Category Archives: Ireland

May 1, 2024 · 8:13 pm

Global Irish Famine Way

The Global Irish Famine Way extends internationally the National Famine Way Ireland and will be the largest heritage trail in the world. It is designed as a physical and digital heritage trail that will for the first time tell the global story of the Great Irish Famine.

The compassionate reception of the Famine Irish around the world has a universal message resonant today and expressed by the trail’s dedication:

“Dedicated to all those who offer hope through compassion and success through opportunity to the stranger on your shore.”

“Tiomnaithe dóibh siúd a thugann dóchas trí thaise agus rath trí dheiseanna a sholáthar don choimhthíoch a thagann chun na tíre.”

Contents

Overview

Purpose

Project Partners

Organisation

Outcomes

Launches: Canada, Ireland, UK

Future Sites

Conferences 2024 and 2027

Appendix I – Historical Background

Appendix II National Famine Way Stages, Walk 20-25 May

Overview

Starting at the National Famine Museum, the National Famine Way is a 165km trail in Ireland that traces the footsteps of 1490 tenants from Strokestown, Roscommon, to Dublin in 1847 during the Great Irish Famine. It was be their last journey on Irish soil and their first on their way to new lives as part of the Irish diaspora.

The Global Irish Famine Way extends the National Famine Way to follow the journeys of all the Irish Famine emigrants around the world, including the UK, Canada, the United States, South Africa, and Australia. The Bronze Shoes and access to information that mark the National Famine Way will also mark each significant location on the Global Irish Famine Way.

Purpose

The international extension of the National Famine Way as the Global Irish Famine Way traces the journey of the Irish Famine emigrants around the world with a series of sites marked by Bronze Shoes and QR codes accessing local information and links to the National Famine Way mother website in Ireland. Locations include sites in the UK, Canada, the United States, South Africa, and Australia.

The Global Irish Famine Way:

  • creates a physical and digital living history of the Famine Irish as a significant event in the development of the Irish diaspora and in its own right an event of global significance. 
  • imparts a universal story more relevant than ever, a story of human agency in the face of catastrophe and of the compassion the immigrants encountered on their journeys to new futures.
  • promotes public history, public awareness, shared international heritage, local engagement, research, discourses on humanitarian relief, and heritage tourism.
  • To receive a set of Bronze Shoes, local organisations must enter into a legal agreement with an authority for the long-term maintenance of the marker, erect a plinth and install a QR code.  

Project Partners

The Embassy of Ireland, Ottawa, and the National Famine Museum, Strokestown Park (Irish Heritage Trust), County Councils (Roscommon, Longford, Kildare, Westmeath, Meath, Fingal, and Dublin), with academic experts, local community groups, and heritage agencies including Parks Canada and related stakeholders globally.

Organization

Under the aegis of the National Famine Museum of Ireland and the Embassy of Ireland Ottawa, there is an informal leadership group comprising academic and other experts, supported on the ground by a volunteer network of GIFW Local Committees.

Outcomes

Anticipated outcomes include:

  • Enhancing public awareness of the global significance of the Famine and its role in the development of our diaspora.
  • Deepening the links between Ireland, the UK, Canada, the US, South Africa, and Australia and promoting our shared heritage.
  • An opportunity to thank recipient countries, settler and Indigenous, for their compassionate response to the Irish humanitarian disaster and to recognise the heroic efforts of first responders and fundraisers.
  • Recognise that most Irish survived and prospered in their new homes, adding to the rich contribution of previous generations of Irish emigrants.
  • Promote the universal message still relevant today: to the strangers on your shore, offering hope through compassion and success through opportunity.
  • Uniting widespread groups of Irish community activists around a common project.
  • Political outreach to political and community leaders, academics and activists.
  • Promotion of public discourse on responses to humanitarian crises, their causes and solutions.
  • Heritage tourism, linking Famine sites in Ireland to related global locations.

The Voyage of the Bronze Shoes: Launch of the Global Irish Famine Way, Canada:

In collaboration with the Marine Institute of Ireland, the cargo of Bronze Shoes will depart on the RV Celtic Explorer from Galway, arriving at St John’s Newfoundland and Labrador on 8 May.  On 9 May there will be a reception by the Embassy for the crew and members of the Marine Institute, Canadian researchers joining the Celtic Explorer’s research in Canadian waters, those involved in the refit of the Celtic Voyager at St John’s (which has been sold to Nunavut), the Irish community, academics, and VIPs.  On the morning of 10 May, The Bronze Shoes will be carried ceremoniously to St John’s Basilica for a commemorative event and the installation of the first Bronze Shoes. There will be a symposium on the events of 1847 and associated links between Ireland and Canada.

Over the following months, Bronze Shoes will be transported up the St Lawrence to Quebec City for installation at sites including Grosse Île, Montreal, Ottawa, and Toronto, with other possible sites at Middle Island and St John (New Brunswick), and Niagara (Ontario).

    The Famine Walk: Launch of the Global Irish Famine Way, Ireland

    Sunday 19 May is the National Famine Commemoration Day. The Walk with the Bronze Shoes along the National Famine Way will take place 20-25 May concluding in Dublin. The National Famine Museum is collaborating with Country Councils, tourism promotion agencies, performing artists, and local schools to promote the Global Irish Famine Way. For further details see Appendix II.

      Liverpool Irish Festival: Launch of the Global Irish Famine Way, UK

      After arrival in Dublin and temporary display, the Bronze Shoes will be stored until transferred to Clarence Dock Liverpool in October where they will be paraded to the Famine Memorial for installation as part of the Liverpool Irish Festival between 17th and 27th of October.

        Future Launches

        Outreach is ongoing to establish partners to develop sites in Canada, the US, South Africa, and Australia. It is envisaged that each site will develop a local Irish heritage trail.

          Conferences 2024 and 2027

          The Embassy is co-hosting a conference with St Michael’s College at the University of Toronto entitled Canada, Ireland and Transatlantic Colonialism 28-30 May which will reference the Global Irish Famine Way and the broader context of the Famine in Ireland within the colonial framework.

          Plans are underway for a major conference in 2027 (180th anniversary) hosted by the National Famine Museum of those involved in the Global Irish Famine Way.  

            Eamonn McKee

            Ambassador of Ireland

            Ottawa

            1 May 2024

            Appendix I – Historical Background

            The National Famine Way is a marked heritage trail from Strokestown to Dublin that follows the 1847 journey of 1490 tenants and family members from the estate there on their way to Canada, via Liverpool, in an emigration scheme sponsored by their landlord Denis Mahon (assassinated the following November). The trail is marked along its 165km route by over thirty bronze shoes cast from a pair found bound together and hidden in the thatched roof of a 19th cottage.

            The Strokestown tenants were part of almost 100,000 people who fled the Irish Famine to Canada in 1847.  Upwards of 20% died during this exodus. Over 8,000 died on the voyage.  In Canada, malnourished and stricken with typhus and other diseases, they died in numbers on landing. The two main burial sites were the quarantine station at Grosse Île (5,400 remains) and at Blackrock Montreal (6,000[1]).  Other burial sites are located at Toronto and Kingston (around 1,000 each); Partridge Island (601), Alms House Saint John (595) and Middle Island (96) both in New Brunswick[2]; Ottawa (360[3]); Cornwall (50) and elsewhere, some sites lost to memory.

            Recent research by Prof Mark McGowan, not yet publicly available, indicates that over 70 Canadians died assisting the Irish on their arrival from disease contracted from the Irish.  New research also details fundraising by Indigenous nations and bands to offer relief. Acknowledging these outstanding examples of compassion forms an important dimension to the Global Irish Famine Way.

            In Britain, while Liverpool was a major embarkation point for Famine emigrants heading across the Atlantic, the city and its hinterland also attracted Famine emigrant settlement. According to census returns for 1851, the Irish-born population of Lancashire doubled over the previous decade to 191,000, or 10% of the population while the Irish-born population of Liverpool itself rose to 22%.

            In the US, half of all immigrants were Irish in the 1840s. It has been estimated that upwards of two million Irish emigrated to the US between 1845 and 1855, almost a quarter of Ireland’s population. Some 7000 famine emigrants were interred at the Staten Island Quarantine Station, New York, in 1847 alone. A simple monument marks the remains of a common grave for those who died on Staten Island, estimated to be in the thousands but many buried in haste without records. By 1855, one-third of New Yorkers were Irish-born. The Irish Hunger Memorial is located at Battery Park City, Manhattan. There is an Irish Famine Memorial in Boston, a major entry point for Famine emigrants, as well as Philadelphia.

            Earl Grey, the Colonial Secretary, established the Pauper Immigration Scheme to relieve pressures on Irish workhouses during the Famine and labour shortages and gender imbalances in the colonies. The first ship, appropriately called the Earl Grey, departed on 3 June 1848 and arrived in Sydney on 6 October. 1848 and 1850, ships carried over 4114 orphan girls from every country in Ireland to Australia, landing in Sydney, Adelaide and Melbourne (Port Philip).

            The website for the Irish Famine Memorial Sydney reads: ‘The memorial to the Great Irish Famine and the young women who came from the workhouses of Ireland to Australia between 1848 and 1850 on a special emigration scheme is the vision of the Irish community in Sydney. The Irish Famine Monument was commissioned by the Historic Houses Trust of NSW (HHT) [name changed to Sydney Living Museums in 2014] and funded by donations from Government bodies, the Land Titles Office and the Irish Community. It was inspired by the call of the President of Ireland, Mary Robinson during her Sydney visit in 1995, that all Irish communities remember the Irish Famine and strive to alieviate poverty in the world today.’  The monument was supported by the Emigrant Support Programme.

            The Famine Rock, Melbourne reads:  ‘Erected by public subscription and unveiled on 6 December 1998 by His Excellency, Richard O`Brien, Ambassador of Ireland, in the presence of Councillor Brad Matheson, Mayor on the 150th anniversary of the arrival in Hobson`s Bay of 191 Irish orphan girls on the Lady Kennaway – Melbourne Irish Famine Commemoration Group.’

            According to research carried out by Dr Ciarán Reilly at NUI Maynooth, 61 young women were sent from Wexford to Cape Town in South Africa, 20 of whom departed in May 1849. He writes ‘The success of this little-known scheme was helped by the fact that there were a number of Irish priests in Cape Town, including the Reverend Arthur McCarthy from County Wexford, who received the Wexford girls and secured employment for them, ensuring that they did not fall victim to the vices of the city.’ (Irish Independent, 5 June 2020).

