Ireland and Atlanta: Deepening Civil Rights Connections 

Ciara O’Floinn didn’t characterize it as a regret, per se, but if the former Irish consul general had more time in Atlanta, she’d likely have spent much of it fostering new conversations on equity and diversity.  

Ms. O’Floinn was promoted to head of Latin America and the Caribbean at the Irish foreign ministry in August, bringing about an early departure from Atlanta after just one pandemic-tinged year. (She met many colleagues in person for the first time at her farewell party.) 

But even in her short tenure, Ms. O’Floinn was able to drive forward an initiative her predecessor started: helping Ireland advance its own civil-rights momentum by tapping into Atlanta’s wellspring of experience in this arena.  

“I’ve definitely gained a deeper understanding of the history of the Civil Rights Movement,” Ms. O’Floinn told Global Atlanta of her time in Atlanta. “Internationally, we know the headlines, but we don’t necessarily know the full picture.” 

Diplomats often pay homage to Atlanta’s role in the fight for Black equality, finding ways to connect the universal challenges their countries experience to the methods and models of a movement that achieved indisputable results but remains frustratingly unfinished.  

This international spotlight is never stronger than the week of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, and especially this year after ongoing protests calling for racial justice angst over the killing of unarmed Black men in the United States.

Some of diplomatic representatives were on hand for a special MLK Day service at the Ebenezer Baptist Church Monday, which centered on the fight to preserve and expand voting rights, particularly for Black voters and other minorities. The event came on the heels of a speech by President Joe Biden at the Atlanta University Center, where he railed against changes to Georgia voting laws he equated with voter suppression and “election subversion.” He also voiced  support for suspending the filibuster to pass federal voting rights legislation with a simple majority over Republican opposition in the Senate. 

During the tenure of Shane Stephens, the Irish consul general before Ms. O’Floinn, the consulate began making inroads in the Black community and across other lines of identity. Ireland knows, he often said, that its job of connecting with the Irish diaspora globally and representing all Irish people abroad must shift along with the changing definition of “Irish-ness” back home.  

About 17 percent of Ireland’s current residents were born in outside of the country, making it one of the most diverse in Europe. Some 2.5 percent of the population — about 120,000 people — have been granted Irish citizenship just in the last 10 years. The Muslim population, while still small in the Catholic-majority country of just 5 million people, has tripled in the last two decades to more than 60,000.  

But Ireland faces many challenges in integrating these communities and ensuring all share equally in the country’s opportunity — a point addressed in the creation of minister of state role with responsibility for “equality, immigration and integration.” In 2020, the country crafted its first anti-racism strategy and granted ethnic minority status to its Roma and Traveller communities, the latter of which has a large community in South Carolina just across the Georgia border from Augusta.  

Between Ireland and Atlanta, finding historical footholds for collaboration hasn’t been too hard. Northern Irish parliamentarian and peace advocate John Hume drew inspiration from Dr. King. A year after Mr. Hume won the 1998 Nobel Peace Prize for his role in the Good Friday Agreement that ended sectarian violence in Northern Ireland, he was given the Martin Luther King Jr. Nonviolent Peace Prize by Coretta Scott King, Dr. King’s widow, at Ebenezer Baptist in Atlanta. 

Going much further back, abolitionist Frederick Douglass was moved to take on a more universal approach to human-rights promotion while traveling in Ireland in 1845, seven years after his escape from slavery. While there, he met with advocates for Catholic emancipation and commiserated with the plight of impoverished Irish people.  

During his time in Atlanta, Mr. Stephens hosted a 200th birthday celebration for Mr. Douglass including readings of the famed orator’s speeches at Emory University’s Rose Library, known for both its Irish and African American collections.  

For her part, Ms. O’Floinn and her team have enjoyed discussions with Nettie Washington Douglass, a great-great-granddaughter of Frederick Douglass who also happens to be descended from Booker T. Washington, the noted educator, orator and founder of the Tuskegee Institute. Ms. Washington Douglass lives in Atlanta and chairs Rochester, New York-based Frederick Douglass Family Initiatives, a nonprofit that fights human trafficking and other modern-day injustices.  

Similarly, Ms. O’Floinn aimed to bring historical discussions to bear on current issues, fostering real dialogues that would resonate across the Atlantic.  

“Ireland has many of the same issues that Atlanta faces. It might be on a smaller scale, it might be more recent, it might be less institutionalized in terms of discrimination and racism and diverse populations living together, but there are a lot of modern day conversations you can have, so I’ve been trying to make that a priority,” she said. “It’s something that I really wanted to build on more.” 

She hopes her successor as consul general will continue the outreach to Atlanta’s Black communities, better connecting them with Ireland and an Irish diaspora that is being revealed to be more diverse as more of the countries’ shared history is brought to light. (On Dec. 14, it was announced that Caoimhe Ní Chonchúir, a diplomat working on gender equality and women’s rights at Ireland’s mission to the United Nations in New York, would replace Ms. O’Floinn in 2022.)   

One model for capitalizing on shared history, Ms. O’Floinn said, is Savannah, which linked up through with County Wexford for multifaceted exchange programs. The TradeBridge initiative, operated by the World Trade Center Savannah, links businesses on both sides, and Georgia Southern University’s Center for Irish Teaching and Research has opened a study-abroad campus in Wexford, the origin county for more than half of Irish immigrants arriving in Savannah during an intense wave in the five years starting in 1848.  

“I have to say I was blown away by how dynamic they are and how they’re pushing to take it further. They want to go into the cultural space, the film industry space, to build on those connections between like coastal Georgia and southeast Ireland, which is a really nice fit,” Ms. O’Floinn said.  

With one of Georgia Southern’s strategic pillars being “Inclusive Excellence,” the university hosted last March a webinar with renowned Frederick Douglass scholar Christine Kealy on “Black Abolitionists in Ireland.” It was open to attendees on both sides of the ocean. 

For more about the Georgia Southern center, visit  https://www.irishgeorgia.com.  

To connect with the consulate, now headed up temporarily by Eimear Nolan, chargé d’affaires, visit https://www.dfa.ie/irish-consulate/atlanta/about-us.