By Melissa Louise Baird
Published in Irish Studies in International Affairs, January 2025.
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Abstract

From the beginning of 1969, panicked Irish diplomats based across the United States beseeched Iveagh House, the headquarters for the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs, to release an updated policy on raising Northern Ireland as an issue at the United Nations Security Council. These requests resulted from an influx of pressure from Irish Americans who were becoming increasingly concerned about the unfolding situation in Northern Ireland. Following the heavily publicised scenes from Derry on 5 October 1968, which showed police officers beating and dragging civil rights protestors on the city’s streets, Irish American interest in the Northern Irish civil rights movement proliferated across the country and across different sections of the diasporic community. While historians have found that the Irish government neglected to effectively monitor the emerging civil rights movement in Northern Ireland, Irish diplomats in the US paid careful attention to how Irish Americans felt about and reacted to the nascent movement in Northern Ireland from early on. Using government documents from the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs, this article examines the reaction from the Irish embassy and consulates to Irish American lobbying, analysing how factors such as class, political ideology and attitudes towards national identity differentiated these responses. This article argues that fissures in the relationship between the state and sections of its diaspora in the US, which stemmed from divisions over the Irish Civil War, contributed to the heightened sensitivity towards Irish American attitudes and actions as tensions began to rise in Northern Ireland.