            Eamonn McKee

            Ambassador of Ireland

            Ottawa

            Appendix II National Famine Way Stages, Walk 20-25 May

            May 2024
            DAY 1DAY 2DAY 3DAY 4DAY 5DAY 6
            DATE20 th May – Mon21 st May – Tues22 nd May – Weds23 rd May – Thurs24 th May – Fri25 th May – Sat
            START / FINISHStrokestown – ClondraClondra – AbbeyshruleAbbeyshrule – MullingarMullingar – LongwoodLongwood – MaynoothMaynooth – Dublin
            DISTANCE20 km32.6 km27.3 km30.3 km28.75 km27 km
            TIME9 am – 4.30 pm9.00 am – 5.00 pm9 am – 4.30 pm9.00 am – 5.00 pm9.00 am – 5.00 pm9.30 am – 4.00 pm

            [1] An estimate based on contemporaneous accounts but subject to confirmation.

            [2] William Spray records the following: Deaths at sea 823; Miramichi 96; Alms House at St John 595; Partridge Island 601.  Total in 1847 2,115, not including Fredericton and St. Andrew’s.

            [3] 314 deaths reported by the Bytown Emigrant Agent, from June to August, 1847, as published in the Bytown Packet, September 4, 1847, with an additional 46 deaths recorded by the Bytown Emigrant Hospital from September to December 1847, according the archives of the Sisters of Charity of Ottawa.

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            November 16, 2023 · 9:49 pm

            Software and the Singularity: Ireland at the Cutting Edge of Quantum Technology

            SaaS North Reception at the Irish Residence

            15 November 2023

            Remarks by HE Eamonn McKee

            Welcome everyone, bienvenue, céad míle fáilte, and jambo.  Jambo is Swahili for hello which I learned today from the company here this evening, Jambo.  A big shout of for Jambo, a ‘software as a service’ company that has just established a presence in Ireland.

            In partnership with the IDA.  We are delighted to host the second annual reception for the SaaS North Conference here in Ottawa.  Apparently our party last year was legend so we’re hoping to repeat it this year!

            Thanks to our co-hosts this evening, the IDA, Ireland has been transformed.  We have some of the greatest companies in the world established in Ireland with strong sectors covering digital services, ICT, pharmaceuticals, Medtech, financial services, aircraft leasing, and of course quantum technology.

            Thanks too to all our sponsors and to Air Canada for sponsoring the fabulous prize of two tickets to Ireland!

            Last year I told you that there was no cloud, the thing you think you’re all working on day and day out.  No, the internet is actually underwater, in the submarine optic fiber cables that run along the bottom of the oceans.  And the last stretch of cable that finally united the world with the telegraph was laid between Newfoundland and Valencia Island in Ireland in 1866. That was the birth of globalization, the sundering of information from transportation. It changed everything.

            This year let’s consider the mobile phone.

            I was always mystified about how my mobile phone always knows how it is orientated: vertical, horizontal, angled.  It has a better sense of balance than I have.

            It is a really important feature of the phone.  And of course orientating an object in three-dimensional space is absolutely vital for all kinds of things.  Think about aviation, precision missiles, and space travel, for example.

            3-D graphics and software recreations of any kind of virtual representation would not be possible without this.

            You would think that plotting this is a simple matter of three-dimensional geometry. Move the point or object along its three axes.

            It turns out that it is not so simple.  Using only three axes gives rise to ambiguities, particularly when it two of the axes line up. 

            The problem was solved on 16 October 1843.  Irish physicist and mathematician William Rowan Hamilton was walking along the towpath of the Royal Canal in Dublin with his wife.  He was on his way to a meeting of the Royal Irish Academy.  He was absorbed in this puzzle.

            Then it hit him like a bolt of lightning!  You needed a fourth dimension.  He was so excited by this sudden inspiration that he scratched the equation in the stone bridge they were walking over, Broom Bridge in Cabra, Dublin.

            As Hamilton described it: “And here there dawned on me the notion that we must admit, in some sense, a fourth dimension of space for the purpose of calculating with triples … An electric circuit seemed to close, and a spark flashed forth.”

            This proves one thing: husbands don’t listen to their wives when out walking and solving problems! 

            Joking aside, it was a moment of supreme inspiration.  He called the equation the quaternion.  The quaternion equation not only got the Apollo missions to the moon. It is the foundation of quantum mathematics and quantum physics.

            When AI meets quantum computing, we will have what experts like Tom Jenkins at OpenText call the singularity. It will represent a paradigm shift in our civilization.  How we manage that will depend on how we will apply software to the enormous power of this convergence. 

            There’s an old joke that when scientist created the most powerful computer in the world, they asked it if there was a god.  What is god, the computer asked? The scientists fed in a definition.  After some calculations, the computer replied “there is now.”

            I tell the story of Hamilton because Ireland’s scientific heritage and the strength of Irish science in Ireland today is not readily associated with us. That’s a big mistake. Consider the following.

            Boyle’s Law on the pressure and volume of gases.

            John Tyndall and the Tyndall scale proving the connection between carbon and climate change.

            The Kelvin scale for temperature.

            Robert Mallet, the founder of seismology.

            Charles Parsons, inventor of the steam turbine.

            John Phillip Holland, inventor of the submarine.

            Who can ignore either whiskey, Guinness Stout, and the famous Spice bag, first created in The Sunflower Chinese takeaway in Templeogue in 2010?

            Hamilton’s true successor was the physicist John Steward Bell from Belfast.  Bell’s Theorem has overturned our understanding of the world.  It establishes a fact that scientist simply accept when it comes to quantum mechanics.  That is, that two particles are ‘entangled.’  Entanglement is independent of space.  That action of one particle has an effect on another independent independent of space. There is no traceable causality.  Einstein could never accept this and called it ‘spooky action at a distance.”

            Today, entanglement is simply accepted as a phenomenon. It is a cornerstone of quantum physics and therefore quantum technology.

            The quantum revolution in computing that is at hand is down to the work of Hamilton and Bell.

            That tradition continues to this day.  Ireland is leading research location for quantum technology.

            According to John Goold, Associate Professor of Physics at Trinity College Dublin, “Microsoft and IBM are here in Dublin and we have research collaborations in my group with them,” said Goold. “In terms of support of the MSc, both Microsoft and IBM were involved in the design of some modules, and Microsoft has a scholarship program for the best female applicants who get a Microsoft Scholarship, which will basically pay their fees and also give them a living stipend. They’re very interested in the MSc degree because they have ambitions to grow a quantum tech ecosystem here in Ireland’s capital.”

            I should add too that Dublin’s thriving financial services sector is due in no small part to Trinity’s Department of Physics.  Dynamic currency exchange was first developed in Ireland, for example.  TCD’s graduates find ready employment in financial services. It is another example of the talent pool in Ireland.

            Ireland’s scientific and technological community is literally at the frontier of quantum revolution in computing. 

            Another example of Ireland’s strength in science is its Young Scientist of the Year competition.  John Collison won the 41st competition in 2005.  He and his brother John created Stripe four years later.  The company is valued at over $20 billion.

            I would like us all now to raise a glass to Ada Lovelace. Augusta Ada King, the Countess of Lovelace, was the only legitimate daughter of Lord Byron.  Well education and raised by her mother, Anna Isabella Milbank, Ada Lovelace loved mathematics.  She worked closely for many years with Charles Baggage, the founder of computer. 

            However, where he saw machines as solely capable of making calculations, Ada could see many applications by developing algorithms to direct machines.  She is regarded as the founder of software.

            I was encouraged to see that Firehood, the group of women angel investors, presented at the SaaS North Conference. 

            February 1st is Brigid’s Day in Ireland.  She is the goddess and Saint of light, fire, creativity, and manufacturing. 

            Today, Brigid’s Day is an occasion to celebrate women in business, the arts and in leadership.

            So please think about what you might be able to so on February 1st to mentor and encourage women to consider careers in technology and software. 

            Thanks and have a great evening!

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            August 28, 2023 · 7:19 pm

            Searching for the Graves of Palliser and Butler in Ireland in the Summertime

            It may seem like an unseasonal hobby.  Seeking out graveyards and searching through their long damp grass of a summertime in Ireland.  No beach for me with its tedious horizon and throbbing ennui.  Give me the name of some historical figure and send me to find his or her grave.  It has its rewards. On this trip to Ireland, I had two names in mind, John Palliser and William F. Butler.

            Palliser was born in 1817, descendant of a Protestant clergyman who had arrived in Ireland in the 17th century.  Though born in Dublin, Palliser’s family roots lay between the Galty and Comeragh Mountains.  The area forms part of the Goldenvale, the richest farmland in Ireland. If his surname rings a bell, its because the prolific English novelist Anthony Trollope borrowed it for the main character in his ‘Parliamentary’ novels that were popularised by a BBC dramatisation in 1974, The Pallisers.  (Trollope’s fifteen year stay in Ireland saw him develop as both a public servant and novelist).

            Palliser shared in the outdoor pursuits of his landed peers, in which horsemanship was a prized skill and hunting an obsession. His love of hunting took him to the prairies of North America in 1847.  Longing to return there, his proposed expedition to British Northern America was sponsored by the Colonial Office as a scientific one that also had the ulterior purpose of projecting British sovereignty above the yet to be defined border of the 49th parallel separating British North America from the United States. 

            Palliser’s report of three  years’ exploration between 1857 and 1860 was a landmark, opening the way to eventual settlement of what became Alberta.  Irene Spry’s history of the expedition details the thrills, dangers, and hardships of the expedition, led with exemplary diplomacy and tact on the part of Palliser (The Pallister Expedition, The Dramatic Story of Western Canadian Exploration 1857-1860 (Toronto, 1963)).  His leadership skills were tested in  territory that suffered lawlessness and much conflict between Indigenous communities and interloping hunters and traders, including those from the United States.  Whiskey as a trade commodity caused untold social damage.  Palliser’s hunting skills were put to good use helping to feed the expedition members with bison, deer, wapiti, mountain goat, sheep, wild fowl, fish and just about anything else edible. His knowledge of horses ensured success in trading for replacement stock from the local Cree and Blackfoot. 

            After further adventures, notably hunting in Russian territories, Palliser spent the end of his days in Comeragh House, trying as best he could to manage his heavily mortgaged estates.  I was keen to find the grave of this consequential but largely forgotten figure.

