As the most visible ‘face’ of Manchester city council, Pat Karney is never short of an opinion, and our readers are seldom short of an opinion about him. Time for Paul Taylor to ask: ‘Who does Pat Karney think he is?’ ...

THE man on the reception desk at Manchester Town Hall is trying to locate ‘Pat’ for me. Not ‘Councillor Karney’, you’ll note, but ‘Pat’. As we settle down in Karney’s surprisingly pokey office, I ask whether he is on first name terms with all town hall staff. The answer is yes.

"My mother was a cleaner and so I go out of my way to recognise people who do what are fairly basic jobs, but jobs that have to be done on a daily basis," he explains.

Family looms large in Karney’s world. Behind his zeal as an anti-smoking crusader is the knowledge that his mother Mary died from smoking-related causes, seduced into addiction by the glamorous Hollywood image of cigarettes in the cinema at the time.

His nine nephews and nieces are ‘hugely important’ to him. Asked about hobbies, the single man says all his free time is spent with the younger Karneys

"After this life, all you leave is your example," he says philosophically.

And then there are his two other ‘families’: the people he grew up with in Harpurhey and Collyhurst, and who he has represented on the city council since 1979, and then, of course, the family which is the Labour party.

But to the ‘family’ of Manchester Evening News readers, Karney is like the ‘mouth almighty’ uncle guaranteed to stir up a row at any gathering. No other name has loomed as large, nor as long, in our Postbag page. He is coy about stating his age (he concedes he is ‘just’ eligible for a bus pass) but his first letter to Postbag was published at the tender age of 13.

When Karney recently ventured the opinion that out-of-town malls like the Trafford Centre be forced to charge for parking, to provide a level playing field with town and city centres, our website drew over 200 responses, many of them critical of him.

It is just the latest of many issues on which Karney has been a touchstone for debate. He shows me a poison pen letter addressed to him at the town hall, referring to the use of the word ‘Xmas’ on posters around Manchester.

"Christmas is spelt Christmas you horrible anti-Christ creature!", it goes. "You will go to hell where you belong." Ironically, Karney actually agrees with the letter-writer that ‘Christmas’ is much preferable to ‘Xmas’.

Such invective against him is at odds with the face-to-face experience he has with Mancunians.

"Overwhelmingly, I find people are really polite, really nice," he says.

But he is aware that being so visible and so vocal, he rubs some people up the wrong way.

"It looks to the readers as if I’m some sort of gobby person, who’s got a view on everything," he says. "Actually, in my estimation, I’m rather serious and rather a shy type of person."

He points out – and we are happy to confirm – that his opinions more often end up in the M.E.N.’s pages because we journalists seek them, not because he volunteers them. The reason we ask, of course, is that he can be relied upon for good copy.

It’s not surprising, then, that the first ambition Karney expressed was to become a writer or journalist. A careers officer suggested the 14-year-old Karney should instead follow his father Patrick into the building trade.

The Kearney family (Karney changed the spelling after others constantly got it wrong) came to Manchester from Dublin when Pat, eldest of three children, was aged nine.

"I remember it being really green and we had a very big garden," he says of his early years in Walkinstown, a Dublin suburb. "When I saw Manchester at 2.30 in the morning at the old Central Station, I said: ‘I don’t like this. I want go home’."

Pat was ‘teacher’s pet’ at Mount Carmel Primary School, loved his studies at St Gregory’s RC High school, Ardwick, and went from a council house in Collyhurst to study at the London School of Economics.

"It was a very middle class, international place. There were a lot of rich Americans," he says. "It opened my eyes up to a world I was never part of."

The family home had no phone, so at 7pm every Sunday night, he would phone his mother in a call box on Rochdale Road. It was in a call from that phone box that she told a 20-year-old Pat that his father had died in an accident on a building site in Middleton.

Returning to Manchester with a BSc in politics and economics, Karney became a community development worker in Collyhurst.

There is a whiff of the American dream about this story: the son of Irish immigrants who becomes a mover and shaker, a pillar of his adopted community. And Karney is fascinated by America and its politics. He reckons to have read every book by every presidential contender since Jimmy Carter.

Karney hopes to spend his summer holidays lending a hand at Barack Obama’s re-election campaign headquarters in Chicago.

Bizarrely, it emerged last year that since Obama’s ancestors hailed from Ireland and included a Falmouth Kearney, Pat may even be related to the US President.

It was his many trips to New York which made Karney the standard-bearer for Manchester becoming something closer to a 24-hour city. He began living in Manchester city centre over 20 years ago – a time when only reluctant caretakers made their home there. Living and working in the centre, he was in the thick of it for Manchester’s two most cataclysmic events of recent times.

He was on High Street, part of crowds being evacuated, when the IRA bomb went off in 1996.

"There were people screaming up Market Street and we were all terrified we were going to die," he recalls. Karney has no truck with talk that the bomb was the ‘best thing to happen to Manchester’.

Then when the riots broke out last year, Karney was on Market Street.

"I saw a crowd of mainly young men, some with balaclavas, baseball bats and iPhones," he says. "They were very menacing. I jumped into M&S and they closed the doors. They started banging on the door and they were filming us on their iPhones, kids as young as 12 or 13. For them it was all part of some horrible movie."

Aside from his council duties, Karney is employed by the NHS as director of Smoke-Free Greater Manchester and has also spoken out against the tide of cheap booze, opposing new off-licences in his ward.

You wonder whether this paternalism about traditional working class vices is at the heart of some people’s antipathy towards him.

A referendum on whether Manchester should have a directly-elected mayor is due in May. Back in 2009, Ladbrokes made Karney 2-1 favourite to become Manchester’s version of Boris Johnson. But Karney opposes the whole concept.

"All that power in one person? You can see what it does in America," he says. "We have a fantastic team. Why swap that for one person?"

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