McCaskill Urges Senate Colleagues to Approve St. Louis Native as Ambassador to Ireland

Senator introduces St. Louis, Mo. native Kevin O’Malley at Senate confirmation hearing

WASHINGTON – U.S. Senator Claire McCaskill today introduced St. Louis native Kevin O’Malley during a Senate confirmation hearing on his nomination as U.S. Ambassador to Ireland.

“[Kevin O’Malley] has academic chops, he has community involvement, he has great professional expertise, and he loves his country, but he also cares deeply for Ireland—which I think is a great combination,” McCaskill said at today’s hearing. “I hope that the committee can move quickly, because clearly it is a time in the world that we need the voice of America at every table, in all of these countries, and that’s why these ambassadorships are in fact so critical … Thank you all for giving me a few moments to introduce my friend and somebody who I think will be the essence of a great public servant to the nation we love.”

O’Malley appeared today before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

McCaskill recently praised the nomination of O’Malley, calling him “a terrific choice” for the ambassadorship.

McCaskill has also called on the Irish government to make public and transparent its adoption records in a letter to Irish Ambassador Anne Anderson. In February, she met with Philomena Lee, whose story of a decades-long search for the son who was forcibly removed from her, adopted and raised by a family in St. Louis, Mo., is the subject of a recent book and Oscar-nominated film. Philomena and her daughter created the Philomena Project in association with the Adoption Rights Alliance to reunite American children separated from their Irish families through forced adoption.

Kevin O’Malley is currently an attorney in the Litigation Practice at Greensfelder Attorneys at Law in St. Louis, focusing on medical negligence, federal white collar criminal defense, and product liability defense. He previously served as Special Attorney in the Organized Crime and Racketeering Section at the Department of Justice, as well as Assistant United States Attorney in St. Louis, and was an instructor for the American Bar Association’s Central and East European Law Initiative in Moscow and Warsaw.

Mr. O’Malley currently serves as the only non-physician member of the Missouri Board of Healing Arts, the state’s licensing and disciplinary body for physicians and is the senior author of the nine volume treatise Federal Jury Practice and Instructions. He received a B.A. and J.D. from St. Louis University School of Law. 

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