[2][3] Scott Tucker has called him "not only a left-wing critic of sexual and political conformism among sectors of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender movements, but ... also one of the notable public intellectuals of the civil libertarian left.

[5] After a stint as a journalist on the New York Post, when it was still owned by Dorothy Schiff, and then on the Community News Service (a short-lived wire service providing news of the black, Latino, and other minority racial communities), he resigned to manage the successful 1970 anti-Vietnam war campaign for Congress by Bella Abzug, making her the first left radical to be elected to the U.S. House of Representatives since Vito Marcantonio.

"[6] Among his notable articles was a 1978 expose, daring for the time, of violence against gay men in the Ramble, known as a cruising area in Central Park in New York City.

"[citation needed] From mid-2005, Ireland was the Contributing Editor for International Affairs of Gay City News, the largest LGBT weekly newspaper in New York City and in the U.S.[2] Ireland's reporting on Iran in the several years after 2005 drew harsh rebuttals from a number of Iranian activists,[10] as well as from Scott Long, director of the LGBT Rights Program at Human Rights Watch.

Long and some other human rights advocates criticized activists and reporters, including Ireland and controversial British campaigner Peter Tatchell, saying they were engaging in unwarranted speculation about the motives for the case.

However, no professional human rights organization ever endorsed these claims, or identified any recent case of persons sentenced to death for consensual homosexual conduct in Iran.

Long and others became increasingly critical, charging that Ireland and others were making claims without evidence, and imputing a Western gay identity to Iranians coming from a very different cultural experience.

However, Long remained a critic of Ireland to the end, faulting him for relying excessively on single sources in his reporting,[12] for intolerance toward Islam[13] and for failing to understand complex international situations.

[2] In his final years, Ireland developed diabetes, kidney disease, severe sciatica, and weakened lungs and progressive muscle deterioration related to childhood polio.

As a staff member of the New Jersey Industrial Union Council AFL-CIO and the United Auto Workers Region 9-A, in 1967 he helped to organize the National Labor Leadership Assembly for Peace to oppose the Vietnam War.