Eamonn McKee and Mark McGowan (editors)
St Michael’s College at the University of Toronto, 3 December 2025
“It all started here at St Michael’s,” I answered the host of our panel discussion. “After Professor Mark McGowan had hosted me for a remote talk on ‘Ancient Ireland and all that Remains of it’ (now with 37,000 views on YouTube), he realized that I might be the Ambassador to Canada but I was also a frustrated historian.” Mark consequently introduced me to local historian of the Ottawa Valley, Michael McBane. “Sitting in the Residence, Michael told an astonishing story of Irish settlement in the Ottawa and Gatineau Valleys, and the arrival of thousands of Famine emigrants there, helped by Sister Bruyère.” When the Royal Irish Academy published Irish Lives in America in December 2021, Mark and I assembled a group of contributors to do a book on Irish lives in Canada.
The interview format was convened at St Michael’s to launch Fifty Irish Lives in Canada 1661-2017. We had a full house last Wednesday in the Charbonnel lounge. William Peat, CEO of the Ireland Canada Foundation (CIF) was, as Mark put it, our Graham Norton for the evening. This was particularly fitting since the CIF has generously funded the book’s publication. The President of St Michael’s, David Sylvester, introduced the evening, also appropriate given the College’s key role in promoting Irish studies with their Celtic Studies Program. Nice to see Ann Dooley, the founder of the program, and Pa Sheehan who teaches Irish there. It was lovely to see my former Department of Foreign Affairs colleagues join us, Toronto Consul General Claire Fitzgibbon and Vice Consul General, Cahal Sweeney.
William, a genuinely talented host, asked how we chose who was in the book. To help with selection, we had decided early on that candidates should be born in Ireland and deceased. Mark insisted that we had to include people from all walks of life, not just those who created headlines and legacies. At any rate, no emigrant life can be described as ordinary. We soon realized that women were missing so we actively sought them out. Grant Vogel had summoned a vivid life of the legendary Mother McGinty from bare traces of her life when Bytown (later Ottawa) formed around the building of the Rideau canal beginning in 1826. Renowned historian Elizabeth Smyth profiled Mother Therese Dease, who founded of the Loreto Order in Canada after she arrived in 1847. My now son-in-law told me about Elizabeth Barnes, the ‘witch of Plum Hollow’ who was an active soothsayer from the 1860s onwards. Prof Michelle Holmgren contributed profiles of important women writers.
As for where we found our contributors, Mark noted that we had to have Thomas D’Arcy McGee’s official biographer Prof David Wilson write that profile. He also cited renowned historian Denis McKim and his profile of Guy Carlton. Professor William Jenkins and Laura Smith, both contributors, also joined us at the launch, along with members of the Irish community and students.
William asked us for our highlights. For me, it was the community of writers on the project, because writing is normally such a solitary occupation. It was also inspiring to pare down a life to one thousand words while still encompassing that life. Mark said that it was adding new dimensions to the story of the Irish. His research had discovered that more than eighty Canadians died as a result of helping the typhus-stricken Famine emigrants in 1847. He and historian Jason King found records, publicly available but forgotten, that detailed the contribution of the Haudenosaunee, Anishinaabe, and Huron-Wendat peoples to Irish famine relief. The Mississauga people of the Credit River contributed even as they faced eviction from their traditional lands.
I noted the resonance between the Irish as colonized and the Indigenous people. But we Irish in Canada were there as settlers, colonizing colonizers. We did not want to shrink from this complex and indeed tragic interaction. Mark pointed to Michele Holmgren’s profile of Nicholas Flood Davin who played a key role in the policy founding the Indian Residential Schools. I noted that the Mounties, based on the Royal Irish Mounted Police, were the cutting edge of colonialism as far as Indigenous peoples were concerned. Our approach was not to second guess decisions that people had to make centuries ago. Our guiding motto was “history is complicated.”
William posed a challenging questions: why read these stories now? Do they have value? I said “In the first instance, we have to remember that the Irish were emigrants, that they came here, were helped, and made major contributions. In the book, we are naming things that deserved to be named.” The Irish made contributions to Canada that are hiding in plain sight, like the Mounties, the modern Canadian flag, jurisprudence, politics, and businesses like Eaton’s Department store. “In today’s world with such much hostility to emigrants, this is an important message about what emigrants bring to society.”
Mark said “that history is often written from the top-down and what this book signals is that ordinary people matter and need to be written into our national narrative. For Irish people in Canada, expatriates and descendants, its an important reminder of the giants upon whose shoulders they stand. It is also a reminder to all settler Canadians of the way in which Indigenous peoples must be rewritten into our national and local histories—this book helps to widen the lens of our perspective. In these times when immigrants have been scapegoated for all of society’s ills, it is a reminder of the many important contributions made by those who chose to make Canada their home.”
What did you leave out but would have liked to include? More women, I offered. It would nice to have gotten to 50%. I noted the contribution of Irish Arctic explorers like Crozier and McClintock and more recently Mick Mallon in Iqaluit who popularized methods for learning Inuktitut. Mark said there were many interesting people left out, and at least two Prime Ministers, unmentioned in his overview (Lester B Pearson and Joe Clark also had Irish ancestry). He lamented that New Brunswick, PEI, and Newfoundland and Labrador could have been better represented. Perhaps, he said these omissions might be rectified in a revised volume.
It was such a delight to that the family of our last profile in the book, Paud Mulrooney, joined us for the evening. His wife Mary and daughter Deirdre had shared his life teaching the Ojibwa of Ogoki Post and Cat Lake in Northern Ontario, documenting their life there with photographs and Super 8 footage. These are now valuable archives for those Indigenous communities. Deirdre herself is a respected documentary maker, devoted to exploring dance in Irish culture, with a book on the life of Lucia Joyce, James’ daughter. She also produced a short documentary on their life in Canada, ‘True North’. Her website is here. Deirdre thought it was beautiful to end our book with a quote from an Ojibwa woman, Gordina Oombash. In conversation afterwards, she told me that the Indigenous community in Cat Lake were very excited to read the book.
Finally, we thanked Novalis for taking a punt on publishing the book. Publisher Simon Apolloni (his mother Ursula Carroll was from Cavan) was there doing a brisk trade selling the book, which Mark and I were proud to autograph. Copies are available to order on line here. Plans are afoot to publish the book in Ireland. More on that anon!
Eamonn
Dublin
8 December 2025
eamonncmckee 