{"id":169091,"date":"2026-03-20T10:39:10","date_gmt":"2026-03-20T10:39:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/169091\/"},"modified":"2026-03-20T10:39:10","modified_gmt":"2026-03-20T10:39:10","slug":"nyc-mamdanis-ireland-answer-shows-citys-st-patricks-day-era-over","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/169091\/","title":{"rendered":"NYC Mamdani’s Ireland answer shows city’s St Patricks Day era over"},"content":{"rendered":"

When asked about a united Ireland earlier this week, Zohran Mamdani admitted<\/a> that he \u201chadn\u2019t thought enough on that question.\u201d The mayor of New York then recited a stiff set of platitudes about \u201csolidarity\u201d in language that he repeated word for word in his St. Patrick\u2019s Day address.<\/a><\/p>\n

There was an incongruity between his comments and his attendance at the James Connolly Irish-American Labor Coalition\u2019s annual luncheon, where he schmoozed for selfies with Sinn F\u00e9in politicians.<\/p>\n

There was incongruity, too, with past mayors like Ed Koch and David Dinkins, the latter of whom lobbied for Irish republican prisoners.<\/p>\n

\"NYCNYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani arrives at St. Patrick\u2019s Cathedral during the annual St. Patrick\u2019s Day Parade on March 17, 2026. AFP via Getty Images<\/p>\n

Context is everything, though, and both the city and the Irish national struggle have changed over the past 30 years.<\/p>\n

Mamdani\u2019s indifference to the Irish question signals the passing of two worlds: that of old New York and old Ireland.<\/p>\n

Population boom & bust<\/p>\n

An Irish-American friend who\u2019s a veteran of New York politics told me an anecdote about Congressman Joe Crowley\u2019s loss to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in 2018.<\/p>\n

That race was, in many ways, a trial run for Mamdani\u2019s victory over Cuomo. Crowley supposedly told him, \u201cThere used to be 20 Irish pubs all up and down this neighborhood and I could campaign by just visiting each one on St. Patrick\u2019s Day, now there\u2019s only one.\u201d<\/p>\n

At the time, the Democratic Socialists of America member Ross Barkan called AOC\u2019s victory \u201cseismic,\u201d asking, \u201cIs this the sound a dying political machine makes?\u201d He compared Crowley\u2019s defeat to the \u201cdefeat of Tammany Hall,\u201d and said Crowley\u2019s \u201ctentacles were everywhere,\u201d recalling 19th century political cartoon levels of anti-Irish rhetoric.<\/p>\n

Conspicuously, Barkan never uses the word \u201cIrish\u201d once \u2014 instead using phrases such as \u201cold machine,\u201d \u201ccorruption,\u201d \u201cTammany Hall\u201d and \u201cbehind-the-curtain . . . power-brokers.\u201d We all know what he was referring to: Irish and Italian Democratic New York.<\/p>\n

\"FormerFormer Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Governor George Pataki at the St. Patrick\u2019s Day Parade on March 17, 2003. NEW YORK POST<\/p>\n

Similarly, when Mamdani beat Cuomo, very few on his team openly framed it as dismantling old white ethnic New York, but that was what they were doing. They constantly telegraphed their knowledge of it through talk of \u201cnew coalitions.\u201d<\/p>\n

Indeed, long-term trends like white flight, looser immigration laws and increases in global refugees over the past 20 years have changed the demographics of New York City.<\/p>\n

In the mid-19th-century, following the famine, the Irish made up a quarter or more of the entire population of New York. NYC was the largest Irish city in the world by the 1871 census, with its 300,000 Irish beating Dublin\u2019s 267,000. This shifting of the entire Gaelic world west across the Atlantic was not limited to New York. Massachusetts and Pennsylvania received large numbers of Irish migrants as well, with Philadelphia\u2019s Irish population reaching 97,000, significantly larger than Cork City\u2019s population of 76,000.<\/p>\n

There are now 376,000 Irish Americans in New York City, fewer than the 410,000 there were in 1890 when the city had 1.5 million people versus the 8.5 million it has now. As a percentage of the population, they have dropped from 27% to 4.4%, far lower than the 12% Muslim share of the population.<\/p>\n

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Not only have Irish and Italian numbers declined, but the social glue that held these old ethnic neighborhoods often no longer exists in the first place.<\/p>\n

Many Irish and Italians are no longer getting union jobs from their cousins and uncles \u2014 the guy who knows a guy. Instead, they\u2019re working in the regular labor market as perfectly ordinary, middle-class professionals.<\/p>\n

Battle\u2019s over<\/p>\n

Many Italian Americans and Irish Americans simply moved from the places that sustained their political machines and cultures.<\/p>\n

Once you\u2019re an upper-middle class professional, your primary allegiance becomes institutional, not ethnic or personal, and American deracination is a powerful process.<\/p>\n

And what of the national struggle for a united Ireland? Aside from the disarmament of the Provisional IRA, the most important part of the Good Friday Agreement was that the Republic of Ireland dropped its claim to Northern Ireland.<\/p>\n

The only mechanism for reunification now is a vote, which happens only if and when one British official appointed by the prime minister, the secretary of state for Northern Ireland, decides to call one.<\/p>\n

This arrangement, along with total disarmament, is what Gerry Adams, Sinn F\u00e9in and the IRA themselves agreed to almost 30 years ago. In some ways, Mamdani reflects this reality. Sinn F\u00e9in have fully embraced the platitudes-about-self-determination style of Irish nationalism.<\/p>\n

Why would anyone expect the Ugandan-Indian Democratic mayor of New York to sound like a dissident republican when those people barely exist anymore?<\/p>\n

Once you disarm and relinquish your claim, then it loses all force internationally. This is why Ukraine refuses to acknowledge Russian annexation of Crimea, even though it has been an established fact for more than a decade.<\/p>\n

The Irish national struggle died a long time ago, and Irish New York has been dying along with it. What\u2019s actually left?<\/p>\n

Excerpted with permission from The Spectator<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When asked about a united Ireland earlier this week, Zohran Mamdani admitted that he \u201chadn\u2019t thought enough on…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":169092,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[30210,9,56,63,65,64,299,66299,82],"class_list":["post-169091","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york-city","tag-ireland","tag-new-york","tag-ny","tag-nyc","tag-nyc-headlines","tag-nyc-news","tag-opinion","tag-saint-patricks-day","tag-zohran-mamdani"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/169091","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=169091"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/169091\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/169092"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=169091"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=169091"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=169091"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}