Tag Archives: Fifty Irish Lives in Canada

December 8, 2025 · 11:39 am

Toronto Launch ‘Fifty Irish Lives in Canada 1661-2017’

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

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March 9, 2025 · 11:41 am

Feminist Hero: Anna Jameson

It has been one of the challenges of Fifty Irish Lives in Canada 1661-2017 to find women to profile. It reflects how history, written by men, had eliminated them from the record or simply anonymised them. One of the heroes of Fifty Irish Lives in Canada is Anna Brownell Jameson, née Murphy (born in Dublin in 1794, died in London 1860), profiled by Laura J. Smith. As we celebrate International Women’s Day, the lives of women we recovered, though few, must stand for the unrecorded lives and work of half the population throughout the history of the Irish in Canada.

Anna was a young child when her father Denis Murphy decamped to London to pursue his profession as a miniature portrait artist. By dint of talent and determination, she carved out a life of literary accomplishment, adventure, and fame that spanned England, Germany, France, Italy, and Canada. Ireland was never far from her thoughts. If there is a thread to Anna’s writing life, it is the role of women in society, beginning with her popular study of woman characters in Shakespeare’s play, Characteristics of Women (London, 1832). Her advocacy for women’s rights become more overt as the century unfolded and her own confidence grew.

By the time Anna wrote her famous three-volume travelogue of Canada, Winter Studies and Summer Rambles (London, 1838), she had become an advocate for women’s rights, driven by rage at how society enslaved them through lack of education and careers. In its degree of freedom and agency, she wrote, the position of Indigenous women was “more honest and honoured”[i] compared to that of European women. The lack of education for women made their situation as settlers far worse than their homebound counterparts. Anna writes: “I have not often in my life met with contented and cheerful-minded women, but I never met with so many repining and discontented woman as in Canada.”[ii] To the alarmed male critics of Anna’s feminist views, one woman riposted wittily “well they may be, for when the horse and ass begin to think and argue, adieu to riding and driving.”[iii]

Shooting rapids accompanied by Canadian voyageurs and Indigenous guides, Anna exulted in the pristine landscapes and exposure to Indigenous life. Notes the Dictionary of Canadian Biography: “… we see Anna at her best, an intrepid, adaptable, enthusiastic explorer, intensely interested in everyone she meets …. and everything she experiences. She was delighted to be “the first European female” to shoot the rapids at the Sault, her companion a part-Indian friend, George Johnston. Escorted homeward down Lake Huron in a bateau rowed by four voyageurs, she was awestruck by the unspoiled beauty of the islands around her.” [iv] Her adventures in the wilds of Ontario made her object of fascination to society women back in Toronto.

In her forthcoming profile, Laura writes, “Winter Studies and Summer Rambles has been reprinted countless times since its publication nearly 200 years ago and has been the subject of numerous scholarly analyses. It has been hailed as an important work of early feminism, travel writing, and of epistolary literature. For twenty-first century Canadians the book is a remarkable glimpse of a virtually unrecognizable Ontario covered in dark, forbidding forests, impassable unhealthy swamps, crisscrossed by blazed trails and ineffective corduroy roads.”

Anna’s arduous crossing to Canada had been occasioned by an attempt to rescue her relationship with her dullard husband, at the time Attorney General. He lacked concern for her emotionally or financially. They were contrary in character and her departure from Canada signaled the failure of the marriage.

A talented artist in her own right, Anna converted her landscape sketches into etchings to accompany her publications. In fact, her love of art and her work as an art historian was the mainstay of her intellectual curiosity and publications. Following years of arduous research, she published the Handbook to the Public Galleries of Art in or near London (1842) and the Companion to Private Galleries of Art in London (1844). As Thomas writes, “After them she began to specialize in the field of art, where she was to become one of arbiters of public taste both in Victorian England and in America.” [v] Her writing on art was immensely popular on both sides of the Atlantic because she was guiding a public eager to learn about an area of culture hitherto the preserve of the aristocracy.

