Why John Dowd is on this page

Heritage: John Robert Arthur Dowd is a NSW Liberal Party politician of the postwar Australian-Irish-Catholic generation; the cited Wikipedia article does not state the specific Irish county of origin, but the wider Australian Liberal Catholic Dowd lineage is well-attested in NSW.

John Robert Arthur Dowd AO KC (born 12 November 1940) is a former leader of the Liberal Party of Australia in New South Wales and a former Attorney-General of New South Wales. He was elected to the NSW Legislative Assembly as the member for Lane Cove in 1975 and held the seat for sixteen years, until 1991. He served as state Opposition Leader from 1981 — elected to the post shortly after that year’s general election — until his deposition by Nick Greiner in 1983. When Greiner won government in 1988, Dowd was appointed Attorney-General and Leader of the House, serving until 1991; in that period he oversaw the establishment of the Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC), one of the most consequential anti-corruption bodies in the Commonwealth, alongside major reforms to NSW criminal, tort and motor-accident law. After leaving parliament he served as Chancellor of Southern Cross University from 2002 to 2014 and as President of ActionAid Australia. He was made an Officer of the Order of Australia and a King’s Counsel.

Heritage notes

Family root: New South Wales, Australia — diaspora-likely-australian-irish.

The directory threads John Dowd back to the O'Dubhda clan story via the surname-variants reality — the same family carried these spellings as it scattered. See the septs and the diaspora for the wider pattern, or the Clan DNA Project for the genetic connections being mapped now.