Three of John Delaney's grandparents were born in Ireland – his grandmothers were named Lynch and Barlow – but the New Jersey-born US congressman has far more recent personal connections with the land of his forefathers.
Before winning a seat in the House of Representatives in 2012, Delaney, the son of a union electrician, founded two companies, a lender to healthcare firms in the nineties and to small and mid-sized businesses in the noughties. As chief executive he visited Dublin twice a year selling the companies' loans to IFSC-based investors as bonds in securitisation deals. The money raised financed more lending. When he left the latter company, CapitalSource, for politics, he left behind a profitable business with loans of $12 billion (€9 billion).
Today, Delaney, a Democrat, runs a congressional district in Maryland, home to many government workers in Washington DC. His electoral constituency covers blue Democrats in the east to red Republicans in the west.
He is the only former chief executive of a publicly traded company in the house and, having floated his lending businesses, one of the wealthiest men in American politics.
Speaking in his Capitol Hill office Delaney recalls "a lot of toasting in new steakhouses and fancy hotels" during his trips to boom-time Dublin. Ireland became "double-levered" into the financial sector with many people employed in the industry and drawing heavily on banks to buy property, he said.
Selling bonds
Delaney was equally alarmed at the time at how money became so easy to raise in the US. Selling bonds in 2001 took weeks of meeting pensions funds and insurance companies around the world, and urging rating agencies to appraise the bonds. By 2007 the process took just a matter of days when a big bank would "blow the bonds out in an afternoon" selling to "synthetic investors," he said. For Delaney, this was the writing on the wall. Recognising the need to find a more solid source of funding, CapitalSource secured a banking licence and acquired 22 branches and $5.6 billion in deposits from a troubled Californian bank just five months before the collapse of Lehman Brothers.
'Get a bank'
"We started saying we ought to get a bank just to diversify. I didn't realise it was, to use an expression in the United States, a 'Hail Mary' pass," he said.
The takeover helped the company survive the global financial crisis. The personal fortune he made from his businesses, running to tens of millions of dollars, sets him apart from other members of Congress – he doesn't have to devote vast amounts of time scraping for donations in the continuous cycle of electioneering that dominates American politics.
Delaney takes a philosophical view of the malfunctioning legislative machine. “Congress was designed so that it can agree very quickly if the country agrees and if the country doesn’t, it really grinds to a halt,” he said.
“Our founding fathers didn’t want a powerful government. They designed it very well because it has achieved their objective. It is powerful in many ways but it is very hard to remove.”
A close ally of Bill and Hillary Clinton, Delaney (50), doesn't rule out running for Maryland governor, a role that will be vacated by another Irish-American politician Martin O'Malley next year.
While the executive skills learned from running companies might make him a natural fit to be a state governor, he believes that, at a national level, reforming US immigration laws and education, creating jobs, and improving America’s infrastructure and competitiveness are bigger challenges.
“I always think about where I can make the biggest difference,” he said. “In many ways the federal issues are the issues of the day . . . Those are actually in some ways more consequential issues so I wrestle with that.”