            According to the RIA’s online Dictionary of Irish Biography (DIB), Palliser was buried in 1887 in Kilrossanty Church of Ireland Cemetery. Google Maps put it northwest off the N25, west of Kilmacthomas and near Lemybrien. It was a fine sunny day.  Under the Comeragh Mountains, the narrow roads with their high hedgerows and overarching trees wound gently uphill.  After a bit of back and forth, we found the gates across from a cottage (the Sexton’s house, said a sign) that led to the chapel and graveyard.  The grass was lush and deep, though generally the graveyard looked well kept.  The chapel was locked, with tell-tale cobwebs across its keyhole.  Inside, the pews were still there as if waiting for the return of the local gentry in  carriages, horses, and Sunday finery. Beneath tall pines we found the Palliser grave, a low crypt enclosed by a modest railing.  A bronze plaque had been placed there.  The legend said that it had been presented in August 1977 by the Province of Alberta to honour Palliser’s expedition as a significant contribution to the development of the Province. Lingering at Palliser’s grave brought a sense of intimacy with the vivid accounts of his adventures in the prairies of the Northwest.

            Next on my list was the final resting place of William Francis Butler.  He was born in Golden, Co Tipperary in 1838. While the Butler was a prestigious and storied one in Ireland, his family were a cadet branch without much wealth. His father was a substantial farmer though he rented far more land than he owned. Butler had to make his own way in the world and his thirst for adventure brought him to a career in the British Army, despite the disadvantages of being a Catholic and without the money to buy an officer’s rank. Though a Catholic and a Home Ruler, his adventurous life as an officer of the British Army had not only taken him to Canada but involved him in some of the seminal colonial events of the British Empire in the latter half of the 19th century: rebellions in Burma and India, attempting to rescue General Gordon in Sudan via Egypt (where he recruited Canadian voyageurs to man a fleet of boats), fighting the Ashanti in West Africa, and reluctantly countering the Boers in South Africa. 

            In 1870 Butler had been engaged as an intelligence officer by the leader of a military expedition to confront Louis Riel, the Métis leader who had led the resistance to settlement around the Red River settlement (today’s Winnipeg).   Riel’s provisional government was instrumental in creating the Province of Manitoba, but the Act establishing it contained no amnesty for his actions.  The expedition was led by Dublin man Garnet Wolseley, regarded as the most capable British Army officer of his generation.  Public opinion in the US gleefully assumed failure.  Wolseley proved his mettle by successfully leading 1100 troops supported by 400 voyagers from Lake Superior to Fort Garry, building 40 miles of road and undertaking 47 porterages. Riel had fled to the US by the time Wolseley arrived at Fort Garry, but the expedition was a key event in the colonisation of the prairies.  Butler’s role had been to explore the territory in advance of Wolseley, in the course of which he met Riel (it is fair to say Butler was unimpressed).  He was then commissioned by the Lt Governor to continue his explorations.  Butler’s recommendations led to the creation of the Northwest Mounted Police, later the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

            Through it all, Butler kept up his writing.  His account of his adventures in the prairies of the Northwest, The Great Lone Land, had been a bestseller. It remains today an immersive read, full of descriptive gems, and suffused with much admiration for Indigenous life and sorrow at its inevitable extirpation by white settlers. Butler’s sympathies were influenced by his upbringing.  His father had impoverished the family by charitable donations during the Great Famine.  He had brought his young son to see the terrors of evictions which left an indelible mark on Butler and a sympathy for the oppressed and the doomed.  In his writings, Butler is clear about the savagery of the white settlers and his doubts of the true values of Victorian progress, however inexorable its course.  He seemed happiest travelling alone in the untamed wilderness of the Canadian Northwest. Butler’s novel, Red Cloud, The Solitary Sioux, was on the syllabus of Irish secondary schools up to the 1930s.

            On retirement from his successful military with the rank of Lt General and a knighthood, Butler lived at Bansha Castle, Co Tipperary, near his birthplace at Golden and purchased for him by the British Government as a house of favour. He died there in 1910, and was buried locally with an impressive military escort.  The DIB noted his burial at Killardrigh (from the Irish for church of the high king).  This proved hard to find because the cemetery is locally called Killaldriffe. However, find it we did, with the lavender backdrop of the Galty Mountains resplendent under a bright blue sky.   A stone plaque cemented into the wall of the cemetery reads: “This is the burial place of Lt Gen William Francis Butler…famous soldier, author, Irishman.”  It quotes a poem by Butler found among his papers with the plea to “give me but six foot three (one inch to spare)/ of Irish ground, and dig it anywhere/and for my poor Irish soul say an Irish prayer/above the spot.”

            We found his grave beneath a modest Celtic Cross at the far end of the graveyard, overlooking the rich pastures of the Goldenvale.  There is a heavily overgrown early medieval church ruin in the graveyard but it was clear too that the cemetery has been in use continuously to the present day. 

            Nearby, I found Bansha Castle but circumstances meant I could only see it from the outside.  We repaired to our accommodation at nearby Bansha House, run by the marvelously hospitable Mary Marnane.  In the sitting room, surrounded by memorabilia of the grand old house’s horse-rearing and horse-racing legacy, which continues to this day, we met another guest, Claire from the US, whose great, great, great, grandfather was Darby Ryan.  In two hours’ time, his famous 1830 lyric ‘The Peeler and the Goat’ was to be commemorated at the local Church of Ireland in the heart of the village.  (The Wolf Tones put its mocking lines to music in a rousing, tongue-twisting rendition, available on YouTube.)  We couldn’t resist Claire’s invitation and joined the large crowd at Ryan’s grave and later in the church, now a community centre, packed for talks about Ryan with a keynote address by Tipperary historian Denis Marnane. It is one of the wonderful features of many small Irish towns and villages that local history generates both expertise and popularity.

            The historical connections between the southeast of Ireland and Canada are deep.  In the 17th century, fishermen from Waterford and Wexford were the first Irish in Newfoundland, there for its great shoals of enormous cod.  After the rebellion of 1798 and the dissolution of the Irish Parliament, there was a virtual exodus from south Wicklow and Wexford, many Protestant farmers.  Recession in Ireland after the end of the Napoleonic Wars boosted emigration, and the religious balance shifted to Catholic emigrants in the 1820s, drawn by employment on Canada’s canals and fortifications, and available land for farming. Irish soldiers fighting in the British Army were settled in British North America to help deter any thoughts of invasion and annexation by Washington.  This strategy of fortification and settlement was devised by Irishman, the Duke of Wellington whose influence on the development of Canada in the 1820s and 1830s was profound. Irish Catholic tenants from Wicklow (such as the Coollattin estate of the Fitzwilliams) were subsidised to emigrate to Ontario in the late 1840s and 1850s to speed the switch to pasturage.

            John Palliser and William Butler were just a part then of the very significant Irish contribution to the development of Canada that stretched over three centuries.  While some 109,000 Irish Famine refugees arrived in Canada in 1847, twenty percent of whom would die in the process, the year marked the end of major Irish emigration to Canada.  Much of the Irish contribution to Canada has been forgotten, as has so much of what happened in Ireland in the decades prior to the Famine.  It was also obscured by the centrality of the US in emigration from Ireland for the second half of the 19th century. This is the way of things.  History moves on and contemporary events and concerns rewrite history.  What was significant previously loses relevance, just as the obscure can gain significance and prominence in official narratives, the stories we tell ourselves.

            The next morning, we set out find two nearby sites that in their own way illustrated this point.  Knockgraffon proved elusive, though I knew it was near Bansha.  Our drive spiraled into a tightening circle on our target, a tree-covered prominent hill.  Suddenly a finely preserved Norman tower sprung into view.  I knew that the Butlers had built one at Knockgraffon.  A short drive further along the road revealed a stumpy hill, not looking at all significant with its thick hedging.  Yet that was Knockgraffon.  The name means the Hill of the Rath of Fionn. In Gaelic Ireland, for centuries before the arrival of the Normans in 1169-70, this Hill was central to the O’Sullivan rulers of the area.  It was the site of the inauguration of their kings.  As I climbed the short, sharp slope to its top, I could see why.  The summit presented a fine 360-degree view of the surrounding land, rich and fertile all the way to the slopes of the Galty mountains. Part of the regnal inauguration in Gaelic Ireland was the candidate holding a white wand and pointing to all points of his kingdom.  The emergence of nearby Cashel as the centre for the kings of Munster and the defeat of the O’Sullivans by the Normans robbed Knockgraffon of its role.  The O’Sullivans were forced to decamp to the wilds of Kerry. The Butlers claimed the land and built their tower at Knockgraffon, part of the defensive network that spread out from their famously impregnable castle at Cahir.

            Heading north toward Golden, we found Athassel Priory.  Across a dung-strewn field that was mercifully dry underfoot, we crossed a delightful stone footbridge and through the stone-arched ruin of a gatehouse.  The extent of the site was unexpected and impressive.  Even more so were the ruins of the many magnificent buildings that had comprised the Abbey complex.  I had not expected anything on this scale, though Athassel had been Ireland’s largest priory.  It was founded by William de Burgh right at the outset of Norman colonisation. The sheer height of some of the remains was stunning (photos on my instagram account, eamonnseye).  I tried to imagine the priory in its heyday.  It must have been magnificent: So large and well endowed it generated a sizeable town in its environs.  When it was dissolved in 1537, the lands went to the loyal Butlers.

            Athassel has been ruins for centuries and its significance lost, its fame eclipsed in the modern imagination by earlier Christian monasteries like Clonmacnoise.  The latter fit the official narrative of Independent Ireland in a way that an Augustinian priory at the heart of Norman Ireland could not.  The de Burghs became Burkes, now regarded as indisputably Irish, just like the Butlers. What we remember is a matter of selection, how we remember a matter of choice.

            I left the beautiful area of the Comeragh and Galty mountains satisfied with small objectives achieved.  I mentally checked the possibility that at some future point the graves of Palliser and Butler will feature in an Irish-Canadian heritage trail. I wondered too about how we designate so many of them and their peers as Anglo-Irish, not simply Irish, or even in some references as British.  The so-called Anglo-Irish had been in Ireland for many generations, even centuries.  The Butlers had been Old English, descendants of the Normans and other early English colonisers, but had kept their Catholic faith.  So, William could be Irish but Palliser, a Protestant, Anglo-Irish:  Questions of history, historiography, even of philosophy but hardly irrelevant to the politics and future of our island. 

            Thinking about the Irish in Canada, about the imperial Irish, Protestant and Catholic alike, I find to be endlessly enriching.  It is a gateway into our own history and role in the British Empire.  The imperial Irish far outnumbered those aligned with republicanism, in careers and activities if not beliefs. As I have written elsewhere, Canada was the future Ireland never had, displaced by the dramatic paradigm shift triggered by the Easter Rising in 1916 and all that flowed from it.  After a hundred years of Independence, I think we are ready to embrace the complexity of our past. We are free to choose to find a place for figures like Palliser and Butler.

