Profiles and Interviews: Msgr. Paul Byrnes

(Father Paul Byrnes, St. Peter’s Catholic Church, readying for St. Patrick’s Day, supported the roads strikers with his own tax protest.)

Msgr. Paul Byrnes, freshly ordained from St. Mary’s Seminary in Baltimore, learned about the road workers’ strike on visits back to Garrett County, where he and his mother had, two years earlier, built a home on the southeast corner of Deep Creek Lake.

“Social justice was stronger than individual morality at St. Mary’s,” said Byrnes,“ a native of Lonaconing in Allegany County. Challenging injustice was part of his family’s story. Byrnes repeatedly heard the narrative of his great grandfather, an Irish immigrant, whom family members said was killed by the owners of the coal company he was trying to organize along St. George’s Creek.

“I was really frustrated the county commissioners wouldn’t settle with the roads workers,” said Byrnes, who traveled to Deep Creek Lake nearly every weekend. “I never wholeheartedly lived in Baltimore. I paid my taxes to Garrett County,” said Byrnes, a cousin to George Myers, Lonaconing’s militant labor activist who helped organize workers at the Celanese plant in Cumberland.

“I was used to standing up for social justice. I was at the March on Washington with Dr. King in 1963,” said Byrnes, who penned a letter to the county commissioners.