Category: Founder

S. Boston businessman helping kids of Limerick

When money was needed for air fare to bring 60 kids and a priest from Limerick, Ireland, to Boston for three weeks next July, Billy Higgins didn’t think twice about coming up with $27,000 of his own.

“I had a hard time growing up and I think it’s important to show these kids there is a way out,”  Higgins, 44, now a South Boston businessman, said recently.  “What we’re trying to do is to give these kids a better childhood and a sense of dignity.  I think we can do that through sports.”

Rev.  Josepth P. Young, a 32-year-old Catholic priest who has been working for the last eight years with disadvantaged boys and girls of Holy Family Parish in the Southill section of Limerick, is the reason Higgins has let his work slide at his various business interests – his Nautilus fitness center, his service station and his used car business – to organize a dinner to raise funds for the Father Joe Young Association on April 16th at Pier 4.

IT HAS been 21 years since Billy Higgins first set foot in Limerick and since then his name has become inextricably linked to the development of Southill.

The friendliness and warmth of the people on the south side of Limerick city led him to begin a series of exchange programmes between Southill and his home city of Boston and to fundraise for community developments in an area, he says, that is like his second home.