When I first came to Boston 45 years ago to teach at Boston College, I was given an office in Carney Hall, the home of the History Department. I didn’t know who Carney Hall was named after and wrongly assumed it was named, like most buildings at BC, for a Jesuit important to the college’s history. I soon learned I was wrong. Carney Hall was named after Andrew Carney, a 19th Century Irish immigrant to Boston.

Carney, a penniless itinerant tailor, emigrated from County Cavan, one of the poorest counties in Ireland. When he arrived, Boston already had more tailors than it needed, so Carney followed a route familiar to so many of our immigrants – he started at the absolute bottom, working at the “Slop Shops” that supplied sailors with ready-made clothing. At the time, ready-made clothing was still unusual, but a necessity for sailors who were in constant motion and had few other options for acquiring clothing. Supplying clothing to poor sailors was not an obvious path to wealth.

But Carney became a pioneer in expanding the market for ready-made clothing, and eventually won a contract to supply the US Navy with trousers – the source of his first fortune. Wise investing in real estate, banking, and insurance [John Hancock] earned him much more.

The mid-nineteenth century Boston that Carney lived in was dramatically anti-immigrant, anti-Irish, and anti-Catholic. Carney responded to the needs of his isolated and struggling Irish Catholic community in Boston. He donated land and money to help build what would become the Carney Hospital and what would become Boston College – giving Catholics their own hospital and their own college
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Carney was a “good” capitalist who used his wealth to help build the infrastructure to aid the poorest and most vulnerable in his community, people who were largely ignored by city and state government.

Carney Hall at Boston College and Carney Hospital carry his name in recognition of this commitment to his community. Sadly, though both share this history, they have had a very different recent history. Carney Hall of Boston College is still there, still functioning as part of a vibrant university now serving the nation.

Carney Hospital may soon be no more. One remained a private institution, the other became “for-profit.” The closing of the Carney Hospital is a reminder of how little “for-profit” hospitals care for the communities they serve. The people of Dorchester have lost what Andrew Carney pioneered: health care for all.

We are all diminished by this.

We could seek to find blame, and there is plenty go around. The archdiocese certainly could have done more to support Catholic hospitals; and allowing the hospitals to become profit centers rather than health centers is a stain on our state regulators and politicians. But blame will do nothing to help those who have lost their local hospital.

One can only wonder what Andrew Carney would have thought of this.

The writer is the co-founder and former director of Irish Studies at Boston College.