TALL TALES Lynch's link to Irish legend remains murky BY BRIAN C. JONES

Since he was elected as Rhode Island’s attorney general in 2002, Patrick C. Lynch has insisted that his strong political-family connections (his brother, Bill, is the chairman of the state Democratic Party) won’t hobble him in carrying out his official duties. "You do that process," Lynch told the Phoenix earlier this year, "determining what the facts in evidence are, then literally looking [at] whatever laws we can apply — should we proceed? And that doesn’t matter whether you’re the Pope, a street urchin, or, you know, the governor."

As with all office holders, only time will tell whether this by-the-book pledge will or can be honored, should a member of the state’s vast and often unruly Democratic tribe end up requiring a dose of prosecutorial process. In the meantime, Lynch can lean on a family legend to bolster his claim of impartiality, an epic myth that I ran across on a recent vacation in Ireland that included a stop in Galway City, on the island country’s western coast

Seems that one of the prominent families of 15th-century Galway were the Lynches, who left behind one of the city’s landmarks — a handsome stone mansion dubbed Lynch’s Castle, now home to the Allied Irish Bank. A nearby stone wall containing the Lynch Memorial is marked by a skull-and-crossbones carving. As with most legends, there are a dozens of versions of what happened, and an Internet check shows substantial variations, including disagreement on specifics of the story, spellings of proper names, etc.

But in summary, they refer to a Mayor James Lynch FitzStephen, whose son was found guilty of murdering another man. No one would carry out the usual sentence — death by hanging. So in 1493, the mayor imposed it personally. Some versions have the father dropping the son out a window, rope attached.

"You found my secret," laughs Rhode Island’s top law enforcer when asked whether he and Bill Lynch are of same Lynches, albeit separated by many centuries. "You know I always promised that I would do whatever I can to make sure justice is done, regardless of who was brought before me. Now you know."

Actually, Patrick Lynch isn’t sure of his specific family ties to the Galway clan, and says he came across the legend himself when, after graduating from Brown University, he played professional basketball in Belfast, Northern Ireland. He was playing against a team in Galway, Bill was visiting, and as tourists, they visited the site of the supposed execution. "Of course, too many days in Ireland, it’s never a challenge to have a kind of gray and rainy day, and it was kind of gloomy," Lynch recalls, which made the memorial carving and the surroundings all the more creepy.

Since then, the Rhode Island Lynches joke about how they hope that in carrying out his pledge for unwavering justice, Patrick Lynch will "waiver more than the lord mayor did."

For the record — and with a political hedge that the subject is "something you always have to reconsider" — the state’s 39-year-old chief prosecutor takes a dim view of capital punishment, because, "Time and time again, there have been too many illustrations that our system of justice isn’t perfect."

Back in Galway, tour guides keep the Lynch legend going, suggesting even that it offers the origin of the term "lynching." A number of Irish tourism Web sites discount this, and candidly add that the memorial wall itself was constructed by "town commissioners" in the 19th century, long after the events in question, but at a time when tourism was getting its start.