Polycrystalline diamond films deposited by the microwave plasma chemical vapor deposition (CVD) technique onto quartz substrates have been irradiated with 100 keV C and 320 keV Xe ions at room temperature and at 200 °C. The dose dependence of the electrical conductivity measuredinsituexhibited complicated, nonmonotonic behavior. High doses were found to induce an increase of up to ten orders of magnitude in the electrical conductivity of the film. The dose dependence of the conductivity for the CVD films was found to be very similar to that measured for natural, type IIa, single‐crystal diamonds irradiated under identical conditions. This result suggests that the conduction mechanism in ion beam irradiated polycrystalline CVD diamond films is not dominated by grain boundaries and graphitic impurities as one might have expected, but rather is determined by the intrinsic properties of diamond itself.