Joe Biden may have had a rough start to his presidency stateside, but he had a brief honeymoon on matters relating to Brexit. Indeed, after the UK government amended the Internal Markets Bill, its worst impulses on Brexit seemed to have been constrained. However, the reprieve would be brief. Relations between the UK and the EU began to deteriorate by the end of January 2021 and would kick off Irish America's most intense period of lobbying yet, crystallizing around protecting the Protocol from British actions to undermine it. This lobbying would span two full years.

A tumultuous 2021

The Biden Administration

The new Biden Administration offered a ripe audience for Irish American lobbying. President Biden, commonly referred to as the most Irish American president since John F. Kennedy, had extensive familiarity with the conflict in Northern Ireland. Though his family is also English, Biden was raised with a profound sense of Irish cultural identity and has tended to emphasize his Irish ancestry throughout his electoral career. As a new Senator whose wife and small daughter were killed in a car accident a month after his election, Biden's identity was also easily comparable to another Irish Catholic family touched by tragedy. As Biden explained in his 2007 memoir: “The Washington press corps ushered me to town as a kind of poor Kennedy cousin: I was Irish, Catholic, young, toothsome” (Biden, 2007: 107).

As many observers have noted, Biden leaned into his Irish identity to maximize his appeal when talking about a wide variety of issues, including oppression, immigration, discrimination, working- class issues, and underdog politics in general (see Viser, 2021).

When we began this book, we struggled with a basic question: is Irish America an ethnic lobby? As we explain throughout this book, contemporary Irish America does not lobby in any traditional sense. There is no formal interest group or even a few select firms that lay out Irish America's interests in Senate and House offices or to the Executive Branch. There are virtually no Irish American PACs. And while individual Irish Americans make political donations, there is no evidence that Irish Americans act as a group to support particular candidates. Moreover, though Irish Americans were traditionally associated with the Democratic Party, today they are now like the rest of America— split between the two parties in near- equal proportions. In fact, there is no longer even a unified Irish American voting bloc to mobilize.

Despite this anomalous behavior, we ultimately decided to treat Irish America as an ethnic lobby. The main reason for this is because there is still a small group of Irish Americans who lobby US policy makers on issues specific to Northern Ireland. And in the past few years, they have lobbied the US foreign policy establishment very effectively, to the point of shaping US foreign policy on the issues surrounding Brexit.

The success of Irish America in setting the terms of US foreign policy toward Brexit reveals some of the limitations of the ethnic lobbies literature. One of our main arguments is that while Irish America has some of the factors that scholars contend make ethnic lobbies successful, they lack others.

Interviews

In many ways, Irish America's involvement in lobbying to preserve the Belfast/ Good Friday Agreement in the wake of the 2016 Brexit referendum is an improbable tale. As indicated in previous chapters, though Irish America was a force to be reckoned with during the Troubles and in the march to eventual peace in 1998, it had lost its vitality by the time the Brexit referendum occurred in 2016. There are several reasons for this retrenchment, including population decline and dispersion, organizational collapse, a lack of leadership and the changing nature of the conflict. But British withdrawal from the EU held risks for key parts of the Belfast/ Good Friday Agreement and threatened wider understandings that had facilitated the process, such as the centrality of bilateral cooperation between the UK and Ireland. It also triggered an unlikely and unanticipated revival of Irish American lobbying in the years after the referendum.

To chart Irish America's improbable path back to influence, we divide our discussion into the following sections. In the first and second sections, we provide a brief history of UK/ EU relations and discuss the politics that led to the 2016 Brexit referendum. In the third and fourth sections, we discuss what Brexit meant for the Belfast/ Good Friday Agreement and map the state of Irish America at the time of the referendum.

A brief history of European unity and the UK

In 1973 the UK joined the European Economic Community (EEC), the predecessor to the EU. While many countries join the EU with great fanfare, Britain's entry is described with diffidence. Scholars and commentators use words like “awkward” (George, 1990), “complex” (Schütze, 2022), and “reluctant” (Moss and Clarke, 2021) to describe the entry.

When Boris Johnson's government succeeded in negotiating the new Withdrawal Agreement that replaced the Backstop with the Northern Ireland Protocol at the end of 2019, most Irish Americans believed that the greatest threats Brexit posed to the Belfast/ Good Friday Agreement had been neutralized. Indeed, by placing customs check points for goods coming from Great Britain at Northern Ireland's ports, a hard border on the island of Ireland had been avoided.

