Christine Callaghan Quinn is the first woman, openly gay, and Irish Speaker of the New York City Council. In 2008, the Irish Echo named Speaker Quinn the Irish American of the Year. As Speaker and Council Member representing Manhattan's West Side, she has brought a new perspective to the diverse challenges facing each of New York City's distinct communities. Speaker Quinn has set a proactive agenda for the Council as an initiator of legislative and policy initiatives that improve people's lives. In short, she is working to make government more accessible to New Yorkers in all five boroughs.
In her three years as Speaker, she has had numerous accomplishments including passing laws and initiating policies in a wide range of areas such as public safety, environmental protection, early childhood education, hunger and nutrition and affordable housing.
Her accomplishments and ongoing efforts include:
• Protecting the lives of New York City's police officers by successfully campaigning for nearly 18,000 new State-of-the-Art bulletproof vests for all our men and women in blue.
• Restoring 6 days a week library service allowing seniors, students and working families to access literacy programs, tutoring and job training, and enabling the City to return to the service levels that were in place before the economic downturn caused by September 11.
• Creating new affordable housing units through updated 421-A legislation, which grants tax relief to developers who include at least 20% affordable housing units in or around their residential developments.
• Taking a stand to ease traffic congestion, improve environmental quality, and fund mass transit through passage of a traffic congestion pricing plan in the City Council. More than half of the votes cast in support of the plan came from Council members representing neighborhoods outside of Manhattan.
• Leading Council efforts to strengthen nightclub safety by creating a package of laws that requires more rigorous identification checks for nightclub entry, security cameras at club entrances, and nightclub staff training. Problem clubs are also required to hire independent monitors at their own expense.
• Embracing New York City's under-utilized and viable waterways with a bold and visionary plan for a five-borough ferry network. With plans for new ferry landings at sites in all five boroughs, service from Far Rockaway began in May 2008, followed shortly by service from South Williamsburg and Long Island City. Ferry service will help take pressure off of already-overcrowded subway lines and offer a sustainable, efficient commute to New Yorkers in all five boroughs.
• Passing landmark legislation requiring large city businesses to offer receptacles for the recycling of plastic bags.
• Making our homes safer through pushing for an overhaul of the City's building code and proposing and passing the Safer Housing Act, a law that forces landlords of the City's worst buildings to make needed structural repairs.
• Working with Council Members and the Bloomberg Administration on the Solid Waste Management Plan, a first-ever garbage solution for New York City, which will ensure that low income communities don't bear the brunt of the City's garbage transportation and disposal slots in her first year in office.
• Making sure low income New Yorkers have better access to food stamps and have access to healthier options through Food Today, Healthy Tomorrow, a nutrition and anti-hunger campaign.

• Protecting summer jobs by securing annually recurring funding. This enables employment programs to plan for summer hiring and young people to plan for summer jobs. Also securing annual funding for parks, family day care, trash pick up, libraries and the Citizens Complaint Review Board, preventing them from routinely being targeted for cuts in each year's budget.
• Passing laws to control the spread of illegal firearms. These laws include the Gun Offender Registration Act for individuals convicted of criminal possession of a weapon in the third degree, a one handgun every-three-month purchase limit, an Inventory law, which requires city gun dealers to physically examine their inventories twice a year; and a ban on gun coloration kits used to disguise real guns in toy-like colors.
Since 1999, Speaker Quinn has served as the representative for the 3rd Council District of Manhattan. She has been a long time pioneer for equal rights, comprehensive health care, improved schools, tenants' rights and affordable housing. Prior to becoming Speaker, she was Chair of the Council's Health Committee and worked vigilantly to pass the ban on smoking in all workplaces, expand access to emergency contraception for rape survivors and other women in need, increase the availability of mammograms citywide, preserve school nurses, and secure millions of dollars for HIV prevention services.
Before being elected to the City Council, Speaker Quinn served for five years as Chief of Staff to Council Member Thomas K. Duane. She then worked as Executive Director of the New York City Gay and Lesbian Anti-Violence Project. During her time with the Anti-Violence Project, Mayor Giuliani appointed her to be a member of the New York City Police/Community Relations Task Force.
The Irish Echo named Speaker Quinn the 2008 Irish American of the Year, underscoring her “consistent ability to deal with issues, many of them complex and not given to easy resolution, while at the same time maintaining a pace of work that would leave many breathless.” The oldest and largest Irish-American newspaper called Quinn a “a strong advocate for a truth commission in Northern Ireland and has been a consistent supporter of the MacBride Principles on fair employment, guidelines that require U.S. companies doing business in Northern Ireland to promote equal religious and community representation. Since her election as New York City Council speaker, Quinn has worked to increase the involvement of the New York Irish community in the Northern Ireland peace process.”
The New York Post has twice rated her one of the fifty most powerful women in New York City, and New York Magazine has named her one of the most influential New Yorkers.
She and her partner, Kim Catullo, live in Chelsea.