            Eamonn

            Rathfarnham, 28 August 2023

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            June 25, 2023 · 6:04 pm

            Colonial Twins: Ireland, Canada, and the Great Irish Famine

            Address to the Famine Summer School at Strokestown Park House, 24 June 2023

            Four Propositions

            First, that the Ireland, England’s first island colony, played a key role in the development of its first continental colony, North America, and its later colonies in Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong and elsewhere.  That role continued in British North America even more forcefully during and after the American Revolution.

            • Anglo-Irish from late 1700s (Guy and Thomas Carlton, John Parr, Walter Patterson, George Hamilton and his brothers, John Caldwell, Richard Bulkeley et al) to the Three Governor Generals (Monck, Young and Blackwood) before, during and after Canadian Confederation.  Wellington played a decisive role in the development of Canada after 1812 with his project which I call ‘Fortress Canada’.
            • Irish Protestant tenant farmers leaving Ireland after 1800, notably from Ulster and Wicklow/Wexford.
            • Irish Catholic tenant farmers, soldiers, and labourers, drawn by opportunities in the building of canals, jobs in the lumber industry, and the prospect of land owning.
            • Middle class Influencers: Thomas D’Arcy McGee, Nicolas Flood Davin, Ogle and James Robert Gowan, George Arthur French, explorers, missionaries, educators, journalists, and leading business figures.

            Second, that local national government is a key factor in social and economic success and destiny. Conversely, its absence is a key determinant.  Ireland and its capital city prospered in the 18th century with a strong (Protestant but indigenous) Parliament.  Both collapsed into extreme poverty, urban decay, and economic malaise in the 19th century (Belfast excepted).  The abolition of the Irish parliament in 1800 combined with the nature of Britain’s direct rule, are the key determining factors influencing the development of Ireland socially, economically, culturally, politically and demographically.  The origins of the Famine and the authorities’ response to it lies in the Act of Union of 1800.  The abolition of the national government and its role in the Famine does not feature as it deserves to in the historical narrative.  The Anglo-Irish Ascendancy that agreed to the abolition of their parliament signed their own death warrant by handing power to London (e.g. the Encumbered Estates Act).  The fate of Denis Mahon perfectly illustrates that the fate of the Anglo-Irish when disempowered in the face of a great calamity.

            Third, that Canada was the future that Ireland never had: The Rising of 1916, the executions, the War of Independence and partition dramatically shifted the paradigm from the consensus of Irish nationalism that reigned from 1870 and earlier.  What the Fenians failed to achieve in 1848, 1866, 1867, and 1870, they achieved spectacularly with the Rising, against the backdrop of fifty years of refusal by London to grant Home Rule.  The official narrative of the new nation state offered no room for the role of the Irish of the Empire, nor even of Redmond’s National Volunteers, ten thousand of whom fought and died in WWI to validate Ireland’s claim to nationhood.  It also therefore obliterated three centuries of Irish involvement in Canada.

            The outcome in terms of public history has been to generate a misleading narrative of rebellious nationalists – read Catholics – and loyal unionists.  In fact, the historical record suggests that reversing the polarity would be a more accurate reading.  This has implications for all-Ireland reconciliation and greater mutual understanding.

            Fourth, that Irish settlement overseas is the product primarily of colonialism not immigration, though immigration takes place of course, the search for economic opportunities abroad.  However, colonialism provides the only coherent narrative for the Irish abroad over three centuries.

            Transatlantic colonialism is also necessary to understanding the creation of the North Atlantic axis between Western Europe and North America, and indeed the fate of the Indigenous of the Americas.  This relationship has been globally consequential: victory in two world wars, the Cold War and now reshaping global geopolitics. 

            Ireland and Canada wrested our destinies into our hands in 1867 and 1922. Had we done so more contemporaneously our bilateral relationship would have been very different. With this new autonomy, new official narratives were required about what we stood for in terms of values and ambitions.  In the early formative period, this rendered inconvenient the degree to which Ireland was involved in the Empire: 30% of the British Army in the 19th century, 70% of Wellington’s Peninsular Army, innumerable administrative positions, and participation in settler projects. 

            However in recent decades, just as Canada has wrestled with the colonial impact on the Indigenous, Ireland has begun to recover the complexity of its past, and the many strands of Irish identity that have varied by social position and over time. I have often said that Yeats’ line about 1916 as a terrible beauty is born, is really the birth of a terrible simplicity. Our history is complicated as is our role overseas. Not for nothing is this motto of our project Fifty Irish Lives in Canada 1632-2016: “It’s complicated!”

            The Famine in Canada and Ireland:

            In 1847, Canada learned the lesson of not controlling its immigration laws.  For many Irish in Canada, the Famine has created a false origin story.  As Prof Mark McGowan has stressed throughout his research, Irish settlement patterns in Canada were established in the generations before the Famine.

            For Canadians today, we have to remind them of the heroic and compassionate story of their response to the arrival of Famine refugees.  Their assistance, often at the cost of their own lives, is a universal story with a moral lesson about helping the stranger on your shore.

            The Famine created the iron triangle of the farm, the church, and the pub.  The farm had to be passed on to one son intact. Sexuality had to be policed. The Church was there to do that. The pub was the social life of men waiting for their parents to retire so he could inherit the farm, the necessary condition for marriage. The pub was the place you went not to meet someone. The land clearances and consolidation of farms enabled by the Famine generated the strong farming class that dominated the politics of Ireland.  The vacuum of direct rule empowered the Catholic Church not just in its partnership with the strong farming class but in the provision of health and education.  Famine enabled the Catholic Church to rise as the pre-eminent national organization for the mass of the population. That Ireland of the second-half of the 19th century owed so much to the formative influence of the catastrophe of Famine, rendered memorialization problematic until recent years. To remember the Famine was to revive guilt, loss, gain at the expense of the victims and helplessness. Best forgotten because it was too traumatising to remember. 

            It is only in recent decades and the efforts of Jim and Caroilin Callery, and a new generation of historians, that the Famine is taking its rightful place. I would to pay tribute to Jim and Caroilin for what they have achieved here at Strokestown House.  The establishment of the National Famine Museum and the mobilisation of historians like Jason King, Christine Kinealy and Mark McGowan has focused new attention on this seminal event. Their efforts have not only deepened our understanding but altered our perception of the Famine.  It has done so by putting the tenants and the tragic fate of Denis Mahon at the heart of the story, based on the rigorous use of the archives here.  The many creative ways in which this Museum tells this story have influenced both academic and public history. It is a wonderful achievement that has yet to offer much much more.

            We are now graced with the next iteration of the story of Strokestown House and its tenants. Hunger and Hope, The Irish Famine Migration from Strokestown, Roscommon in 1847. The book is a brilliant addition to the history of Famine, edited by Christine Kenealy, Jason King and Mark McGowan. Through great sleuthing and research, they uncover and retrace the journey of the tenants from Roscommon to Canada. The title Hunger and Hope eloquently sums of a human story of trauma and resilience.

            If we are now through post-revisionism grappling with the Famine in our collective understanding, we have yet to approach the role of colonialism in Ireland and the role of the Irish in colonialism.  I would argue that the role of the Act of Union must be considered as a formative event in the unfolding narrative of the Famine and its ramifications, for example. Yet the role of colonialism in Ireland is much wider than the Famine, its ripples reaching to issues of the present day. This deserves analysis and understanding, well worth the dangers of navigating the shoals of counter-factual history. We cannot understand the role of the Irish in Canada over three centuries, nor arguably in many parts of the former British Empire, without the framework provided by colonization in Ireland and transatlantic colonialism. That is a topic for another day.

            Eamonn McKee

            Strokestown House

            24 June 2023

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            January 20, 2023 · 10:09 pm

            Oireachtas Committee on the Implementation of the Good Friday Agreement

            19 January, 2023

            Statement by Eamonn McKee

            Anglo-Irish Division 1986-89

            I joined the Department of Foreign Affairs in October 1986 and was assigned to the Political Section of Anglo-Irish Division. The Division had increased its staff numbers to implement the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985, notably:

            The establishment of the Secretariat of the British Irish Intergovernmental Conference (BIIGC) at Palace Barracks, Belfast. The Secretariat serviced the regular meetings of the Conference and was manned 24-7 by Irish and British officials and staff members.

            An expanded team of travelers based out of Iveagh House with specific areas of responsibility derived from the objectives of the Anglo-Irish Agreement. Their reports were vital to the briefings and discussions at the Secretariat and the summit meetings of the BIIGC.

            1. The weekly pattern in the Division entailed the dispatch of travelers early in the week to meet with contacts and to report back. Their reports were compiled on Friday morning along with other reports of contacts and meetings from the embassies in London, Washington, and elsewhere into the weekly brief, known as the ‘Box.’ The Box was copied and circulated to the Government and senior officials on Friday afternoon. That day also saw the return of the team from the Secretariat and the departure of the weekend team to Belfast, under high security.
            1. The background of the Ulster Says No campaign led by the DUP, loyalist protests outside the Secretariat, ongoing paramilitary violence, and allegations of security force collusion and human rights abuses created a sense of purpose and consequence in the Division. Writing speeches and briefing notes, responding to a high level of PQs, attending meetings with official counterparts, NGOs, and groups and party representatives from NI, and responding to acts of violence generated a very full work programme. The SDLP, notably John Hume and Seamus Mallon, were frequent visitors to Dublin. SDLP representatives across Northern Ireland were essential sources of advice and guidance.
            2. As a junior officer, I supported the work of the political traveller, Liam Canniffe. Liam and I worked with members of the SDLP, notably Alastair McDonnell, to develop the Disadvantaged Areas Programme to help direct funds from the International Fund for Ireland to areas most affected by the conflict.
            3. The Department of Foreign Affairs conducted a human resource strategy that ensured that officers who were assigned to Anglo-Irish Division were rotated to related postings (Embassy London and Missions in the United States) and back to the Division on return to HQ. This developed a cadre of officers who had in-depth knowledge of, as well as a range of contacts relating to, the key issues in the peace process. This was an important factor in the negotiations of the GFA and the long process of its implementation.
            4. Following the pattern established by the Department, I was posted as Vice-Consul General Boston in August 1989. I was then transferred to the Embassy Washington in January 1990.
              1990-1996
            5. I worked directly with the Political Director at the Embassy Washington, Brendan Scannell. Early tasks included countering Ancient Order of Hibernia critiques of the International Fund for Ireland, the establishment of a funding scheme for Irish emigrant groups in the US, and support for the passage of legislation creating the Morrison visa programme which solved the problem at that time of the undocumented Irish. The Embassy’s relationship with Senator Kennedy, the Speakers O’Neill and Foley, the Congressional Friends of Ireland and related staffers was particularly strong and productive on issues related to Northern Ireland but also on all other issues, from visas to agricultural regulations.
            6. Ambassador Dermot Gallagher had opened lines of communication with Bill Clinton and the Clinton-Gore campaign. At the request of Senator Kennedy’s office, which was providing advice to Clinton-Gore on foreign policy and policy in relation to Northern Ireland, I wrote the draft text for the Clinton-Gore letter on Northern Ireland. Clinton’s presidency transformed the role of the White House with regard to the peace process and gave the Embassy unparalleled access. Brendan Scannell played a key role in this, having developed key contacts from his time as Consulate General in Boston. The Saint Patrick’s Day receptions at the White House were invaluable opportunities for networking and validating the significance of the Peace Process.