However, in Northern Ireland, Unionists decried the solution, arguing that Johnson's withdrawal plan had created a border within the UK, separating Northern Ireland from the rest of the UK. They saw the separation as threatening Northern Ireland's economy, its access to the UK's internal market, and its very place within the Union. They also objected to the lack of democratic consent in the arrangement because Northern Ireland would continue to be governed by EU regulations it would have no role in crafting. With the Conservative Party's overwhelming victory in the snap election in December 2019, the DUP's power to affect the Withdrawal Deal disappeared and the party began to seek new opportunities to influence the situation. As a result, the politics of Brexit continued to roil, even after the Withdrawal Agreement was ratified in January 2020 (Carswell, 2020; Haverty, 2024).

In this chapter, we pick the story up from the passage of the Withdrawal Agreement that included the Protocol (approved by Parliament in January 2020) and trace it forward, through the last year of the Trump Administration. We focus on the efforts by the Irish Americans to defend the Protocol from the Internal Market Bill announced in the summer of 2020 and to encourage the British to work with the EU in order to avoid collapsing the Withdrawal Agreement and defaulting to a hard border.

This chapter provides a look at the limits of Irish American activism regarding how best to grapple with the legacy of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Irish America was a forceful opponent of the UK government's so- called “legacy legislation,” which halts most ongoing investigations into Troubles- related crimes, but its lobbying to stop the legislation did not help prevent its passage in 2023. Irish America's inability to move the needle is all the more notable, given that it had a larger set of partners than it did during debates about revising the Protocol. Opponents of the legislation included the Irish government, victims and human rights groups in the UK, Ireland and the EU, the Labour Party in the UK, and all the political parties in Northern Ireland.

The key features that allowed Irish America to function successfully as a lobby in all the same ways it had defended against a hard border were still in force when the legacy legislation passed. Irish America was unified in its opposition to the legislation and it still occupied key positions of power in Congress and the White House. And even though Nancy Pelosi was no longer Speaker of the House when the legislation was introduced, Irish Americans in Congress were united across party lines in their opposition to the legislation, and President Biden offered to assist Ireland after it lodged a case in the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) against the UK government (“New British Government Should Keep Its Manifesto Promise and Immediately Repeal Northern Ireland Legacy Act,” 2024).

Irish America is a sizable if quotidian part of America's so- called melting pot. Like other waves of European migrants, Irish emigrés left poverty, famine, and limited opportunities to build new lives in America. Though many Irish emigrés would remain poor and “foreign” after decades in America, their descendants would move up the socioeconomic ladder, becoming fully assimilated within three or four generations. While assimilated, these great- grandsons and daughters of Ireland continue to recognize their Irish roots. In 2021, 31.5 million Americans— 9.5 percent of all Americans— claimed Irish ancestry on the US Census form (US Census Bureau, 2023).

Though most Irish emigrés were fleeing desperate poverty, they brought distinct political sensibilities and skills with them and ultimately become an integral part of America's 20th- century political landscape. Irish émigrés in the 19th century often had no choice but to embrace ethnic politics because the political establishment was dominated by Dutch and Anglo- Saxon Protestants who saw them as inferior and had little inclination to welcome them into “respectable” society. Squashed together in crowded tenements in cities on the Eastern Seaboard, acting collectively was often the only way to improve their lot, even as it placed them in fierce competition with other migrants, both foreign (Italians, Poles, and Hungarians) and domestic (Black Americans heading north during the Great Migration).

In this chapter, we focus on Irish America's early forays into ethnic politics. Irish America writ large did not follow a traditional path to ethnic influence— most notably by forming a well- funded lobby. Instead, it succeeded by forming dense networks of ethnic patronage and harnessing them for survival and later political advantage.

By most accounts, Irish America was tremendously influential in the Irish peace process in the 1990s (see, inter alia, O’Clery, 1996; Arthur, 2001; Lynch, 2004; MacLeod, 2016; Cooper, 2017; Fitzpatrick, 2019; Sanders, 2019). During the 1992 presidential campaign, Irish Americans united across traditional divides to persuade Bill Clinton to agree to appoint a special envoy to Northern Ireland if elected. The promise was important because it signaled Irish America's intention to make Northern Ireland a US foreign policy priority, despite the longstanding tradition (in the US and the UK) that matters in Northern Ireland were considered British domestic affairs. As President, Clinton made good on his promise, selecting former Senator George Mitchell for the role in 1995. Mitchell laid the groundwork for peace talks and would go on chair the talks that produced the Belfast/ Good Friday Agreement in 1998.

