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When businessman Sean Lane was elected to be its Chairman by The New York City St. Patrick\u2019s Day Board of Directors (effective July 1, 2018), he had been playing a critical role in raising funds for the parade as well. Additionally, as Vice Chair and co-founder of the St. Patrick\u2019s Day Foundation \u2014which has become the largest single source of financial support for the parade \u2014 Lane is a passionate supporter of both the Day and the Parade. The Foundation he co-founded also provides scholarships and supports the efforts of the Parade\u2019s Affiliate Organizations in recruiting new members.<\/p>\n
To that Lane said in the press release, \u201cI am very grateful to the St. Patrick\u2019s Day Parade Board for this enormous honor and responsibility.\u00a0The primary duties of the Chairman are to serve the parade community; to provide strategic leadership and to help ensure the future of the parade while remaining faithful to our mission of celebrating Irish faith, heritage and culture. Thanks to John Lahey [outgoing Parade Board Chairman], the Parade Board and to the generous support of donors to the Parade Foundation, the New York City St. Patrick\u2019s Day Parade has the biggest surplus ever. This surplus has enabled us to revive the parade scholarship program, increasing the number of scholarships from six to nine, including three scholarships in Timothy Cardinal Dolan\u2019s name to highlight the importance of catholic education. We want to greatly expand this program as we move forward.\u201d<\/p>\n
Said Lahey in the press release, \u201cIn Sean Lane and Ryan Hanlon [the Vice-Chair], the New York City St. Patrick\u2019s Day Parade has found two leaders dedicated to our hallowed traditions of honoring St. Patrick and uniting Irish-Americans promoting Irish values and culture. This new leadership will help assure the financial stability which will allow us to continue these traditions and keep our beloved St. Patrick\u2019s Day Parade marching into the future.\u201d<\/p>\n
Although a legal holiday only in Suffolk County, Massachusetts, Saint Patrick’s Day is nonetheless recognized and celebrated throughout the United States. Primarily seen as a celebration of Irish and Irish American culture, the celebration was not Catholic in nature. Irish immigration to the colonies was dominated by Protestants, so its purpose was simply to honor the homeland. The Charitable Irish Society of Boston organized the first observance of Saint Patrick’s Day in the 13 Colonies in 1737 and it coordinated charitable works for Boston\u2019s Irish community but they didn\u2019t meet on March 16th again until 1794.<\/p>\n
New York’s first Saint Patrick’s Day observance was similar to that of Boston, held on March 16th, 1762, in the home of John Marshall, an Irish Protestant, and over the next few years, the norm was informal gatherings by Irish immigrants. The first recorded parade in New York was by Irish soldiers in the British Army in 1766.<\/p>\n
Irish patriotism in New York City continued to soar, and New York City\u2019s parade continued to grow. Irish aid societies like Friendly Sons of Saint Patrick and the Hibernian Society were created and marched in the parades. Finally when many of these aid societies joined forces in 1848, the parade had become not only the largest parade in the USA but one of the largest in the world. According to the National Retail Federation, consumers in the United States spent $4.4 billion on St. Patrick\u2019s Day in 2016.<\/p>\n
With that significance, of course, Lane’s title isn\u2019t merely a ceremonial one, or simply about getting attention for him. So when asked what does the title mean for him, it was for something more than further headaches. Answered Lane, \u201cYou\u2019re dealing with 200,000 people marching in the parade then one to two million watching on the sidelines, then all the media, so it\u2019s an enormous responsibility. That\u2019s why we restructured the board to have these committees that have power to do different things so everything doesn\u2019t have to back come to the chairman. We formed a finance and media committee.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Parade organizers had never had a media committee before, so Lane felt it was about time. He noted, \u201cPat Smith did some publicity for us but he\u2019s mostly working with Quinnipiac now. John Leahy is helping us now. But we need to get proactive. The challenge in the past with the parade is that everything was run by the chairman and there were no committees. They said there was a Parade Committee, but it was pretty much the Chairman. Now we\u2019re trying to decentralize it and empower different groups. This year we had to re-do the bylaws, which took a couple of months.\u201d<\/p>\n
Most assume the television brings in money, but as Lane noted \u201c[Our deal] needed to be revamped and we started on that this year. Right now it breaks even. It\u2019s about getting the affiliated organizations on TV and promoting whatever the message is that year.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe re-did the TV contract which took a couple months. We\u2019re on seven platforms for TV this year and we were on only one last year. Hulu, Roku, NBC, Cozi, Apple TV, YouTube TV and the Catholic Faith Network to televise the Mass for the first time ever. We did a TV special on the aides to the Grand Marshal. They\u2019re considered to be escorts to the Grand Marshall, but they\u2019re really honorees. It\u2019s typically people that have given their lives to service. We have a teacher, engineers, a Special Forces guy.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere are now 16. We did a special about them and immigration for the Catholic Faith Network it\u2019s faith and immigration and everyone\u2019s story. There\u2019s going to be a special on the Catholic Faith Network and Cardinal Dolan is filming a segment for it. It will air a minimum a four times leading up to the parade and everybody\u2019s going to get a DVD. It\u2019s a chance to tell their story. The Grand Marshall is of course, an accomplished person but there\u2019s an army that runs this parade and put it on. You couldn\u2019t do it (alone) and this is about highlighting these people and their organizations.\u201d<\/p>\n
When not dealing with the Parade, Lane is a Senior Vice President with a major Wall Street firm and provides financial advice to families, individuals, pensions and endowments and foundations. He explained, \u201cWorking for this business involved another connection, another Irish guy. I had a friend at his firm and so I ended up working here. My responsibilities here [have to do with] endowments, individual accounts, pensions, financial planning. I have clients that are English, and Korean, and Italian and they get a kick out of going to Irish events.\u201d<\/p>\n