As her place in society was established, Anna felt freer to embrace her Irish identity. She returned to Ireland in 1848, touring extensively against the backdrop of the Great Famine. She was horrified by the scenes of starvation, death and dissolution and disgusted at the anti-Irish bigotry of The Times. The pleasant part of the visit was staying with Maria Edgeworth and drinking whiskey punch with reverend fathers in a priory. Anna returned again in 1853 for an Irish exhibition. Her affinity for Ireland was illustrated by her warm response to any fellow countrymen she encountered or sought out on her travels. She felt most comfortable in the company of what she saw as her own people.

Anna’s five-volume work Sacred and Legendary Art was a major intellectual achievement and marked her out as a pioneering art historian. Regrettably, as Clara Thomas notes, Anna’s planned three-volume history of female artists who made their living by the “public exercise of their talents” never came to fruition.

As Anna labored to build her career as a writer and intellectual, she financially and emotionally sustained a household for her long-invalided father, along with her mother, two unmarried sisters, and a niece. Her advocacy for women’s right to education and the opportunities it allowed continued for the rest of her life. She was a mentor to a new generation of feminists.

Eamonn

[i] Clara Thomas, Love and Work Enough (Toronto, 1967), p.141.

[ii] Vol. 1, p. 108.

[iii] Mrs Proctor responding to Thackery’s criticism, cited Love and Work Enough, pp 141-2.

[iv] https://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/murphy_anna_brownell_8E.html

[v] Op cit., p 164. The verdict in slightly amended form is repeated in the DIB entry https://www.dib.ie/biography/jameson-anna-brownell-a4254

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February 2, 2025 · 9:47 am

John Palliser and the Expansion of Canada

Palliser, John

Born: 1817, Dublin, Co. Dublin, died: 1887, Comeragh House, Waterford

Horses, hunting, and debts loomed large in the life of Ireland’s Protestant landed gentry. They shaped the adventurous life of John Palliser.[1]  Palliser learned his outdoor skills at home in the Comeragh Mountains. He absorbed profligate ways from his family on their frequent continental holidays where he learned to speak fluently in French, German, Italian, and Spanish. By the time he turned thirty in 1847 he was pursuing big game on the US Prairies. Palliser became adept enough in its forbidding conditions to hunt and travel alone, accompanied by his big half-wolf white dog Ishmah.[2] His popular book Solitary Rambles and Adventures of a Hunter in the Prairies (London, 1853) recorded his apprenticeship as an explorer. Palliser’s attention then turned northwards, across the ill-defined border along of 49th parallel and the southern prairies of British North America. Diminished wealth led him to approach the Royal Geographical Society for financial support, casting his travel plans as an expedition exploring routes across the Prairies and into the Rockies. The Society added scientific purposes and submitted the proposal to the Colonial Office.

Canada’s Prairies lay within 1.5 m square miles to the north and west of colonial Canada, comprising Prince Rupert’s Land, granted originally to the Hudson’s Bay Company by Charles II in 1670, and the North-Western Territory. The Indigenous inhabitants, living there since time immemorial, were never consulted. The War of 1812 had put London on notice of US ambitions to seize Canada.[3] By the 1850s, they viewed the Prairies as vulnerable given that American hunters and traders were already active there. Yet they blanched at the cost of a transcontinental railway to enable settlement and assert sovereignty. While American action was unlikely during the emancipation crisis and Civil War, it was time to consider less expensive ways to assert domain. Personal and imperial interests found then a convenient match in Palliser’s proposed expedition. The Colonial Office provided £5,000 (£400,000 today).[4]

Palliser’s dilettantish professional life offered little comfort for the expedition’s prospects. An indifferent student at Trinity College, he left without a degree. Obliged by class to serve as county High Sheriff, deputy lieutenant, and justice of peace, his attention to duties in his father’s Waterford Artillery Militia were fitful. Palliser’s natural intelligence, social skills and outdoor accomplishments revealed his true talents; writes Spry, ‘as much at home in Rome or Heidelberg as he was in Dublin or London, on a Scottish grouse moor or in the Swiss Alps as he was in the wild, beautiful Comeragh Mountains of County Waterford.’[5]