            Anglo-Irish Division 1996-1999

            1. I returned to Anglo-Irish Division at the request of its then Director, Sean Ó hUigínn, to act as the traveller for the Justice and Security Section. Sean had been the key architect, along with Taoiseach Albert Reynolds, of the Downing Street Declaration, one of the breakthrough documents of the peace process leading to the 1994 ceasefires. This breakthrough built on the courageous outreach of John Hume in the Hume-Adams talks. Issues on my desk included parades (the Government’s submission to the North Commission), Bloody Sunday (the Irish Government’s Assessment of the New Material), policing, administration of justice, use of lethal force by the security forces, and allegations of collusion. I worked closely with a number of key contacts, including Alex Attwood of the SDLP, Don Mullan, Martin O’Brien and the Committee on the Administration of Justice, Jane Winter of British Irish Rights Watch, Brendan McAllister of Mediation Northern Ireland, Resident groups in Belfast, Garvaghy Road, Dunloy, journalists, solicitors, and republican contacts. I travelled extensively, more or less weekly, filing reports for the Box and regularly briefing the Secretariat on current issues and participating in meetings there with NIO officials. I acted as the lead official for the proximity talks on Drumcree 1997-1998. My opposite number was Jonathan Powell, Prime Minister Blair’s Chief of Staff.
            2. In the run-up to the negotiations for the GFA, the new Director of Anglo-Irish Division, Dermot Gallagher, formed the Talks Team. I was a member of that team with particular responsibility for policing, justice and security normalisation. Martin Mansergh worked on the new proposed text for Articles 2 and 3 and I sent him a paper recommending the addition of ‘entitlement’ to the ‘birth right.’ By the time I arrived at Castle Complex, draft text had been agreed to on the policing section of the GFA. I invited Seamus Mallon and Alex Attwood to review it, and they confirmed my concerns. Thereafter I was the lead official negotiating new text with the NIO team. The NIO were focused on policing, that which continued to be effective, whereas I was focused on a future policing service that in its composition and ethos reflected society. Both objectives were essential. This creative tension produced hard bargaining, but a very good outcome regarding the terms of reference for what would become the Patten Commission’s recommendations. I extracted some final concessions at our last negotiation session unaware that PM Blair had instructed his officials that all text be finalised with the exception of the language around the North-South bodies.
            3. Overall, the Patten Commission did an excellent job through extensive consultations and a comprehensive set of recommendations that adhered closely to the terms of reference. Patten himself made this clear on the publication of his report when some unionists expressed surprise at the outcome of the Commission’s work. The post-conflict transition in the security sector is one of the most difficult to achieve and sustain in any peace process. In the formation of the Patten Commission, I insisted on the inclusion of Professor Peter Lynch. I understand that he made a significant contribution that helped eliminate the use of plastic baton rounds. The PSNI is an outstanding example of a successful security sector reform process.
            4. I would like to pay tribute to Alex Attwood and Brian Barrington who helped steer the whole implementation of the Patten Recommendations and the establishment of the Policing Board with a forensic focus and determination. For example, Alex played a particularly crucial role in resolving the issue of the Policing Board’s access to sensitive material involving national security on matters relevant to the Authority and its credibility. As with the Finucane case, the SDLP were determined to ensure that allegations of state collusion in the use of lethal force could not and would not be outside the mechanisms for accountability that it endorsed.
            5. Another crucial factor in the success of the policing transformation was the creation of the Oversight Commission led by former New York police officer John Considine and the Office of the Police Ombudsman under Dame Nuala O’Loan. The Oversight Commission ensured that the recommendations of the Patten Commission were fully implemented and operational on the ground. This provided a vital assurance for the acceptance of the PSNI and the eventual decommissioning of paramilitary weapons.

            Consulate General New York, 1999-2001
            I was assigned as Press Officer to the Consulate General in New York and returned to HQ in December 2001.

            Anglo-Irish Division, 2002-2004
            I was again assigned to Anglo-Irish, this time as head of the Justice and Security Section.

            1. During the negotiations of the GFA, I learned that it had been agreed that while policing would have a full independent commission, the justice system would be reviewed only. This reflected a strong belief in the NIO and among Unionists that the justice system had continued to operate throughout the conflict and did not require fundamental reform. However, the review process was not without its problems. When I returned in 2002, I learned from contacts that the Criminal Justice Act, which gave effect to the recommendations of the Review, fell short of requirements, notably on judicial appointments. In anticipation of another round of talks to advance the implement of the GFA and secure the decommissioning of paramilitary weapons, I convened talks involving the SDLP, led by Alex Attwood, and Sinn Féin, led by Gerry Kelly, at the Wellington Park hotel to agree a common agenda for amendments to the Act. These proposed changes became part of the negotiations convened at Hillsborough in March 2003. These commitments, including to a new Act, were published in a Joint Declaration by the British and Irish Governments in April 2003.
            2. I was also involved in secret talks at Farmleigh with British security officials on security normalisation. This was the culmination of many years of talks about the pace of normalisation. For example, the Chief Constable regarded the Observation Towers in South Armagh as essential to the safety of his officers where locals detested them as unwarranted intrusions. They had continued in operation for many years after the signing of the GFA. Seamus Mallon with mordant humour regarded them as the bane of his life. The eventual dismantling of the Towers and other military installations were seen as tangible indications of the progress of the peace process.
            3. Arising from the Weston Park Agreement and the SDLP’s endorsement of the new policing arrangements, the British and Irish Governments agreed to appoint a judge of international standing to investigate allegations of collusion in six controversial cases, including the murder of Pat Finucane. The judge was to make a recommendation on whether any or all of these cases merited a public inquiry. There was considerable back and forth between Dublin and London as to the appointee7. I interviewed and recommended Judge Peter Cory of the Supreme Court of Canada. This was endorsed by the British Government. Judge Cory did an outstanding job with speed and great integrity. His recommendation for a public inquiry into the murder of Pat Finucane has yet to be implemented.

            Irish Aid, UN Director, Director Conflict Resolution Unit, 2004-2009

            In 2005 I was asked by the Secretary General Dermot Gallagher, acting at the request of the Minister, Dermot Ahern T.D., to establish a conflict resolution unit to share the lessons of the peace process. We launched a number of initiatives including a National Action Plan on UNSC 1325 Women, Peace and Security, and projects in East Timor, Liberia, and Sierra Leone. In 2009 I was appointed as Ambassador to the Republic of Korea and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
             

            2013 to the present
            In 2013 I was appointed Ambassador to Israel. In 2015 I returned to HQ as Director General for Trade. In 2020 I was appointed as Ambassador to Canada, Jamaica and The Bahamas.

            Eamonn McKee
            Ambassador of Ireland, Ottawa
            15 January 2022

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            January 1, 2023 · 8:34 pm

            The Good Friday Agreement Twenty-five years on: The Summer of 1998 and the Long Road to Peace

            Travelers were officials working in Anglo-Irish Division who would weekly travel north to meet contacts, learn what was going on, report back and feed into intergovernmental discussions. Memory jog seeing my NI reports surface in the released state papers.[1] The parades issue was my beat as a traveler.  It pitched NI into new levels of heightened social tensions with dire potential.

            Flashpoints combusted when Orange Lodges insisted on marching through nationalist areas. Places like the Lower Ormeau Road in south Belfast and the small village of Dunloy in the heart of Orange country in Antrim.  Drumcree in Armagh, the birthplace of Orangism, emerged as the leading battle of wills. 

            Portadown Orange Lodge No. 1 held a traditional church service at Drumcree on the Sunday before the Twelfth of July, the annual celebration of King William of Orange’s victory over King James at the Battle of the Boyne in 1691.  The traditional route took them along the Garvaghy Road, a nationalist housing estate on the edge of the predominantly loyalist Portadown. For the Twelfth, Portadown centre would be festooned with red, white and blue bunting, curb stones similarly painted, and triumphal arches erected across the street depicting King Billy astride a white horse.

            Why now, with the ceasefires in place? As my contact and friend Brendan McAllister of Mediation Northern Ireland explained to me, the parades issue emerged after the paramilitary ceasefires as the new vehicle for the cross-community divisions that lay at the heart of the conflict.  The struggle between the paramilitaries and the security forces had acted as a default, a kind of lethal Punch and Judy show between ‘professionals’ on both sides, paramilitaries and the security forces.[2] 

            The Orange Lodges insisted that they had the right to march ‘the Queen’s highways.’  Resident groups resisted this, saying they should not be locked in their homes with the security forces aiding a sectarian and triumphal demonstration. Each side saw in this a contest about their place in society, their rights, and the esteem of their identity.

            The British Government appointed the North Commission to review parades and marches.  It reported that “The dispute in the summer of 1996 between the Loyal Orders and Nationalist residents groups, which required major intervention by the police under the public order legislation, brought Northern Ireland close to anarchy.”[3] Since the issue was on my desk, I drafted the Government’s response to the North Review.  It appeared from my research that while the right to assembly was a well-established one in many jurisdictions, there was no right to decide the route to that assembly.  Our submission argued that each parade dispute be subjected to arbitration based on the rule of law to adjudicate between those who insisted on marching and those who resisted such marches. The Director General, Sean Ó hUigínn, reviewed, honed and approved the draft. We traveled to meet the North Review to discuss the submission, Sean leading the delegation and responding to their questions with his eloquence and deep intellect. He left satisfied with the outcome. The North Review recommended the establishment of a Parades Commission operating under a new Public Processions (NI) Act 1998.[4] 

            Tensions spilled over again in July 1997 as the Garvaghy Residents were cleared off their streets by the RUC on the night before the Orange parade. Riots broke out across the North.  The Minister, Ray Burke, called me to his office and instructed me to meet the residents. From the rise above Newry town, an eerie sight of plumes of black smoke rose across the North.

