Tara Grace Connolly

Tara Grace Connolly is a cross-border feminist activist and advocate from Belfast. She was the first person from the North/Northern Ireland to serve as Ireland’s UN Youth Delegate, where she represented 1.3 million Irish young people at the United Nations. She is a graduate of the National Committee on American Foreign Policy’s NI Emerging Leaders programme, through which she published a policy paper on the implementation of UN Security Council Resolution 1325 in post-conflict Northern Ireland, and was an inaugural fellow of the Global Fellows in Courage Gender Justice accelerator programme in conjunction with Brown University. She is a member of Ireland's All-Island Women’s Forum, a member of the Shared Island Youth Forum, and completed the 2022/23 Centre for Democracy and Peacebuilding Fellowship. Tara Grace is a former Chairperson, Treasurer and Adult Advisor to the Northern Ireland Youth Forum, the largest voluntary youth organisation in Northern Ireland. She is a graduate of the Washington Ireland Program, where she interned at the Northern Ireland Bureau in Washington DC, and is a member of Rethinking Conflict’s “Emerging Young Leaders Programme, where she engaged in global peacebuilding initiatives with young Israeli, Palestinian and American peacebuilders. In 2018, Tara Grace co-founded “Our Future, Our Choice NI,” a youth-led pro-EU campaign, through which she delivered a speech on peacebuilding and Brexit at one of the biggest demonstrations in modern British history, to an audience of 1 million people in London's Parliament Square. Tara Grace previously worked at BBC Northern Ireland, the Northern Ireland Assembly, and the Irish Council for Civil Liberties, Ireland's oldest independent human rights organisation. She is currently works as Engagement and Communications Officer at the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission. She holds an LLB in Law with Politics, and a MA in International Relations, both from Queen's University Belfast.