He was awarded an honors Post-Graduate Diploma in Business and a B.A. from the National University of Ireland, Galway. He holds a Certificate in Advanced Financial Planning from NYU, and has earned both the Chartered Financial Analyst and Certified Financial Planner designations. He is a member of the CFA Institute, The New York Society of Securities Analysts, and the Financial Planners Association.<\/p>\n
Lane was born in New York City and raised in Galway. “Though born in NY,\u00a0 I went back to Galway when I was 10. One television station came on at six o’clock in the evening. It was a slight change and you learned very to get out of the house if you were given something to do. You spend all day in the fields. It was a very small village in the middle of the country.<\/p>\n
When I was in New York, St. Kevin\u2019s was the school I was in in Flushing. I went to. It was very different [from school in Ireland which] seemed a lot more intense at the start. It depends, if you went to international schools and some were brilliant. I did calculus when I was 11 years old and I didn\u2019t see it again until I was 15. My instructor was that\u00a0kind of teacher. If he felt you could do something he kept giving you more.\u00a0 I didn’t catch onto later that he\u2019d give you less if you did less. I did college there too in Galway.”<\/p>\n
Lane was awarded an honors Post-Graduate Diploma in Business and a B.A. from the National University of Ireland, Galway. Lane returned to New York in 1993 and worked as a bartender until he secured a job in the financial services industry.\u00a0 He explained as to what made him return to the States? \u201cI was working in the hotel industry at the local hotels including the Great Southern as well. The unemployment was 20-25% there in Galway so no one was making any money. This was in the late \u201880s and early \u201890s. You could work 80 hours and make like a 100 dollars after tax, it was ridiculous. I finished college and my post grad in Galway, skipped a year of school and got into college when I was 16. I was quite good at languages and math, but in French. It was all about the girls and that\u2019s how I chose my major. But I was a year younger than anyone so they wouldn\u2019t date me \u2014 but that\u2019s a whole other story.\u201d<\/p>\n
After a chuckle and a pause, He continued, \u201cSo anyway, I had been coming over and the hotel would let me leave in the summer to make more money. I was working and I\u2019d come over in the summer and work. And that\u2019s how I met Austin Delaney and ended up staying.<\/p>\n
\u201cTen or 12 years ago, I met some of the parade guys. They asked me to help form an organization. There\u2019s a lot of great guys in the Knights of St. Patrick’s that do fundraising.\u201d<\/p>\n
As a first-generation Irish American born in New York, Sean is deeply involved in this community. Beside he NYC St. Patrick\u2019s Day Parade Chairmanship and cofounding the Foundation, he is on the advisory board of the 69th Regimental Trust, the Irish National Theatre, the Galway University Foundation, and the Leadership Circle for the Northwell Health Department of Medicine. In 2017, Sean was appointed as an honorary member of the 69th Regiment for services to the military by the U.S. Secretary of the Army. And since 2011, Sean has been honored each year as one of the 50 most prominent Irish Americans on Wall Street by Irish America Magazine.<\/p>\n
He holds a Certificate in Advanced Financial Planning from New York University, and has earned both the Chartered Financial Analyst and Certified Financial Planner designations. He is a member of the CFA Institute, The New York Society of Securities Analysts, and the Financial Planners Association. He is now a Senior Vice President for a major Wall Street firm.<\/p>\n
Lane is an honorary member of the 69th\u00a0Infantry Regiment, the Fighting 69th, and serves on the Advisory Board of the Regimental Trust.\u00a0 He also serves on the U.S. Board of the Irish National Theatre, the Galway University Foundation, and the Leadership Circle for the Northwell Health Department of Medicine.
\nLane and his wife, Cielo, have two children, Sarah, 14, a lector at St. Joseph\u2019s Roman Catholic Church in Garden City, and Ryan, 12, an altar-server at St. Joseph\u2019s.\u00a0 Though he is deeply engaged locally, he\u2019s also concerned with the big issues. As Sean explained, \u201cThis year [the Parade\u2019s theme] is immigration. In the past, it was the peace process with George Mitchell and education. Immigration is a hot topic and formed the Emerald Isle Immigration Center 25 years ago. The majority of their clients are Spanish or Latin America as opposed to Irish. We have a good board and usually it\u2019s about what\u2019s of concern or topical with our community.<\/p>\n
\u201cImmigration is front and center. In 2017 there were 50 thousand Green Cards and we get 140. And we\u2019re 20% of the population here. The Irish were dying for Visas since \u201808 when the economy was shaky and for whatever reasons the Visas stopped coming. That was always a natural relief valve for the Irish economy because such a horrible history of immigration that it\u2019d help the economy because everyone was used to leaving and everyone had relatives somewhere else. But this wasn\u2019t in the last wave in 08 during the crisis. We built the bridges and the cities along with the Italians and the Chinese. We dynamited the tunnels with the Chinese because no one else would do it at the time. We dug the coal mines with other immigrants. 200,000 of us, 10% of the Union Army was straight off the boat Irish. The 69th Regiment, I\u2019m an honorary member and I believe it\u2019s one of the most decorated regiments in the US Army. These were the guys that were the generals, the soldiers, the regular rank and file guys that performed all these heroics into all these battles.\u201d<\/p>\n
With the parade, it\u2019s an opportunity to put a positive light on the immigration experience. \u201cIt\u2019s positive, but we all needed support when we came over here. My brother likes to remind me he gave me the airfare. I paid him back a long time ago but he still brings it back. I had five Pounds in my pocket when I arrived here. So I personally understand the immigrant experience and share it, not only with my fellow Irish people but immigrants of all kinds. We hope to put the Parade\u2019s focus on that.\u201d<\/p>\n