First NI appointed UN Youth Delegate

Tara Grace Connolly will assist the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade in a year that Ireland has been elected to the UN Security Council.

The 22-year-old law graduate, who has just completed her Masters’ degree in International Relations at Queen’s University, said it was a great honour to be selected.

“It’s a real privilege to be the first person from the north to be picked for this role. I got the confirmation at the beginning of September and had to keep the secret for three weeks until it was formally announced by the Irish Foreign Minister Simon Coveney.”

Tara Grace has been working on human rights and youth participation since the tender age of nine: “I wrote a letter to Al Gore when I was nine complaining about climate change and the melting of the polar ice caps and have been working on issues that affect young people ever since,” she said.

Tara served as chairperson of the Northern Ireland Youth Forum and the Belfast Youth Forum and is a graduate of the Washington Ireland Program Class of 2017. She spent two months in Washington DC working in the Northern Ireland Bureau.

Tara Grace has presented at the UN Committee of the Rights of the Child in Geneva as a peer advocate with the Children’s Law Centre and is a member of the US Embassy Dublin Young Leaders Council. She was named Belfast’s Celebrated Citizen in 2015 and was awarded the 2016 Voice of Young People Award.