            With the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in April 1998, the Drumcree march in July became a test case.  The newly established Parades Commission had ruled against the parade going via the Garvaghy Road. Loyalists and Orangemen gathered outside the church at Drumcree.  Nationalist supporters flooded into the Garvaghy Road.  The British Army dug a ditch and put up barbed wire in between both groups. There was something primal about the carnival of menace, jeering, fireworks and hatred from Drumcree hill. Everything seemed to be on the line: rights, law and order, the authority of the Parades Commission, the future.

            In an attempt to head off the confrontation, ‘proximity talks’ were convened.  The Orange Order refused to meet directly with the Garvaghy Residents, seeing in this an admission that the Residents had a say in public order.  I was with them as the Government’s representative.  Their legal advisor was Rosemary Nelson from nearby Lurgan. I knew Rosemary from previous cases that we had raised through the Secretariat of the Intergovernmental Conference.  We talked a lot about the North in the longueurs of the proximity talks, about the tensions of living there, of the relief she felt whenever she crossed the border south. There wasn’t much for me to do but observe, check with contacts, make sure no untoward or unacceptable initiatives made matters worse, and keep Dublin closely informed. Under the leadership of the new DG of Anglo-Irish, Dermot Gallagher, senior officials in Dublin, Belfast and London were actively engaged and monitoring developments, advising the Taoiseach Bertie Ahern as developments unfolded. I’m sure the lines between Ahern and Blair were busy. Up north, as a mediator trusted by all sides including leading churchmen on both sides, Brendan McAllister was trying his best to cajole a solution. My opposite number was Jonathan Powell, Tony Blair’s chief of staff.  Jonathan too tried his best to negotiate a solution as he shuttled between Portadown Orange Lodge No 1 and the Garvaghy Road Residents. 

            Then a horrific incident changed the atmosphere. Jason, Mark and Richard Quinn, three young boys, died in a UVF firebomb attack on their home in Ballymoney on July 12th. Widespread condemnation was immediate, including from some very courageous Protestant clergymen who spoke out from the pulpits.  A new consensus coalesced, enough was enough. Tensions eased, the Parades Commission’s decision was upheld. Garvaghy Road did not see an Orange Parade.

            The Good Friday Agreement faced another dreadful test a month later.  On August 15th the Real IRA exploded a bomb in Omagh, killing 29 and including more than 200.  It was the worst incident of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, surpassed in lethality only by the Dublin Monaghan bombings in 1974 that killed 33 and injured more than 300. The consensus hardened that such murderous violence had to be consigned to the past, that the GFA was the future. 

            In that summer of 1998, it was as if the Agreement, the shield of good intentions and high ambitions, made of words and ink, blessed by the people’s endorsement North and South, was being tested by the swords and dragons of Northern Ireland.  

            Though Northern Ireland’s swordsmen and dragons died hard, the shield stood.  There would be other killings, for sure. In March 1999, Rosemary Nelson was killed when a bomb exploded under her car.  It was claimed by a loyalist group.  Yet peace had the upper hand and the inclination to use of violence ebbed.  Even the means to carry it out were tackled, led by the Independent International Commission on Decommissioning.  Canada’s General John de Chastelain played a key role in this along with its other members.  I had never been sure that decommissioning had been feasible.  In the wake of the GFA, a republican contact in Derry had thrown a live round across a table at me, said take it to Dublin and “tell them that’s the only f—king decommissioning they’re going to see.” It was a stubborn issue that took years to unlock but that too was achieved. As the new policing represented by the PSNI took hold, the prize of decommissioning all paramilitary weapons was finally won. The monopoly on the use of violence was returned to the state.

            Twenty-five years on, the signing of the Good Friday Agreement reminds us of what we left behind: killing and hatred, a decent future frustrated by the claims of the past. Finding peace in Northern Ireland had been a long road: the Sunningdale Agreement 1973-74, the Haughey-Thatcher summits in the early 1980s, the Anglo-Irish Agreement 1985, the Hume-Adams talks, the paramilitary ceases fires in 1994 and 1997, the GFA in 1998 and the twenty-nine subsequent agreements to implement it.  Through infinite hours of talks, meetings and negotiations, peace came dropping slow.

            Great leaders emerged who took courageous decisions: Hume, Mallon, Haughey, Thatcher, FitzGerald, Spring, Major, Reynolds, Adams, McGuinness, Trimble, Robinson, Bruton, McAleese, Paisely (eventually) and Blair.  Countless others included the women of the Peace Movement like Mairead Corrigan and later leaders of the Women’s Coalition like Monica McWilliams and Pearl Sagar.  People working in NGOs and community groups at interfaces, risking vilification and physical violence to inch forward toleration.

            Now the black swan of Brexit calls again for leadership of a very high order, provided on the Irish side by a new political generation. Like generations of peace makers of all kinds, as officials we were sustained by a ‘duty of hope’, committed to the process, always working toward a better future.  Here’s to more progress in 2023.

            Eamonn

            Ottawa

            1 January 2023

            [1] https://www.irishtimes.com/news/politics/pithy-and-precise-the-post-it-notes-from-bruton-s-era-1.4765531

            [2] Security forces as a term covers many organizations, including RUC, its Special Branch which was regarded as a force within a force, the British Army and a host of covert intelligence agencies, including MI5 and the British Army’s Force Research Unit.

            [3] https://cain.ulster.ac.uk/issues/parade/docs/north97sum.pdf

            [4] http://www.paradescommission.org/

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            December 31, 2022 · 6:16 pm

            Bloody Sunday: When and Why Apologies Work

            Interesting to read about British discussions in 1997 about an apology for Bloody Sunday.  Northern Ireland Secretary of State Mo Mowlam wanted a review but only one such that “no soldier or other crown servant should be placed in jeopardy of legal action by whatever the reviewer might find or by what might flow from his findings”.  

            As the Irish Times reports, “the restricted files released in Belfast show there was considerable debate within the UK government during 1997 over whether a fresh inquiry was necessary, or if a more limited review and apology might suffice.”[1]  The Defence Secretary, George Robertson, was concerned either that a review without legal consequence could not be guaranteed since a decision to prosecute lay with the AG, or that such a review would be of little interest to the Bloody Sunday relatives.  “A heartfelt apology should, in my view, be the Government’s last word on the subject.”

            Here’s why an apology would not have worked in 1997 but was appropriate and fitting in 2010.

            An apology in 1997 would have been an attempt to head off the pressure for a new inquiry into the 1972 killing of 14 people in Derry by the British Army (the Paras).  Pressure to revisit the killings increased dramatically with Don Mullan’s Eyewitness Bloody Sunday. With forensic skill and detective work, Don worked through the contemporaneous statements ignored by Widgery.  Over 500 statements had been collected by the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association and the National Council for Civil Liberties.[2] His account directly challenged the official British version contained in the report of the Widgery Inquiry.

            Widgery, the Lord Chief Justice of Britain, had conducted a public inquiry under the gold-standard Tribunal of Inquiries Act 1921.  With undue haste, it took him only a month.  Yet his conclusions echoed through the years.  In exonerating the soldiers and blaming the victims with false accusations that they were armed, Widgery became synonymous in Ireland with a white wash. The Widgery Report was dismissed, including by the Irish Government.

            The events of Bloody Sunday and the Widgery Report exacerbated the conflict, strengthened the Provisional IRA, cast the British Army into the role of aggressor, and robbed nationalists of any belief that the rule of law or justice was available to them under British rule. 

            Yet however much nationalists would denigrate the Widgery Report, it was the official British version of events by the Lord Chief Justice, the officer at the very apex of the British legal system.  This is what the long campaign of the Bloody Sunday Justice Campaign was up against. If there was ever to be a new inquiry, the Widgery Report would have to be set aside. By 1997 the case against Widgery was reaching a climax.

            The publication of Mullan’s Eyewitness Bloody Sunday prompted renewed calls for another inquiry and the campaign of the Bloody Sunday Justice Campaign got a fresh impetus. In addition to Don’s work, others like Professor Dermot Walsh of the University of Limerick had analysed the statements by soldiers to the Military Police and Treasury Solicitors, detailing their many discrepancies and alterations.  New ballistic evidence emerged, reinforcing the questions raised back in 1972 by Samuel Dash. Channel Four News broadcast new interviews with soldiers on duty that day that challenged the Widgery version of events. We discovered 101 statements by eyewitnesses collected by Irish Government officials.  Investigative reporting by the Sunday Business Post added to the growing body of evidence that the Widgery was indeed a white wash, at the very least an incomplete and distorted account of events. 

            Parliamentary Questions were tabled in the Dáil.  In drafting responses, I suggested and the Department of the Taoiseach (Paul McGarry) agreed, that the ‘new material’ presented by Don Mullan would be assessed.  Initially I had no idea how to do this.  A colleague and friend, Gerry Corr, was intrigued.  “You are summoning beasts from the deep” he said, “What will you do if they come?” (Gerry became a life-long friend with a highly distinguished diplomatic career and one of the Department’s great speech writers. He had worked as a traveler in Anglo-Irish Division during some of the worst years of the conflict.)

            So I went back to the source and read the Widgery Report.  It was a rich repository of material about the events of that infamous day.  It was plain to see where Widgery had to distort the narrative to validate pre-determined conclusions.  The rationale for ignoring eyewitness statements that conflicted with Widgery’s mission to exculpate of the soldiers was clear. The new material from all its various sources did not need to be proven factually or legally correct. Rather it could be collated and aimed directly at Widgery’s claims, paragraph by paragraph.  The Widgery Report could be hoist on its own petard. The draft Assessment was finished with great editorial and research support from colleagues in Anglo-Irish Division, and Gerry Cribben and Wally Kirwan in the Department of the Taoiseach.

