Catholic Insight

Some may, like me, remember Catholic Insight, a feisty Canadian Catholic magazine edited by Dr. Alphonse de Valk. Father de Valk has passed on, and the magazine then officially folded.

But the good news is, it has been resurrected online.

THey just pikced up a piece of mine, on "The Holy Lands of Ontario."

Go and have a look:

https://catholicinsight.com/ontarios-holy-lands/

The Irish in Canada

I am not sure ethnic histories are a good idea. They tend to exclude. We are all brothers.

When I was in graduate school, I signed up for a course on the Holocaust. On the first day, introducing the course, the distinguished visiting scholar informed us that “the Jewish question is at the centre of all European history.”

I think I stayed until the end of the lecture. Next day, I dropped the course.

I do not mean to downplay the Holocaust. And I do think the Jews have been influential out of all proportion to their numbers. But I doubt my Irish ancestors ever saw a Jew, and I doubt they spent much time pondering the Jewish question. In exaggerating the Jewish experience, their experience was being marginalized. What were they, chopped liver?

And now here I am, and aren’t I saying, “the Irish question is at the centre of all Canadian history”?

Yeah, I guess I am.

I think I need to say, therefore, a few words in my defense.

The Jewish story has already been told. The Jewish experience in Europe, fascinating as it is, and important is it is, has not been suppressed or ignored. It has been thoroughly reported, novelized, filmed, dramatized, mimed, and sung about.

Not so the Irish in Canada.

In Canada, we have grown up hearing about the “Two Founding Nations” – English and French. We have all heard a great deal too about the “First Nations.” We may know about the UE Loyalists. More recently, we have been treated to Ken McGoogan’s How the Scots Invented Canada.

By contrast, the Irish Canadian experience has been oddly absent from the library shelves; especially considering how large and important it has been. Throughout the nineteenth century, most immigration to Canada was from Ireland. Between 1825 and 1845, 60% of all arrivals were from Ireland—and this was before the Great Famine. There is room for a lot of information unknown to the average reader, without resorting to humbuggery, drumbeating or massed trumpets. This is also why I presume stressing the Irish experience in Canada is no slight to any other group. 

I cite for example the Black Rock, aka the “Irish Commemorative Stone” in Montreal. It was the first memorial for the typhus epidemic of 1847, raised only in 1859. You knew, at least, about the typhus epidemic of 1847? The potato famine, and all that.

Granted, this was not the moral atrocity of the Shoah. It was as much an act of God as of man. But tellingly, and troublingly, the unhewn rock in Montreal belatedly raised to remember the dead of the typhus pestilence features nothing to indicate that its victims were Irish.

When it was dug up, the ground around, a mass grave of 6,000 unknown Irish Catholics, was given, logically enough, to the Anglican Church. The ceremony of consecration was conducted by an Anglican minister. Catholic clergy were not invited. No mention at the service, any more than in the stone’s inscription, of the nationality or religion of those interred.

It is hard to see this happening with any of the many Holocaust museums: no mention that the victims were Jewish.

What is going on here?

I grew up partly in a pretty Irish area of Canada―Leeds County, Ontario. It is here my Irish ancestors had settled. Growing up, it was clear to me that most of the names of my neighbours, and my relatives, were Irish. Even the local rural accent was Irish—so British visitors often informed me on hearing it. But I had heard nobody local ever make this point. There was not a breath about of the Irishness of the place. I even heard denials when challenged: no, we were Canadian, or British, or Scottish, or “mongrels.” 

I always wondered why.

Living then in Montreal as a teenager, I was warned by my parents never to go near Point Saint Charles or Griffintown. Living in Kingston, Ontario, later, I was cautioned never to buy property north of Princess Street. There was no reason given; these were just “bad neighbourhoods.” I suppose they were; they were poor, for what little that is worth; but they were not the only poor neighbourhoods. And poverty was considered no excuse, either, it seems, for moving there. And if you speak of opportunities for vice, they were not even in the running. John Maguire boasted of Griffintown, at its worst, that despite its poverty, “not a single house of ill-fame is to be found in the entire district” (The Irish in America, p. 220). There are areas of Montreal, or Kingston, of which that much could not be said.

But Griffintown, Point St. Charles, and north of Princess Street were, tellingly, the old Irish neighbourhoods. This was a past that must not be acknowledged.

This secret Irishness became a puzzle for me personally; a knot I needed to untie, something I felt I owed to my ancestors and myself. There is something to be said, after all, for coming out of the closet. I feel now that if I had known at a younger age just how Irish my background was, and what being Irish meant, I might have been spared a lot of trouble finding my path. It could have cleared up a lot of confusion. Perhaps this is true of others too.

