Policy / March 19, 2026
The mayor’s difficulty in dealing with a question about Irish unification was not entirely his fault. But it was also a trap he should have seen coming.
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani sits next to former Irish President Mary Robinson during a St. Patrick’s Day breakfast at Gracie Mansion, March 17, 2026.
(Ed Reed / Mayor’s Office of Photography) On Monday, New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani was request a question he clearly did not expect: “Do you support a united Ireland?”
There are two short, non-evasive answers that would have effectively settled the matter. He could, like Governor Kathy Hochul (whose roots go back to County Kerry) simply said: “Indeed I do”. Or he could have noted that as mayor of New York, he had constituents on both sides of this issue and that ultimately it was “for the people of Ireland to decide.”
Instead, the mayor laughed at first, before admitting, “I have to be honest, I haven’t thought this through enough.” » Maybe he should have. Because while the context was indeed improbable – the mayor and his transportation commissioner, Mike Flynn, were at Flushing International High School to announce a new 15 mph speed limit around the city’s schools – the moment was almost inevitable. The next morning, Mamdani was scheduled to host New York’s good and great Irish at a breakfast at the Gracie Mansion marking the city’s 256th annual St. Patrick’s Day celebration. And it had only been a few days since the mayor guest by John Samuelsonhead of the Transportation Workers Union and an important Mamdani ally, to speak at a St. Patrick’s Day luncheon sponsored by the James Connolly Irish American Labor Coalition.
The mayor’s confessions sparked a rapid rap about rhetorical joints of Samuelson, who said I’m in New York he had “no doubt that Zohran would wholeheartedly support the quest for a united Ireland”. Samuelson rose to his union’s international presidency in 2017 from New York Local 100, which, under his leadership, supported Bernie Sanders in the New York Democratic primary the previous year.
But when I ran into Samuelson at the breakfast before the parade, he dismissed any fuss over what he described as “a cautious response from a new mayor.”
“I don’t think you can expect the mayor to be aware of the demographic geopolitics of every community in New York City,” Samuelson added. Tuesday morning, the union leader, who still lives in a neighborhood heavily Gerritsen Beach, of Irish and American origin neighborhood of Brooklyn, was seated to the right of the mayor. Mary Robinson, who left the Dublin Corporation board to become Ireland’s first female president, was to the mayor’s left.
Mamdani presented an official proclamation honoring Robinson, who, after leaving the presidency, served as United Nations high commissioner for human rights. In his remarks, he recalled “how closely she stood with the Palestinian people” while so many others remained silent. Noting that “much of the exploitation later imposed elsewhere in the world was first refined on the plantations of Ireland,” Mamdani celebrated the island nation’s long history of struggle: “When I think of the Irish, I don’t think first of oppression. I think about resistance. I think of unity. I think of corned beef and Troy Parrott’s 96-minute goals, and the Pogues’ “New York Fairy Tale.”
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However, when he was asked again about Irish unification While marching in Tuesday’s parade, the mayor, describing himself as “someone who believes deeply in the principle of self-determination,” said simply that that principle “should be extended to the Irish” — a response that quickly attracted attention. a little flak on social networks.
That shouldn’t have been a surprise either. There was a time, it is true, when the mayor of New York was not expected to have a foreign policy. When the young, stylish Irish American Mayor Jimmy Walker sailed for Europe in the fall of 1932, it was a exit strategy for corrupt outgoing presidentnot an act of political sense. Previous mayors had remained in the five boroughs, as had Walker’s successor, Fiorello La Guardia, despite an itinerant childhood that took him from Arizona to Fiume and Budapest, and service on the Italian front during the First World War.
It was Bill O’Dwyer, who was the last Irish-American mayor of New York, who inaugurated what became a town hall tradition with a 34-day trip to Israel in 1951. Although he made this trip immediately after leaving office, O’Dwyer, born in Ireland (County Mayo), had close ties to the Jewish state. In 1949 he proclaimed Israel Independence Day as a city vacation; his younger brother Paul, who later became president of the New York City Council, had run arms for the Irgun – and in the 1970s provided legal defense to Americans accused by the Nixon administration of performing similar service for the Irish Republican Army. Yet such visits were soon considered obligatory by O’Dwyer’s successors, marking Mamdani’s break with such expectations. during a Democratic primary debate so shocking and refreshing.
To some of us, Mamdani’s election, despite – or perhaps because of – his refusal to recite standard Zionist shibboleths, seemed almost miraculous. Of course, many Jewish New Yorkers share the mayor’s disenchantment with Israel. For others, the issue was less important than his commitment to affordability and building a New York that truly belongs to the people who live here.
Yet in New York as elsewhere, most Jews retain some interest in the survival of the Jewish state, which means that when the subject comes up, Mamdani – who is not only pro-Palestinian but also the city’s first Muslim mayor – seems aware of the need to tread carefully. His ability to do so was for me best summed up by a photo published by the town hall, and that Jacob Kornbluh, senior political reporter for The attackerposted earlier this month showing Mamdani breaking her Iftar fast with a plate of hamantaschen (the triangular pastries that Jews eat to celebrate Purim).
As for how far Mamdani’s opponents will go to demonize him, the most recent evidence is controversial– about which if you are not on social media you could have remained blissfully ignorant – about an illustration provided by his wife for a collection of short stories written by Gaza writers. When it emerged that the editor of the collection had referred to Jews as “vampires” and “parasites”, addition“I also don’t care if people erase the distinction between Zionists [and] Jews”, the mayor duly convicted his rhetoric is “clearly unacceptable. I think it’s reprehensible.” This is undoubtedly true – although some of us on the receiving end might question the decency of devoting so much energy to maintaining the tone when the children of Gaza and the West Bank are still murdered.
But as this week’s Irish tour demonstrated, Israel and Palestine are not the only foreign policy minefields for a mayor. As a candidate, Mamdani said he’d probably skip many of the city’s ethnic parades, but he’s already made exceptions for Irish and Chinese New Years.
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It would indeed be surprising if it showed up on May 18, when the Israel Day parade – the successor to Bill O’Dwyer’s celebration – marches down Fifth Avenue under the theme “Proud Americans, Proud Zionists.” But if the mayor wants to continue pursuing foreign policy, he might consider adopting some form of skepticism toward the assertions of all nationalisms found in the pages of his father’s books. Inflexibly radical and yet resistant to the rhetorical discourse that too often taints progressive support for “liberation struggles” – especially those comfortably removed from the speaker’s home – the work of Mahmood Mandami, particularly his 2022 study Neither settler nor nativeoffers a vision of citizenship and action independent of blood and soil.
Maybe the mayor could borrow a copy the next time he visits his parents.
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DD Guttenplan DD Guttenplan is special correspondent for The Nation and the former host of The nation’s podcast. He was editor of the magazine from 2019 to 2025 and, before that, editor and London correspondent. His books include American Radical: The Life and Times of IF Stone, The Nation: a biography, And The next Republic: the rise of a new radical majority.