A BOSTON city council member has labelled a reference to her as "a Protestant from Fermanagh" as an "absolute disgrace."
A heated exchange at the US city council saw councillor Frank Baker make the remark about Liz Breadon, claiming she was launching an attack against Catholics for attempts to redraw electoral boundaries in the city.
Ms Baker said she took the remarks as a personal insult, saying she had married "a nice Irish Catholic girl" and would take no lectures on sectarianism in Northern Ireland.
Addressing the council last week, Mr Baker said he had received a call from a Catholic priest who told him the clergy in Boston were viewing the proposed boundary changes as "an all out assault on Catholic life...and it's not lost that the person leading the charge is a Protestant from Fermanagh."
Mr Baker apologised after the meeting was suspended for a while, saying: "That was unlike me I apologise....a good Catholic boy like myself shouldn't do that or be like that....I shouldn't use language like that. I'm heated because I believe that neighbourhoods in district three, that happen to be Catholic, are under attack."
Councillor Breadon called the remarks "an absolute disgrace" and spoke of her experiences of witnessing discrimination first hand during the Troubles.
"Yes I am from Northern Ireland, yes I was raised Protestant and yes...as a Protestant from Northern Ireland growing up in a rural community that was bisected by the division of Ireland in 1922, and set up a Protestant state for a Protestant people," she said.
She called it a "travesty" that Catholics had been discriminated against in housing, job opportunities, education and healthcare.
"I grew up with this. The Troubles started in 1969, I was ten years old. Violence on the streets, people getting bombed out of their homes because they were Catholics, people got burned out of their homes because they were Protestants," she said.
"Inter-communal strife all about religion. I'm a lesbian, I grew up in Northern Ireland and was unable to live fully my life and express myself.
"I came to Boston...I married a nice Irish Catholic girl named Mary McCarthy. Grand woman she is too.
"I've committed my adult life to trying to fix the wrongs in the world."
And she added: "This is my home and it is an insult to me, to have a colleague insinuate in this city council that I am discriminating against Catholics."
Coverage of the incident in the Boston Globe came with the headline: 'The Troubles in the Boston City Council'.
Columnist Kevin Cullen said the council had "descended into the kind of tribal, venomous rhetoric that held Northern Ireland back for generations".
