It’s complicated and revealing: colonial Ireland and the making of Canada

Fifty Irish Lives in Canada is a project to compile short biographies of people born in Ireland, now deceased, who made an impact in Canada or who lived lives emblematic of the immigrant experience. We have published preliminary biographies online in celebration of Irish heritage month. My volunteer crew of historians—professional, and amateur alike—have fired up the project with their expertise and passion. Irish Ambassador to Canada Eamonn McKee, pictured in Ottawa. The Hill Times photograph by Sam Garcia One thing we anticipated was that women were written out of the record or anonymized. We tried to correct that and also to include ordinary immigrants whose toil and talents made Canada. Like many others, I tended to see the Irish in Canada as an epic story of immigration. The revelation for me of Fifty Irish Lives is that, in fact, the Irish in Canada were a product of colonialism. The distinction is profound. Immigration is a spontaneous and voluntary movement of people from one country to another. Britain’s colonization of Ireland generated a three-centuries long outpouring of people. Immigration was more outcome than cause. Only a colonial telling reveals the full story of both Ireland and Canada itself. However, the implications of this telling are far wider. The complex relationship of the Indigenous peoples toward the Crown and their ultimate terrible fate, as well as the evolution of the two solitudes of Quebec and Ontario, can only be understood as outcomes of European imperial rivalries that spanned the North Atlantic and generated the vast settlement here of Europeans. To see the Irish in Canada as immigrants only is to miss this far larger and more consequential story. Disastrously consequential for the Indigenous peoples, the transatlantic colonialization created a powerful anglophone architecture of politics, culture, values, language, and hard power. The exodus from Ireland involved both the descendants of the successful colonizers, the Anglo-Irish, as well as the colonized, the native Irish. They traced as well as sustained the outward spread of British imperialism to North America. The Anglo-Irish were the winners in the conquest of Ireland. They found a new outlet for their soldiering and administrative skills in British North America, men such as governor general Guy Carleton, the man who saved Quebec from American invaders, and lieutenant governors like his brother Thomas Carleton, John Parr, and Walter Patterson. I am thinking, too, of the forgotten Richard Bulkeley whose obituary after 50 years of service declared him the founding father of Nova Scotia. The Irish-born and raised duke of Wellington created Ottawa when—as master-general of the ordnance and later as commander-in-chief of the British Army—he ordered the building of the Rideau Canal, the better to defend against the Americans. For him, Canada was key to British global hegemony. All that activity drew in generations of Irish Protestant and Catholic farmers and labourers. The Great Irish Famine of 1845-1851 was a product of imperial rule in Ireland. It provoked a massive exodus of the native Irish, numbering in the millions. In 1847, more than 106,000 fled to Canada, 20 per cent of whom died en route. They were refugees, not immigrants. Most were saved by Canadian compassion. Their arrival boosted Irish numbers in cities from Saint John to Toronto. Anglo-Irish landlords then cleared their Irish estates by exporting tenants to Canada in a process of both assisted emigration and forced relocation. The three Anglo-Irish governors general during and after Confederation—Charles Monck, Lord Lisgar (Sir John Young) and the earl of Dufferin (Sir Frederick Temple Blackwood)— worked to stabilize the relationship between Ottawa and London. To force Britain from Ireland, the Fenians invaded Canada precisely because they understood its strategic value to the British Empire. The bulk of the Irish in Canada were moderate nationalists, content to be part of Britain’s first Dominion within the evolving Commonwealth. Irish church leaders like bishop Michael Anthony Fleming (1829-1850) in Newfoundland, and archbishop John Joseph Lynch (1870-1888) in Toronto learned their politics in colonial Ireland and applied them constructively in Canada. Thomas D’Arcy McGee’s Irish political journey from Fenian to constitutionalist informed his leadership in the Confederation debates. The RCMP, originally the North-West Mounted Police, were modelled on the Royal Irish Constabulary to ensure the successful colonization of the North West. Irish nationalist Nicholas Flood Davin wrote the report recommending the Indian residential school system. Yet for all of their identification with Canada, the Irish retained an irreducible sense of their Irish identity. Mother Teresa Dease, leader of the Loretto teaching order, pioneered education in girls’ and co-educational schools across Canada before and after Confederation. She corrected Princess Louise, wife of the Governor General, to say she was not English but Irish because “I come from Dublin.” What Fifty Irish Lives in Canada reveals over its 300-year span is the complexity of Irish identities that ranged from Anglo-Irish loyalists to Fenian rebels, from moderate nationalists to imperial Irish. It was the genius of Canada that those divergent loyalties eventually found here a place to live in stability and prosperity. We can take some of these lessons home. “A terrible beauty” was born, wrote Irish poet W. B. Yeats of the Easter Rising in 1916. Until the Rising of 1916, Britain’s execution of the leaders, partition of Ireland, and the Irish War of Independence, Canada represented the future that Irish constitutional nationalists wanted. Through those seismic events, this aspiration was lost, and everything utterly changed. Yeats might have well have written “a terrible simplicity”: history’s complexity reduced to loyal unionists and rebellious nationalists. Simplification is not history. History is complicated. In Canada, we can glimpse—indeed recover—the complexity of Ireland’s own history and its role within the British Empire, willing and unwilling. Back home in Ireland, we face our future and the prospect—however distant—of unity. Our journey will be immeasurably more honest, richer, and inspiring if we look to the complexity of our history, glimpsed in Irish lives lived in Canada. For Irish Heritage Month, pick a few to read and see what you think. Eamonn McKee is Ireland's ambassador to Canada and is based in Ottawa. The Hill Times