As the upbeat melody of Irish polka melded beautifully with the beauty of the Antiguan steel pan at the newly restored Government House on Monday evening, the new “Entangled Islands: Ireland and the Caribbean” exhibition opened before an audience of diplomats, officials, and cultural figures, marking the first exhibition to be staged at the historic venue since its renovation.

Irish musicians Jim Murray and Dermot Byrne, accompanied by Antigua’s very own Khan Cordice and Irish dancer Kait Rock delivered a performance that wowed the crowd, and serving as the foundation for the exploration of the historical roots and blending culture the exhibition was designed to explore.

Governor General Sir Rodney Williams, who officially opened the exhibition, described the relationship between Ireland and the Caribbean as one spanning more than 400 years, beginning in the 17th century under the slave trade and evolving into something that has shaped the institutions, culture, and many of the surnames in Antigua and Barbuda.

“This exhibition invites us to reflect on those connections not only to understand our past, but to better appreciate the richness of our present,” Sir Rodney said.

He credited High Commissioner for Antigua and Barbuda to the United Kingdom, Karen-Mae Hill as the woman behind bringing the exhibition to Antigua and Barbuda, when the Governor General and his wife Lady Sandra Williams made a 2025 visit to the Republic of Ireland.

Irish Ambassador John Concannon, attending the opening with his wife Mary, traced the genesis of the exhibition to a conversation in Galway during that visit.

He noted that the opening at Government House carried personal significance, recalling the warmth with which he and his wife were received when presenting credentials at the same venue the previous year.

The exhibition was curated by Dr Catherine Healy, historian in residence at EPIC, the Irish Emigration Museum in Dublin, who provided the evening’s historical account of what was to be explored.

Drawing on the 1678 census for Antigua, Dr Healy noted that Irish people made up more than a quarter of the white population at the time, and that the census itself was commissioned by Irishman William Stapleton, who later governed the Leeward Islands and died holding large estates across the region.

“Colonial authorities here as in Ireland saw Irish Catholics as very much an underclass — socially inferior rogues, they were called vagabonds and rebels — and yet other Irish people climbed into positions of power and privilege,” Dr Healy said.

She also drew attention to Irish abolitionists, including members of the United Irish movement in Belfast who boycotted plantation-produced sugar, and to St. Lucian Nobel laureate Derek Walcott, educated by Irish Presentation Brothers, who found in Irish literature a model for writing defiantly from within a colonised tradition.

Minister of Foreign Affairs E.P. Chet Greene pointed directly to many of the surnames still carried in Antigua and Barbuda as evidence of the historical Irish presence.

“Those names speak to the connections, historical ties between our two countries,” Greene said.

Green used the occasion to raise diplomatic priorities directly with the Irish delegation, calling on Ireland — set to assume the presidency of the European Union in approximately two months — to advocate for small island developing states on issues including access to finance and citizenship by investment programmes.

He also pressed for progress on a direct air service between Dublin and St. John’s.

The exhibition, which previously showed in Barbados, is expected to travel to The Bahamas later in the year.