            However to my mind, the real test of the Assessment’s merit was the judgement of the Director General of Anglo-Irish Division at the time, Sean Ó hUigínn.  Sean played a pivotal role in the peace process, a supreme intellect at work navigating the way forward in the crucial transition from conflict to ceasefires.  He had been the architect of the Downing Street Declaration of 1993, working closely with the Taoiseach, Albert Reynolds, another driving force in the peace process. After Sean had read the draft, I was summoned to his office.  He was leafing through the document and lay it on the coffee table as I sat down. As long as there were no glaring errors in it, he approved text.  Relief. In his view, the new material fatally undermined and discredited the Widgery Report. More than that, Sean subsequently added concluding paragraphs that resounded with the high principles of justice at stake.  His indictment was eloquent and excoriating: 

            “There have been many atrocities in Northern Ireland since Bloody Sunday.  Other innocent victims have suffered grievously at various hands. The victims of Bloody Sunday met their fate at the hands of those whose duty it was to respect as well as to uphold the rule of law.  However, what sets this case apart from other tragedies which might rival it in bloodshed, is not the identity of those killing and killed, or even the horrendous circumstances of the day.  It is rather that the victims of Bloody Sunday suffered a second injustice, this time at the hands of Lord Widgery, the pivotal trustee of the rule of law, who  sought to taint them with responsibility for their own deaths in order to exonerate, even at great moral cost, those he found it inexpedient to blame.”[3]

            Under Sean’s seal of approval, Taoiseach Bertie Ahern conveyed the Assessment to the newly elected British Prime Minister, Tony Blair.  I understand that he underlined in the strongest possible terms the import of how Blair would respond and of the significance of overturning the historic wrong of Bloody Sunday.  Blair could have little doubt that such a powerful gesture would reinforce the momentum toward peace and reconciliation.

            The intention was to publish the Assessment eventually so that even if the British Government refused a new inquiry, the Irish Government would table in effect an alternative narrative. It was a great example of the collective talent and teamwork that the Irish system was able to bring to the peace process.

            Legend has it that Blair gave the Assessment to his wife Cherie to read with her legal eye.  She had just taken silk, become a Queen’s Counsel.  I like to think that that might be true. Imagine the scene as, possibly armed with a legal pad of her notes, she tells Tony that he can’t stand over Widgery.

            It was quite a moment then in January 1998 as, across the floor of the House of Commons, Blair faced Ted Heath, the Prime Minister who had established the Widgery Inquiry over twenty-five years earlier.  Blair announced a new inquiry: “I have been strongly advised that there are indeed grounds for such a further Inquiry. We believe that the weight of material now available is such that these events require re-examination.”

            The Inquiry would take twelve years and cost £200 million. Yet in that brave decision Blair sent a profound message that he meant business about a new form of engagement in Northern Ireland. 

            Prime Minister David Cameron’s apology in 2010 was meaningful precisely because it was based on the conclusions of the Saville Inquiry. “What happened on Bloody Sunday was both unjustified and unjustifiable. It was wrong……Some members of our armed forces acted wrongly. The government is ultimately responsible for the conduct of the armed forces and for that, on behalf of the government, indeed, on behalf of our country, I am deeply sorry.”

            An apology in 1997 would have done little to substantively correct the double injustice of the victims, murdered and then blamed for their own deaths.  Thanks to the Saville Inquiry, the victims of Bloody Sunday had their innocence not just declared but proven.  The wrongs of Bloody Sunday were laid at the door of the British Army. And through the long years of the Saville Inquiry, there was much truth recovery that in future years will be invaluable for future assessments of what happened that day and why.

            Eamonn

            Ottawa

            31 December 2022

            [1] https://www.irishtimes.com/history/2022/12/31/bloody-sunday-mo-mowlams-draft-apology-on-soldiers-not-intending-murder-ruled-out/

            [2] Eyewitness Bloody Sunday, 25th Anniversary edition, p 23.

            [3] Bloody Sunday and the Report of the Widgery Tribunal, The Irish Government’s Assessment of the New Material, p

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            December 15, 2022 · 2:56 am

            Death of a Peace Maker and Friend: Brendan McAllister RIP

            As we approach the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement, there is naturally a focus on the negotiations of that historic agreement and its implementation.  That is right and proper.  However, peace in Northern Ireland was the achievement of courageous people who reached across the sectarian divide in myriad gestures of reconciliation.  Peacemakers worked for years, decades even, through the haze of violence, riots and blood, reaching for a better future, for the better part of our natures, for peace.

            One of those people was Brendan McAllister.  He died unexpectedly, suddenly, too young, this week.  His name will not be familiar to most.  To those who knew him, and loved him, his name is in our hearts.

            Brendan worked with Mediation Northern Ireland in the years before and after the paramilitary ceasefires of 1994.  Alex Attwood, member of the SDLP and a former Assembly member and Minister, was one of his closest friends.  Reflecting on Brendan’s life and work, Alex said Brendan went to the hardest places.  There were no harder places in mid-1990s than the confrontations between the Loyal Orders and nationalist residents.

            In 1996, parades in contentious areas like the Lower Ormeau Road in Belfast and the Garvaghy Road in Portadown exposed sectarian emotions at their rawest.  Peace in Northern Ireland felt like it was on the line.  As a mediator, Brendan went there armed with his humanism, his abiding Christianity, his determination to make Northern Ireland a better place, a place where people weren’t murdered for their beliefs. Brendan explained the parades issue.  Before the ceasefires, the Northern Ireland conflict was fought between ‘professionals’ on both sides: the PIRA versus the security forces.  In a way, they were the Punch and Judy show, avatars and mediums of the deeper divisions within society. 

            Brendan worked hard as a mediator to win trust on all sides, to bridge the sectarian divide, to find common humanity.  Drumcree emerged as the titular confrontation of the parades issue. As a traveller with Anglo-Irish Division, we found each other in the no-man’s land between the Garvaghy residents and the Orange Order.  He was working to mediate, to connect the key stakeholders and find an agreed solution.  Jonathan Powell, PM Tony Blair’s chief of staff, was lead for the British Government.  I was point for the Irish Government. Daily, I would talk to Brendan, analyze, assess, and report back to Dublin. 

            The annual Drumcree crisis washed over us, nationalist residents beaten off their own road by the RUC in daylight in 1996.  Then beaten off their own road again at night by the RUC in 1997.  Still Brendan worked to connect, and not just in Portadown about across innumerable interfaces in Northern Ireland, firefighting for peace, for that better future.

            The Good Friday Agreement changed the equation.  Lines were held in 1998.  Courageous people spoke for toleration.  As the Parades Commission adjudicated each confrontation, the energy drained slowly from the parades issue. Again Brendan was at the coalface, injecting into the arbitration the philosophy and practice of mediation, reason, and compromise.

            Brendan was also truly influential on the policing project.  His experience of the parade confrontations the critical role of policing in avoiding escalation and calm tensions.  Security sector reform is one of the most difficult challenges of any peace process.  In Northern Ireland, it was not only critical but successful.  Thanks to his input and influence before the Patten Commission and during the implementation of its recommendations, policing change in Northern Ireland was profound and successful.  It remains an enduring success of the peace process precisely because it is no longer on the radar screen. 

            Years later, Brendan served as a Victims Commissioner and the Department of Foreign Affairs nominated Brendan for the UN’s panel of standby mediators.  I am sure that his wisdom, compassion and experience of conflict were invaluable in the places where he worked. 

            I met Brendan and his wonderful wife Elizabeth a few years ago at a dinner hosted by the Irish Joint Secretary in Belfast.  It was a wonderful evening, a joy to spend time with Brendan and other old contacts.  When we parted, we hugged.  Brendan was a hugger.  And a smiler too with a ready infectious laugh that said ‘sure what’s it all about?’  By then the shadow on Brexit had fallen over the North.  There would be more work for Brendan, endless work of reconciliation.  Reflective as ever, his thoughts turned back to his faith and earlier this year he was ordained a Deacon.  When Brendan died last Tuesday, Northern Ireland lost a true friend and a gentle guide on its journey to a better future.

            Eamonn McKee

            Ambassador of Ireland to Canada

            Ottawa, 14 December 2022

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            December 5, 2022 · 2:24 pm

            Thomas Ahearn, the ‘King of Electricity’ and the Man who Made Ottawa

            The Bytown-Ottawa Irish Heritage Trail: the Fabulous Ahearns, cont’d.

            Coincidentally, the man who would create modern Ottawa was born the year that the city changed its name from Bytown. In hindsight, this was auspicious.  If Bytown owed its existence to the Duke of Wellington, Ottawa owed its entry to the modern era to Thomas Ahearn.   

            We do not know much of Thomas Franklin Ahearn’s early life but considering the energetic, confident and brilliant son they had raised, John and Norah must have been loving and supportive parents.  Young Tom would have seen up close the magic worked by his blacksmith father, heating cold black iron until it glowed orange and soft enough to be shaped.  Satisfied, his father plunged it hissing into cold water.  A kind and patient father would have answered his son’s questions, turning the young lad’s wonder into curiosity about the infinite variety and utility of the things that could be made.  Likely too that Tom’s close friend Warren Soper visited the forge.  The boys supported each other in their exploration of the new scientific breakthroughs reshaping the world.  If metallurgy had fashioned civilization for millennia, and steam the age of industrialisation, harnessing electricity birthed the modern technological age.

            It must have been a well-read household for Thomas was exposed enough to new developments to develop a passion for electricity.  He grew up as telegraphy came of age, spreading around the world, its binary signal spreading information in hours where before it would have taken weeks. That flow of information was transformative: for markets, armies, technology, and daily life. By the time Tom was eleven, the New York businessman Cyrus Field was hailed a hero for successfully laying the transatlantic cable, finally uniting the world’s telecommunications and putting the last piece in place for a truly globalized world. It is hard not to think that Field was an inspiration to young Tom.

            Tom wanted to be a part of this but he was expelled from the College of Ottawa for misbehaviour.[1]  The lack of a formal education mattered little to him.  He joined the Montreal Telegraph office at Chaudière, as a messenger really intent on learning about the application of electricity. After a stint in New York, Tom returned as the company’s chief operator, then hired some years later aged twenty-five by Bell Telephone.  Bruce Deachman writes about this in an anecdote that tells us much about Tom:  “This latter development was not without some irony: In 1878, Ahearn, perhaps unaware of the misdeed he was committing, infringed on Alexander Graham Bell’s patent when, after reading an article in Scientific American, made the first successful long-distance telephone call from Ottawa using handmade sets he’d built from cigar boxes to place a call to Pembroke. Ahearn later sold the boxes for $16 to settle an outstanding hotel bill.”[2]

            Tom knew the practical end of electricity but when he realised he was undercharging for his installation work he knew he needed a business partner.  He turned to his childhood friend Warren Soper and in 1881 they formed Ahearn & Soper Telegraphy and Electric Light Contractors.  IN 1882, their Ottawa Electric Light Company installed sixty-five street lights, Thomas working him with two Irish laborers draping the lines as they went along. The lights were powered by Canada’s first hydro-electric power from a wheel and generator at Chaudiere Falls. They won a contract with the Canadian Pacific Railway to install telegraph lines and began building a local business empire. “The following year the young men were awarded a contract to introduce electric lights into the House of Commons. The lights were switched on in January 1884, a full year earlier than at the Capitol in Washington, DC.” [3]   It would prove to be a life-long partnership that created modern Ottawa and earned them the title the Edisons of Canada. 