Irish Americans also incentivized the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and its political party, Sinn Féin, to abandon their violent campaign and in so doing helped normalize their participation in politics. They pressured President Clinton to grant travel visas to the US for Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams and other IRA leaders, prevailing over the opposition of the US Departments of State, Justice, and the Treasury as well as vociferous back- door protests from the British government, who were reportedly “apoplectic” that Clinton had ignored their concerns (see Duffy, 2021).

In 2019 two books on Irish America hit bookstore shelves. Shenanigans by Trina Vargo, former Congressional staffer for Senator Ted Kennedy, pulled few punches describing her frustrations working with the Irish American establishment to fund her US- Ireland Alliance and the now- inactive Mitchell Scholarship Program. But Vargo also made some important observations about contemporary Irish America, notably that it was not a “monolith,” particularly “cohesive,” or even a “voting bloc.” As she put it, claims about “Irish American political clout and donations … don't withstand scrutiny” (Vargo, 2019: 5– 7)

Caitríona Perry, BBC's Washington correspondent, made similar points in her book on Irish American influence. Drawing from dozens of interviews with prominent Irish American figures, Perry too contended that Irish American power and influence is “fading” (2019: 238).

These analyses were not incorrect, especially for the moment they described— the 20- year period after the 1998 peace agreement. And both books seemed to be driven to encourage people to think in new ways about how Americans might relate to a newly prosperous and relatively peaceful Ireland in the future. But the trajectory they describe does not anticipate the re- emergence of the Irish American lobby in the period that followed Brexit and its subsequent successes in shaping US foreign policy. Instead, Irish American leaders paid close attention to how the UK's withdrawal negotiations could hurt the Belfast/ Good Friday Agreement. To ensure their concerns were heard, they formed new groups, including the Ad Hoc Committee to Protect the Good Friday Agreement in 2019, the American Brexit Committee in 2016, and the American Irish State Legislators Caucus (AISLC) in 2021.

This chapter recounts the re- emergence of the Irish American lobby in 2019 and the efforts it took to prevent the UK Withdrawal Agreement with the EU from re- establishing a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. Specifically, we cover the time period bookended by the collapse of Theresa May's 2019 Withdrawal Agreement, which included the Backstop, and the approval of Boris Johnson's 2020 Withdrawal Agreement, which replaced the Backstop with the Protocol.

As we will demonstrate, Irish America's key role during this time was to shape how the US understood its strategic interests in the context of Brexit, and then to make those views known to the UK. This was no mean feat. Brexit created a wedge between two of the US's strongest allies and, in so doing, called into question what kind of withdrawal agreement would be in the US's best interest.

The narrative of the Irish American lobby's reengagement makes clear that despite all the changes since the 1990s, it maintained the core traits that had facilitated its prior political successes. It still had a coherent political culture and well- networked members in and out of Congress. It was also well equipped to use St. Patrick's Day festivities in official Washington to its political advantage. And, its bipartisanship and general appeal ensured goodwill from power brokers across Democratic and Republican administrations.

Strategy for re- engagement

As Irish America began to remobilize in this period, its lobbying involved a three- pronged strategy. The first was direct Congressional action. The most notable group in this regard was the Congressional Friends of Ireland Caucus. As noted in Chapter 2, the Caucus was formed in 1981 by three Irish American politicians— Senators Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Ted Kennedy, and Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill.

Irish unity is the ultimate goal for many people in the Irish American lobby. And since the Good Friday/ Belfast Agreement provides a mechanism for calling a referendum on a united Ireland, defending the agreement is paramount for those who want unification. Former Congressman Joseph (Joe) Crowley (D- NY) distilled this view in our interview in 2020 when he explained why he had continued to keep tabs on the agreement long after others had moved on: “the possibility of a united Ireland.” Crowley made similar comments at an event sponsored by Friends of Sinn Féin USA in 2020: “it is still “important for Irish- Americans to not only stay engaged, but re-engage’ on the issue of unifying Ireland” (Crothers, 2020).

Irish America worked to protect the agreement between 2018 and 2023, however it did not focus on the question of Irish unity. The primary reason for this was that Brexiteers never threatened the agreement's referendum guarantee. Rather, the more immediate threat was a no- deal Brexit, which would have reimposed a hard border on the island of Ireland, disrupted the all- island economy, unsettled the delicate balance of Northern Ireland identities, and possibly provoked violence.

While the question of Irish unity was not activated by Brexit, it could be in the near future. There is a growing consensus in academic and policy circles that Brexit makes a referendum for a united Ireland more likely to happen and to pass (Pogatchnik, 2023; Dugan and Doyle, 2024; Walsh, 2024).