Sharon Doyle Driedger - An Irish Heart

Passengers press onto the upper deck as an emigrant ship leaves Liverpool, port of departure for thousands of Irish.

Illustrated London News, July 6, 1850, courtesy of the TPL (TRL)

A DVENTURE AND AMBITION HAD ALREADY PROPELLED hundreds of thousands of Irishmen across the sea to Canada. The first Hibernian migrs arrived long before the Great Famine, landing in the colony of Newfoundland, the Maritimes and settlements along the St. Lawrence, centuries earlier, with the French and the British, rivals competing for control of North Americas lucrative fur trade and fisheries.

The Irish started spending summers at Newfoundland fishing stations in the early 1600s. Each spring, British fishing boats en route to the Grand Banks would stop at Waterford, Cork and other ports in the south of Ireland, to take on provisions and to hire young Irishmen to work for the season in Talamh an EiscGaelic for land of the fishthe Irish name for Newfoundland.

The wanderlust that had led the Irish to Newfoundland prompted many to move on again; and they gradually fanned out into Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, Anticosti and the Magdalen Islands. A few Irish sailed directly to Halifax in 1749, with some 2500 settlers sponsored by British authorities who were eager to establish a fortified town on the Nova Scotia coast. And they were soon joined by indentured workers from the Newfoundland fishery, trying to escape their harsh contracts. Within a decade, their numbers had increased to nearly three thousand, enough to lead one British resident to complain that the common dialect spoke at Halifax is wild Irish.

Irishmen had begun to trickle into Quebec in the seventeenth century. OSullivan, Casey, OBrennan and other Irish names appear in land documents and census records as early as 1625. Nearly one hundred of the twenty-five hundred families registered in the parishes of New France in the late 1600s originated in Ireland. By then, members of the legendary Irish brigade known as the Wild Geese had made their way to the French colony.

The Irish Catholics soldiers had found a ready ally in France, after their exile from Ireland in 1691. They had lost the infamous Battle of the Boyne on July 1, 1690, a turning point in an epic struggle for the English crown. The war, fought on Irish soil, had pitted supporters of the deposed Catholic King James against those of King Billy, the Protestant William of Orange. The Irish army, largely Catholics, had resisted their oppressors for more than a year after their bitter defeat at the Boyne. But the soldiers were forced out of Ireland en masse after the Battle of Limerick in 1691a Protestant victory that would usher in centuries of oppression of Irelands Catholics under increasingly severe Penal Laws.

Irish emigration to Canada began in earnest after the French lost their hold on North America. Louisbourg fell to the British in 1758, followed by Quebec in 1759 and Montreal in 1760. Almost as soon as the hostilities ended, British entrepreneurs looked to the colonies for business opportunities. And the Irish came streaming in behind them, encouraged by the British who were eager to populate their newly acquired territories with loyal subjects.

So many sons of Erin had settled in the Maritimes, that when the British decided to carve a new colony out of Nova Scotia in 1784, William Knox, the provinces Irish-born undersecretary of state, proposed naming it New Ireland after his native land. King George III demurred, choosing instead to call it New Brunswick in honour of a German prince.