            Ahearn is most famous for the invention of the electric oven and stove. “On 17 January, 1884, he cooked the first dinner with teh appliance in Ottawa’s Windsor Hotel before a collection of VIP journalists. The oven was over 6 feet [2 metres] in height and width and in the words of the Ottawa Citizen, ‘It was hot enough to roast an ox.’ The dinner consisted of Saginaw trout, potato croquettes, sugar-crusted ham, lamb cutlets, stuffed loin of veal, strawberry puffs chocolate cake, and apple pie.” [Sweeny, pp 351-2]

            The year 1884 was also significant for Thomas personally. On 25 June, he married Lilias MacKey Fleck. In May 1886, Lilias gave birth to their son, Frank. Two years later, she gave birth their daughter but tragedy truck and Lilias died in childbirth. Grief-stricken, Thomas named his daughter Lilias. Lilias’s fate in childbirth was one of the great dangers that women had faced and continue to face. She would not see her children grow, nor her daughter Lilias marry the publisher Harry Stevenson Southam, one of the resident elite families of old Ottawa. Frank would call his daughter after her, an Irish tradition.

            Ahearn and Soper literally electrified the city and brought lighting and phones to the Parliament, factory floors, the streets and homes.  In 1887 they used thousands of light bulbs to decorate Parliament in celebration of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee. In 1891, Thomas Keefer transferred the rail charter to Ahearn and Soper. Keefer was the son-in-law of the builder of the Rideau Canal and founder of Bytown, Thomas Mackay. Keefer had developed the Rockcliffe neighbourhood and used horse-draw railcars to connect it to the town centre. With the charter in hand, Ahearn and Soper introduced electric trams, the new lines literally generating Ottawa’s suburbs as houses sprung up along them.  Ever inventive, Ahearn installed electric heaters in them. The tramline went first from Bank Street to Landowne, spawning the Glebe neighbourhood as the local farmer sold lots for housing.  Ahearn and Sopper bought the land adjacent to planned lines the next time. To ensure his streetcars did a good business at the weekend, Ahearn built amusement parks at Rockcliffe with, of course, electric merry-go-rounds.  He helped encourage the first skiing in the region on the scenic slopes there overlooking the Ottawa River.

            Ahearn combined many traits, from creativity and constant tinkering with new devices, building networks of people to advance his projects, and thinking big about how to develop Ottawa. “However, it was his ability to find solutions to particular technological obstacles impeding the progress of large systems that gave his companies an edge over the competition. He was always innovating, interconnecting his machinery in new ways, and adapting inventions to his needs. He was also a master of promotion. On 29 Aug. 1892 he invited members of the Ottawa elite to an “electric” banquet. An entire meal was cooked in a powerhouse on electrical appliances that he had designed and constructed. The food was delivered to the dining room of the Windsor hotel by streetcar.”[4]

            Thanks to Ahearn and Soper, Ottawa was first in all these things, ahead of Montreal and Toronto. “By 1900, it was reported there were 100,000 incandescent light bulbs burning in the city, more per capita than anywhere else in the world.” [5]  Ahearn drove the first car in Ottawa, notably an electric one using batteries.  He was forever inventing and held almost thirty patents in Canada and the US.  He applied his technical genius to make ovens[6], fridges, water bottle warmers, streetcar heating systems, insulators, battery jars, arc-light carbons, motor brushes, recording machines for music, telephones and telegraphs systems.

            Ahearn was a close supporter of both Wilfred Laurier and Mackenzie King, the latter appointing him to the new Federal District Commission tasked with the development of the city’s parks and roads in 1927. Thanks to Ahearn we have the Queen Elizabeth Driveway and the Champlain Bridge. A year later, the Prime Minister appointed Ahearn to the Privy Council. 

            Tom Ahearn died in 1938.  Anna Adamek sums up his life in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography thus:

            “Thomas Ahearn’s career was truly remarkable. Although he was born in a poor working-class family, he became one of Ottawa’s richest and most influential entrepreneurs. His outstanding technical expertise, but also his intuition, allowed him to compete successfully with members of the city’s business elites and build powerful political alliances. Through the companies he founded and the institutions he led, Ahearn realized his vision of Ottawa as a modern, industrialized capital and greatly contributed to its transformation in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.”

            Deachman again: “Tom, as he was known his entire life, grew up in lockstep with the new city, and it’s impossible to imagine what Ottawa might look like today without his influence. Along with his business partner, Warren Young Soper, Ahearn touched the lives of everyone in Ottawa, through transportation, electricity, beautification and leisure and entertainment. The pair’s interconnected business enterprises very much shaped how and where the city grew, as its population soared from just over 10,000 when Ahearn took in his first breath, to about 150,000 when he exhaled his last.”

            We can look forward to a full treatment of Ahearn’s life when a new biography of Ahearn and Soper is published by Laura Ott.  Ott has said that Ahearn and Soper are “among the most unrecognized people for the type of impact they had on the city.”

            Tom’s son Frank built a memorial to his father and you can see it now in the Glebe, at the corner of Bank and Holmwood.  As well as an image of his father, the memorial was combined with a drinking fountain, a wonderful symbol of the utility that Tom brought to the life of his beloved city of Ottawa.

            So we are lost for choice when it comes to putting places on the Bytown-Ottawa Irish Heritage trail marking Tom Ahearn’s impact on the city.

            Up next, we look at the remarkable life of his son Frank in the continuing saga of the fabulous Ahearns.

            Eamonn McKee

            Ottawa

            5 December 2022

            [1] Dictionary of Canadian Biography (DCB), entry by Anna Adamnek.

            [2] Capital Builders: Thomas Ahearn and Warren Soper, the ‘Edisons of Canada’,  Ottawa Citizen, 4 April 2019.

            [3] DCB.

            [4] Ibid.

            [5] Ibid.

            [6] Canada Post issued a commemorative stamp in 2011 featuring Ahearn’s electric oven.  The oven had won him the gold medal at the Central Canada Exhibition in 1892 and featured in the World’s Fair in Chicago in 1893. Ibid, Ottawa Citizen.

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            December 4, 2022 · 11:10 pm

            John Ahearn, founder of an Irish Canadian Dynasty

            The Bytown-Ottawa Irish Heritage Trail: the Fabulous Ahearns

            In three generations, the Ahearns progressed from an Irish-born blacksmith to the Privy Council and to a leading role in the Governor General’s Office, along the way creating and shaping the modern city of Ottawa. Each generation more than deserves tribute and whether individually or collectively, the Ahearns were indeed fabulous. Here is the story of the fabulous Ahearns, John, Thomas, Frank and Lilias. Each were a leader of their generation. They will be great additions to our heritage trail. First up, John Ahearn.

            We do not know much about John Ahearn other than that he was born in Ireland in 1806. He married Honorah (Norah) Power, date and location unknown. He or they immigrated to Canada and he worked his trade as a blacksmith in what was then Bytown. The home of John and Norah was on Duke Street in the working class neighbourhood of Lebreton Flats, not far from Chaudiere Falls on the Ottawa River.


            We can guess what brought him to the Ottawa Valley. By then the long struggle between Britain and France for global dominance was over and thanks to the Duke of Wellington, the construction of the Rideau Canal had begun, a strategic communication between Kingston and Montreal away from the St Lawrence, the likely point of attack of the United States. There was already a thriving lumber industry, dating back to the Napoleon blockade that had cut off Baltic timber. The Irish could find cheap passage as living ballast on the lumber ships on the ships’ return leg from England and the naval shipyards there.


            In the Ottawa and Gatineau Valleys, there were jobs in the lumber industry, though the work was dangerous and rough. There was cheap land to buy when the trees were cleared, though clearing giant tree stumps and rocks was backbreaking. However, the canal and plans to build almost one hundred locks and dams meant that there was plenty of good work for skilled craftsmen like carpenters, stone masons and blacksmiths. All of these opportunities drew in the Irish at a time when the Irish economy was in recession after the boom times of the Napoleonic wars.


            John packed up his belongings, probably too the tools of his trade, and began the long sea passage across the great North Atlantic, up the St Lawrence to Montreal and then the Ottawa River to its confluence with the Gatineau and Rideau Rivers. He married Honorah Power, but we do not know whether they met in Ireland or in Canada. Her life would have been one of hard labour, giving birth and running a household without any modern conveniences. The brutal winters added to her chores, as did the muddy spring time and mosquito infested summers. Cut off from home and the support of relatives, loneliness must have been a factor too. Prevalent illnesses would have added distress as well as the ever fear of death. Throughout all of this, Norah was wife, mother, cook, cleaner, nurse, moral conscience and educator. Raising a family in these conditions was nothing short of heroic.

            The construction of the Rideau Canal had stimulated a new settlement dubbed Bytown after Colonial John By, the engineer in overall charge of the canal’s construction. Officers and gentlemen worked and lived around Barracks Hill while the Irish and French workers settled in the swampy area of Lowertown. The market, taverns and shanties there became known as Byward. Perhaps indicating his status as a craftsman and perhaps too intent on avoiding the violent quarrels between the Irish and French in Lowertown as they competed for jobs and dominance, Ahearn settled in Lebron Flats, at Duke Street.


            By any stretch, John’s life was fabulous, moving from an island scarred by British colonialism and savage sectarianism, across the incalculable expanse of the North Atlantic, perhaps guided by some old letters that had promised opportunity. For somebody from Ireland, the vast scale of the St Lawrence must have been awe-inspiring. He probably stopped at Quebec and then Montreal, bustling cities cacophonous with French speakers and up close with Indigenous residents, visitors and fur traders. As he travelled up the Ottawa River, he would have seen the giant rafts of squared logs, topped with cabins and guided downriver to Montreal by strong and hardy lumbermen. He would too have seen Indigenous travelers in their birch bark canoes, including warriors, hunters, and families.


            When he arrived, John would have found Bytown to be boisterous and half-built, with muddy streets, shanties and some grand stone buildings, yet a city ambitious for its future. He could admire the success of fellow Irishman John Egan who had risen to be the leading lumber baron in the Valley and an influential politician. Ahearn would have noticed that the immediate region was stripped of trees. He must have gazed in wonder at the Gatineau hills and beyond the wilderness of bear and wolf stretching infinitively west and north. Imagine his first winter in Canada as all of this fell under a crystalline spell of snow and ice. At least he would not have been short of company in the large Irish community, the cadences of the Irish language common among his fellow immigrants. John and Norah’s son Thomas Franklin was born in 1855 at their home in Duke Street, Lebron Flats.

            Next up, we look at Thomas’ life and his role as the founding father of modern Ottawa.

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