It cannot only be that my parents, being middle-class Irish, did not want to be confused with more working-class Irish; although that was perhaps some of it. Those Irish ghettos were places our relatives, if not our direct ancestors, had escaped from, off the coffin ships, penniless and plague-ridden. Nicholas Flood Davin refers to the Irish in Canada as “a nation of helots” (The Irishman in Canada, London, 1877, p. 3). It is human nature to internalize this, so that the Canadian Irish themselves might come to see Irishness as cause for mortification. To many in the New World, denying one's Irishness might have felt like moving up.

But that by itself surely cannot explain it. The Highland Scots also came desperately poor, yet proud of their heritage. So too seem the Italians, or the Portuguese. Jews have no problem being spotted in Kensington Market, on Spadina, St. Urbain, or along the Main.

It may have been that for the Irish in Canada, their history had become too painful to remember. That too makes sense. On the other hand, why has this motive never overcome the Jews, who dwell on the Holocaust, who even offer graduate courses on it?

And remember the Memorial Stone. It is not just the Irish who seemed eager to suppress the Irishness of the Irish; the authorities felt the same impulse. There was something especially troublesome about being Irish. It was the ethnicity that dare not speak its name.

Have you ever seen the flag of the Riel Rebellions? The rebellions in the Northwest, in 1870 and 1885, supposedly involving the grievances of the Métis and the Indians? The flag run up the flagpole by the insurgent governments of Red River and Assiniboia?

Contemporary sources say it featured a fleur-de-lys, an Irish harp, and a shamrock, on a background of green.

Now what ethnicity does that suggest?

What have we not been told?

Irish Montreal

Homes, Goose Village

Jerusalem is built as a city

Strongly compact.

It is there that the tribes go up

The tribes of The Lord.

We left ship for land at Bonsecours
The little city shimmering with fever
A hundred suns reflected on tin roofs.
Yet angels welcomed us
And far and up away we saw a cross.

Spring flood in Griffintown.

Where we began, the land was so bog low
It flooded with the snow melt every spring.
Yet generation by generation, we have climbed toward the cross, always in our sight.
Block by block, sometimes with full barrow, against snow, sometimes on our knees.
Past better shops, universities, art museums, widening areas of green.

Until finally last fall we made the summit.
The city looked lovely below us,
More beautiful than we remember.
But around us,
We discovered only graves, as far as eye could see.  

- Stephen K. Roney

Children, Goose Village, 1910.

The Irish Canadian Hall of Fame

Joe Malone of Les Canadiens: scored the first goal in the NHL.

Writing in the National Post today, Terence Corcoran proposes that Canada should have an Irish-Canadian Hall of Fame, with Jim Flaherty as its inaugural inductee.

I think this is a fabulous idea. The Irish contribution to Canada, I believe, is under-appreciated—one hears far more about the French, the English, and the Scots. But more than this: a celebration of Irishness would encourage Canadian unity, since Irishmen have been prominent on both sides of the French-English language divide. Both Tom Mulcair and Peter Lougheed, for example, are ethnically Irish. The Irish could be an ethnic glue to keep Canada together.

I have a further suggestion: that the Irish Canadian Hall of Fame ought to be located in Gananoque, Ontario. Gananoque is a tourist town; it could use the attraction. It is a historically Irish area. And it is roughly equidistant from the three large historical Irish settlements (and major population centres) of Montreal, Toronto, and the Ottawa Valley.

To emphasise how important the Irish have been in the history of Canada, here is my own list of potential inductees. If you don't know who some of them are, consult my Irish-Canadian historical map for more information.

Joe Beef (Charles McKeirnan)

Irish Canadian Hall of Fame:

Thomas D'Arcy McGee
Jim Flaherty
Brian Mulroney
King Clancy
Red Kelly
Timothy Eaton
Mary Travers (La Bolduc)
Joe Beef
Gratton O'Leary
Fr. Bernard Lonergan
Stompin' Tom Connors
Edward Blake
Marshall McLuhan
Sam McLaughlin
Kate & Anna McGarrigle
The Leahys
Catherine and Mary Margaret O'Hara
Francis Collins
Robert Baldwin
Emily Murphy
Lorena McKennitt
Patrick Burns
Sir Guy Carleton
St. Brendan the Navigator
Edmund O'Callaghan
James Ready
Mother Barnes
John McLaughlin
Sir John Thompson
William Henry Drummond
Brian Moore
WP Kinsella
Alden Nowlan
Mack Sennett
Ruby Keeler
Mary Pickford
Thomas Ahearn
Charles Fenerty
Tommy Ryan
Aimee Semple McPherson
Joe Malone
Don Cherry
Bobby Orr
Ambrose O'Brien
William McMaster
Conn Smythe
Peter Lougheed
James Boyle Uniacke
Charles Allison
James Austin
John Bassett
Thomas E. Kenny
Paul Kane
Tim Horton
Emile Nelligan
Patrick Roy
Bishop Michael Power
Mac Beattie

The Irish in Canada

The size and significance of the Irish presence in Canada is widely underestimated. We are the invisible ethnicity.