Over three seasons between 1857 and 1860, Palliser’s leadership of the Expedition was the key to its success, marked by indefatigable good humour, supreme tact, and egalitarian charm to all he met. His hunting prowess fed his team and his knowledge of horses ensured success in regular trading for replacement stock from the local Nēhiyawak (Cree) and Siksika (Blackfoot). His personal diplomatic skills de-escalated conflicts within the team and with locals, whether Indigenous or settler, in what was a lawless region beset with all the ill effects of the trade in whiskey, guns, and pelts. Since Lewis and Clark’s violent encounter with members of the Blackfoot Confederacy in 1806, the region had a reputation as hostile. The “scientific” purpose of the Palliser Expedition was to chart opportunities for transport infrastructure, agricultural and mining development, and settlement. This was science as colonisation. Palliser’s success in avoiding violent conflict was all the more remarkable since both Indigenous and his team knew that their research portended settlement and the destruction of the Indigenous way of life.[6]

Canada confederated and established its own government in 1867, a year after the end of the American Civil War. Any renewed US ambitions would have to brush aside a democratic government not a mere colony. London then organised the transfer of Rupert’s Land and the North-Western Territory to Canada through a sale agreement for £300,000 in 1869. The costs of a railway would fall to Canadians, not the Exchequer.

The Palliser Report was a landmark, prodigious with data and insights. As Spry records: “After Prince Rupert’s Land and the North-Western Territory had become western Canada, the Expedition’s successors made much use of its Report. Outstanding among them were the geological survey teams, the North-West Mounted Police, and the negotiators of the Indian treaties. Among them, too, was Sandford Fleming, Engineer-in-Chief of the Canadian Pacific Railway, who was ‘very desirous’ of making Palliser’s acquaintance and did contrive to meet him. He always took a copy of Palliser’s Report with him when going over the ground the Expedition had covered, finding it of great use.”[7]

The transactions between London and Ottawa on the fate of the Prairies represented a profound violation of the rights of the Indigenous and the Métis. Under the leadership of Louis Riel, the Métis of the Red River Settlement armed themselves and established a provisional government in late 1869 to assert their rights to their land, culture, and livelihood. A military expedition led by Garnet Wolseley (from Dublin) suppressed the Resistance.[8] Riel fled to the US and a settlement negotiated with Ottawa established Manitoba as the fifth province to enter the Confederation the following year.[9] To police the vast and lawless prairies, Prime Minister John A. MacDonald created the North West Mounted Police, modelled on the Royal Irish Mounted Constabulary, and appointed George Arthur French from Roscommon, who had briefly served in the Royal Irish Constabulary, as its first Commissioner.[10]

Palliser had other adventures, notably in Siberia, before retiring to Comeragh House, unmarried and relying on his brother-in-law for financial support. After a long walk in the mountains, Palliser died while reading in his living room, aged 70, and was buried at Kilrossanty Cemetery.[11] Comeragh House was burned down at the end of the Troubles in 1923, along with Palliser’s papers. Palliser’s achievement lives on in his Report and in place names in Alberta.

The many Irish gentry like Palliser involved in colonisation shared similar characteristics. Protestant (mostly[12]), landed gentry by birth, heritage, upbringing, and lifestyle, variously profligate and impecunious, many made careers advancing the British Empire’s interests. From North America to the Middle East, from Africa to Asia, they brought leadership, courage, good horsemanship, and hardy constitutions to their roles as very effective colonisers. Though largely forgotten, their actions were often consequential, not least for those on the Empire’s receiving end.[13] Personal rather than imperial objectives drove Palliser. However, Palliser helped open the Prairie North-West to colonisation with all its devastating effects on the Indigenous population. He was a significant participant in a broader strategy that extended Canada’s jurisdiction to the Pacific.

Further Reading:

Irene Spry, The Palliser Expedition, The Dramatic Story of Western Canadian Exploration 1857-1860 (Toronto: Macmillan, 1963).

Irene Spry (editor), The Papers of the Palliser Expedition, 1857-61 (The Champlain Society, 2013): her Introduction is masterful.

[1]DIB: Settled on the fertile Goldenvale between the Galtee and Comeragh Mountains, William Palliser left Yorkshire for Ireland, becoming archbishop of Cashel from 1694 to his death in 1727. English novelist Anthony Trollope borrowed the Palliser surname 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 was formative to his development as a public servant and novelist.

