Greenwood Lake renames street Mulcahy Way in honor of local family

In Greenwood Lake, one family’s determination to help children caught in the violence of Northern Ireland ultimately grew into an international peace-building movement that touched the lives of more than 23,000 young people.

On Saturday, Aug. 8, the Village of Greenwood Lake honored that legacy by renaming one of its streets Mulcahy Way, recognizing the Mulcahy family and its extraordinary contribution to peace and reconciliation.

The story began with brothers Patrick and Denis Mulcahy, Cork natives and members of the New York City Police Department, who watched the nightly news from Northern Ireland during the height of the Troubles during the 1970s. They saw children growing up surrounded by sectarian violence and began wondering whether there was a way to break the cycle before those children became adults.

Their idea was deceptively simple: bring Protestant and Catholic children out of the environment of conflict and allow them to spend time together in a peaceful setting. By getting to know one another as children, they reasoned, perhaps they would be less likely to become enemies as adults.

That idea became Project Children.

In the program’s first summer in 1975, six children—three Protestant and three Catholic—were brought to New York State for a summer holiday away from the violence of Northern Ireland, and two of the six spent their first summer right in Greenwood Lake. What began around a kitchen table soon developed into one of the largest grassroots peace initiatives associated with the Troubles. Over the following decades, thousands of children crossed the Atlantic, welcomed by American host families and communities that offered them something remarkably ordinary: a chance to simply be children.

Greenwood Lake played a particularly important role in the organization’s history. The village became closely associated with Project Children and the Mulcahy family’s belief that personal relationships could accomplish what politics often could not. The initiative demonstrated that peace-building could begin with something as basic as friendship, hospitality and the willingness to see another child not as a member of a rival community, but simply as a child.

Street dedication honors Mulcahy legacy of peace building

The impact of that original idea continues today. In 2025, Project Children celebrated its 50th anniversary, marking a half-century of peace-building and cross-cultural friendships. Anniversary events in Monaghan, Ireland, included the official opening of the Project Children Stories Exhibition at the Monaghan Peace Campus Museum and the Project Children 50th Anniversary Gala Celebration. And in August of last year a tree-planting ceremony was held at the Greenwood Lake Town Beach to honor host families and early pioneers like local host family Carol and Duke Hoffman.

The dedication of Mulcahy Way therefore represents more than a street-name change. It recognizes a Greenwood Lake family whose decision to act on what they witnessed transformed an idea born around a kitchen table into a legacy that crossed oceans, generations and religious divisions—proving that one person, or one family, really can make a difference.