Why Jim Dowd is on this page

Heritage: London-born Labour politician of the post-war London-Irish-Catholic generation; the cited Wikipedia article does not document specific Irish parentage. Heritage classification: London-Irish-diaspora-named.

Jim Dowd (born 5 March 1951) is a British Labour Party politician who served as Member of Parliament for Lewisham West from 1992 to 2017. At the 1992 general election he won Lewisham West from the Conservative incumbent John Maples by a 1,809-vote margin and made his maiden speech in the Commons on 10 June 1992. He was appointed an opposition whip in 1994 and party Spokesman on Northern Ireland in 1995; after the 1997 Labour landslide he served in the Blair government as a whip. He was unexpectedly sacked after the 2001 election and from then served on the House of Commons Health Select Committee, with a voting record consistently in line with government policy. Following the announcement of Theresa May’s snap general election in June 2017 he stood down at the 2017 election. He should not be confused with Jim Dowd the American ice hockey player, already published in the directory at `/notable/jim-dowd/`.

Heritage notes

Family root: London, England — diaspora-likely-london-irish.

The directory threads Jim 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.