring to the family who traveled from Ireland and Long Island to Maine for the ceremony. “We’re grateful to the Navy and Bath Iron Works for building the ship, and all the people involved in making this dream come true. There were so many behind the scenes for years to make this happen.”
Lance Cpl. Patrick Gallagher was awarded the Navy Cross for his actions during a 1966 enemy grenade attack that nearly killed three of his comrades in a foxhole in Vietnam. He was killed in combat in his last few days of military service in Vietnam. Credit: Marine Corps
Gallagher was an Irish immigrant — from Ballyhaunis, County Mayo — who had settled in Lynbrook in 1962, joining an older sister, Walsh-Irwin’s mother, Margaret Gallagher Walsh, now deceased. She was the eldest of nine siblings and Gallagher was the second eldest.
Walsh-Irwin said when her mother was a young child, she couldn’t pronounce his name and called him Bob. She said the family called him “Uncle Bob.”
After he enlisted in the Marine Corps and was called to go to Vietnam, he had the choice to go back to his home country. Instead, said his family and others, he chose to serve.
Gallagher, who served in a gunnery unit, was awarded the Navy Cross for his actions during a 1966 enemy grenade attack that nearly killed three of his comrades in a foxhole near Cam Lo, in Vietnam’s Central Highlands. He kicked away one grenade, then cradled another to his belly before throwing it into a nearby river.
His Navy Cross citation lauded Gallagher for displaying “valor in the face of almost certain death,” Newsday reported in a 2017 article about Sen. Chuck Schumer’s letter to then-Navy Secretary Richard V. Spencer, urging the Navy to recognize Gallagher posthumously by naming a ship after him.
But within a month of receiving his citation from Gen. William Westmoreland, in 1967, Gallagher was dead at the age of 23. He was just days from going home when he was killed in another enemy attack.
Schumer (D-N.Y.) said of Gallagher: “He was not a citizen, but Patrick was called to serve,” adding that he could’ve gone back to Ireland to avoid service in Vietnam, but didn’t.
“It’s the story of the Irish,” said Schumer. “It’s the story of immigrants. It’s the story of the greatness of America, and the attachment that immigrants for generations have had for serving here, in this case, Irish immigrants for serving our country with valor and loving America’s freedom and willing to die for it.”
Patrick Nealon, commander of VFW Post 2307 in Lynbrook, is among family and supporters who are in Maine for the ship christening. He said Gallagher “could’ve walked away” from serving in Vietnam.
“He said, ‘No. this is my new country. This, I will defend’ … and he went.”
Nealon was among those who sought to get Gallagher recognition. There was a petition drive that several years ago had garnered about 10,000 names. There was also support in Gallagher’s home country. The Dublin Airport commemorated Gallagher’s exploits in 2015 in a series of billboards displayed in its departures area for flights to the United States. And his home village commemorated the 50th anniversary of his death.
Nealon, who is Irish, said of the ship named for Gallagher: “It’s a real proud moment, for all of Ireland and every Irish American in the United States.”
A historic 78,000-acre conservation project in the western Maine woods is nearing completion.
The Magalloway Conservation Project will ensure the land remains open for fishing, hunting, and other recreational activities for generations to come.
The project will also protect wildlife habitat and support the regional timber economy.
The effort began last March and is expected to be completed later this month.
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Four conservation groups are leading the project.
LEWISTON, Maine (WGME) — The Lewiston Fire Department says a family home caught fire on Thursday.
The Lewiston Fire Department says a family home caught fire on Thursday. (Courtesy of Lewiston Fire Department)
At around 11 a.m., the fire department reportedly started getting calls about the blaze on Goffe Street.
When they arrived, the fire was roaring in the rear of the home and had engulfed the attic space, according to authorities.
The Lewiston Fire Department says a family home caught fire on Thursday. (Courtesy of Lewiston Fire Department)
Firefighters attacked the fire “aggressively.”
Lewiston Fire says no one was home at the time, and the cause is still under investigation.
Maine’s highest court weighed Wednesday whether the state can reject petition signatures collected by out-of-state circulators who did not check a box consenting to Maine’s jurisdiction, a legal dispute that could determine whether Mainers vote on transgender inclusion in sports this November.
The group called “Protect Girls Sports” initially submitted enough signatures to qualify for the ballot, proposing an initiative that would restrict what school sports teams, bathrooms and facilities trans students can access. Secretary of State Shenna Bellows later determined that the campaign had failed to qualify, after thousands of signatures were invalidated. That ruling was upheld by a Superior Court judge in June and the campaign appealed that decision to the Supreme Judicial Court.
More than 1,500 of the invalidated signatures were collected by four out-of-state circulators who had not checked a box on the form agreeing to Maine’s jurisdiction. The Maine Supreme Judicial Court must now decide whether those signatures were properly invalidated. The initiative is short 500 signatures to qualify.
The Maine Constitution prohibits out-of-state circulators from submitting petitions, but that ban was declared unenforceable by a federal appeals court in 2022, since it likely violated the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. In response to a lawsuit, Maine then entered into a consent agreement, which all citizen-led initiatives still rely on to hire out-of-state circulators to collect signatures. However, they must consent to the state’s jurisdiction.
Attorney Tim Woodcock, who represented Protect Girls Sports, argued that out-of-state circulators should be treated the same as Maine residents who collect petition signatures, since the consent agreement requires the state to allow them to work on campaigns. Woodcock said the consequences of not reversing the ruling would be dire.
“If this is upheld, it’s essentially a petition that has been pulled off the ballot with 1,520 otherwise valid ballot signatures,” Woodcock said in the Augusta courtroom. “That would be a remarkable result of these circumstances.”
The same argument was made after the May hearing before the Secretary of State’s Office as well as before the Superior Court, but neither accepted it.
Protect Girls Sports has not pushed back on any other findings showing a pattern of negligence in the signature collecting process, with circulators leaving forms unattended, adding ditto signs on some columns, and other infractions. Rather, Woodcock challenged the secretary’s authority to impose what he said was an unfair burden on out-of-state signature collectors by requiring them to check an additional box to consent to Maine’s jurisdiction.
Attorney Christopher Dodge from Elias Law Group, the national law firm representing the three Maine residents who initially challenged the petition signatures, said, “We are here today because Protect Girls Sports has essentially reached the bottom of the barrel for its last few arguments to try and dislodge the secretary’s well-reasoned and well-supported findings.”
“And each of those arguments basically concedes that the initiative violated … Maine law.”
Since the vast majority of the 120 out-of-state circulators complied with the requirements, Dodge said Woodcock could not make a convincing case that the rules were a burden.
“The burden here is they have to complete the circulator affidavit … and they have to check the box, that’s it,” he said. “And most of the non-resident circulators have absolutely no problem complying with it.”
One circulator, Cairo, had initially left the box blank but later checked the box through a corrected affidavit in May, three months after the petition was submitted for validation. Woodcock has previously argued that her signatures should be considered valid because of her corrected form.
However, her decision to intentionally leave the box blank was a “substantive lack of agreement” to Maine’s jurisdiction, Superior Court Justice Deborah Cashman said in her opinion validating Bellows’ decision on June 11.
Woodcock said in court Wednesday that the “consent agreement says nothing in it about when an out-of-state circulator must consent to jurisdiction,” and that those rules were being imposed by the Secretary of State’s office.
The Supreme Judicial Court is expected to rule on the appeal before mid-August, before the deadline for the secretary’s office to put a question on the ballot.
This story was first published by Maine Morning Star and is republished here under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
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