Nicholas Flood Davin gives the math for 1877: Ontario then held 559,440 Irish, 328,889 Scottish, and 439,429 English. Canada at Confederation contained 846,414 Irish, 706, 369 English, and 549.946 Scottish—the Irish numbers second only to the French. In the West of Montreal, “les Anglais” of the day were in fact 19,394 Irish, 7,974 Scottish, and only 9,099 English. So, if we are indeed going to speak of “two founding nations” in Canada, those two are: French and Irish.

But even that is not the whole story. Estimates are that the “French” population of Quebec, through intermarriage, is up to one quarter Irish by blood. Marguerite d'Youville's stepfather was Irish. Loius Riel's ancestor changed his name to Riel from Reilly. Louis Saint Laurent's mother was Irish; so was George Vanier's.

I submit that this has left a massive stamp on the Canadian culture and character. There is a real mainstream Canadian culture, and it is essentially Irish.

Irish-Canadian culture is also different from Irish-American culture, or Irish-Australian culture, for several reasons. Notably, the Irish of Canada came mostly from Ulster, and were primarily Protestant. Those in America and Australia came mostly from the south and west, and were primarily Catholic.

Unlike the US, the Irish were also already well established in Canada before the Great Famine. However, even at the time of the famine, there were more Irish emigrants to Canada than to the USA, and those who landed in Canada tended to be the poorest and most destitute. The passage to Canada was significantly cheaper—because there were fewer safety and health regulations in Canada, and because the lumber trade meant many ships were otherwise empty on their westward journey.

The Shiners' War

Joseph Montferrant ("Big Joe Mufferaw") takes on the Shiners.

My native Eastern Ontario was torn in the earlier years of the 19th century (1837-45) by what is called the "Shiners Wars." The Shiners were recent Irish immigrants working in the lumber camps, who generally raised trouble and terror up and down the Ottawa Valley.

Besides raising hell, the Shiners apparently also had a political agenda. At one point they flooded a meeting of an agricultural society, and had their leader elected the society's president. At another they tried to take over Nepean Township, but were outvoted.

Canadian troops were actually called in to restore order.

Generally considered a case of the boys just getting rowdy. But nobody knows why they were called "Shiners."

I have a theory. The term "Shinner" was actually common in Ireland in the early 20th century. It referred to the members of Sinn Fein, the Irish nationalist organization. "Sinn" is pronounced like "shin." Could the "Shiners" be "Shinners"?

At first, it looks improbable. Sinn Fein was founded by Arthur Griffith in 1905, long after the days of the Shiners. But "sinn fein" is also an Irish phrase. It means "ourselves," with the implication "on our own." And it is found in English-language nationalist songs from early in the 19th century. It seems likely that Griffith, a speaker of Gaelic as a second language, because it already had a certain cachet, and it may have been quite common for some time in Gaelic.

So "Shiner" might have been a recognized reference, to the Irish of the Valley, to "Sinn Feiner." With the implication that the lumbermen's true aim was some form of self-government for themselves as Irishmen, in the new world if not in the old.

This was, in fact, a common thought among Irishmen throughout the Irish diaspora. We have all heard of the Fenian movement in the US, I presume? And you have heard of Ned Kelly, the famous Australian outlaw? Except he was not just an outlaw. His hope was to establish at least a part of Australia as an independent Irish republic. In 1798, inspired by events in the US and France, the United Irishmen rose in a rebellion that lasted for six years. In 1800--bet you never heard this--Irish in Newfoundland rose in the same cause.

Now note again the year the "Shiners Wars" began. 1837. Do you remember, from your history, anything else that was happening in Canada in 1837?

Two things, actually. In Lower Canada, the Patriots took up arms. Probably the only name you know from that rebellion is Papineau, and you imagine it purely a Francophone thing. Not so. As prominent as Papineau among the rebels was Edmund Bailey O'Callahan, the MLA for Yamaska and editor of the Montreal Vindicator. To make the matter plain, he was the leader of the Irish community in Quebec at the time.

And in Upper Canada, William Lyon Mackenzie also took up arms.

You can see something was in the air.

It is amazing how all this Irish Canadian history has been suppressed. I believe it has mostly been suppressed by the Irish themselves. Canada defines itself as the Loyalist half of North America; Being opposed to the British Empire has no doubt not always been a politically comfortable position. It became less comfortable thanks to the Fenian raids of the latter half of the 19th century, when being Irish in Canada must have put my ancestors under a suspicion similar to that German Canadians would have felt during the First World War, or Japanese Canadians during the second. Indeed, it must have been awkward for Irish Canadians again in the First World War, when the Easter Rebellion happened in Dublin. It was seen at the time by the British as treason during wartime, after all. And this on top of the usual prejudice against Irish and Catholics.

Someone needs to revisit this history, and tell the truth about it.