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Mamdani Stumbles Over the Irish Question

The mayor’s difficulty in handling a question on Irish unification wasn’t 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 at a St. Patrick’s Day breakfast at Gracie Mansion on March 17, 2026.

On Monday, New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani was asked a question he obviously wasn’t expecting: “Do you support a United Ireland?”

There are two short, non-evasive responses that would have effectively disposed of the matter. He could, like Governor Kathy Hochul (whose roots go back to County Kerry) have said simply, “Indeed I do.” Or he might have noted that as mayor of New York he had constituents on both sides of that question, and that ultimately it was “for the people of Ireland to decide.”

Instead, the mayor began by laughing, before going on to admit, “I’ve got to be honest, I haven’t thought enough on that question.” Perhaps he should have. Because if the setting was indeed unlikely—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 timing was all but inevitable. The following morning, Mamdani was scheduled to host the good and great among New York’s Irish at a breakfast at Gracie Mansion marking the city’s 256th annual St. Patrick’s Day festivities. And it had only been a few days since the mayor had been invited by John Samuelson, head of the Transport 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 confession brought a quick rap on the rhetorical knuckles from Samuelson, who told AM New York he had “no doubt Zohran will wholeheartedly support the quest for a united Ireland.” Samuelson ascended to his union’s international presidency in 2017 from New York Local 100—which under his leadership backed Bernie Sanders in the New York Democratic primary the previous year.

But when I ran into Samuelson at the pre-parade breakfast he dismissed the fuss over what he described as “a cautious answer by a new mayor.”“I don’t think the mayor can be expected to be on top of the demographic geopolitics of every community in New York City,” Samuelson added. On Tuesday morning the union leader, who still lives in the heavily Irish American Gerritsen Beach neighborhood in Brooklyn, was seated on the mayor’s right hand. Mary Robinson, who rose from the Dublin Corporation council to become Ireland’s first woman president, was to the mayor’s left.

Mamdani presented an official proclamation honoring Robinson, who after she left the presidency served as the United Nations high commissioner for human rights. In his remarks, he recalled “how she stood steadfast alongside the people of Palestine” when so many others remained silent. Noting that “so much of the exploitation later imposed elsewhere across the world was first honed in the plantations of Ireland,” Mamdani celebrated the island nation’s long history of struggle: “When I think of the Irish, I do not think first of oppression. I think of resistance. I think........

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