[2] Irene Spry, The Palliser Expedition, The Dramatic Story of Western Canadian Exploration 1857-1860 (1963), p. 3. Palliser brought Ismah and a menagerie of deer and buffalo back to Ireland, all to unhappy fates. Ishmah’s taste for sheep put him in Lord Dunraven’s private zoo and the buffalo died of TB. Spry’s account of the Expedition is a classic, detailing the thrills, dangers, and hardships of the expedition, and detailing the significance and impact of the Palliser Report as the standard reference work for decades. 

[3] The Duke of Wellington, outraged by this stab in the back, set about fortifying Canada with canals, citadels and Martello towers: see Wellington and Ottawa: How an Irishman and a Pot of Spanish Silver Transformed Canada at www.eamonncmckee.com.

[4] See Irene Spy’s Introduction, The Palliser Papers, op cit. Palliser had the persistent support of fellow Irishman and official John Ball in securing this funding.

[5] Ibid, p.2.

[6]Palliser recommended against trying agriculture in a triangle of semi-arid steppe that later bore his name, the Palliser Triangle. Yet the impulse to settlement over-rode his advice and generations of farmers there endured punishing periodic droughts. Palliser also recommended preservation of the buffalo herds to help Indigenous survive.

[7] The Papers of the Palliser Expedition, pp cxxxii-cxxxiii.

[8] According to the DCB, Wolseley “moved a force consisting of nearly 400 British troops, over 700 Canadian militia, and a large party of civilian voyageurs and workmen from their port of embarkation at Collingwood, Ont., to the Red River between 3 May and 24 August, without losing a man. Altogether the expedition made 47 portages and ran 51 miles of rapids.” The expedition’s projection of Canadian authority was an unmistakable signal to the US about who ruled north of the 49th parallel. Wolseley was born in Dublin in 1833 and his family seat was in Carlow. However, his father died when he was young, leaving his widow to raise seven children.  Under financial pressure, she educated Garnet in Dublin rather than England (as was the custom) and he joined the British Army to start a career, without having to purchase the commission thanks to his father’s service.  Wolseley became the leading commanding officer of his era, with active service against the Fenians in Canada, in Burma, India (rebellion), China (Opium War), Egypt, and the Crimean War.

[9] The Irish Governor General, John Young (Lord Lisgar), had wisely warned Macdonald against executing Riel if intercepted. Riel’s execution after the 1885 North-West (Second) Resistance embittered the Métis and French Canadians against the federal government and exacerbated tensions along ethnic, linguistic, and confessional lines across Canada.

[10] French served from October 1873 to July 1876 and led the famous 2000 km ‘march west’ of 1874, establishing bases at Fort Macleod, Swan River, Bow River, Fort Walsh and Fort Saskatchewan to ‘bring order’ to the region. The iconic red tunics were chosen to impress the Indigenous and to distinguish themselves from the blue tunics of the US cavalry. See The Irish and the Colonisation of the Prairie North-West at http://www.eamonncmckee.com

[11] Kilrossanty is near Lemybrien, County Waterford. The charming Church and Cemetery are deserted but well-tended. I found the Palliser grave, a low crypt enclosed by a modest railing, appropriately enough beneath tall pines.  A bronze plaque is there, presented in August 1977 by Alberta to honour Palliser’s expedition as a significant contribution to the development of the Province.

[12] William F. Butler, from Tipperary, was Catholic and had a storied career with the British Army. He had volunteered as an intelligence officer for Wolseley on his march west to counter Riel’s Resistance. Like Palliser, Butler’s published account of his adventures on the Prairies was popular: The Great Lone Land (1872) and The Wild North Land (1873).

[13] Leading the army of the East India Company, Richard Wesley, supported by his younger brother Arthur, seized India between 1798 and 1803, laying the foundation for the British Raj; Arthur of course defeated Napoleon. Lord Dufferin diplomatically and Wolseley militarily combined to secure the Suez Canal and control of Egypt for Britain. When Viceroy of India during the 1880s, seven of Dufferin’s Lieutenant Governors were Irish. He led the destructive invasion of Burma.

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June 13, 2024 · 8:30 pm

Mother Barnes, ‘The Witch of Plum Hollow’

Born Elizabeth Martin, 1800 Cavan Ireland, died 1891 Ontario

(As part of our Fifty Irish Lives in Canada, we searched out women, often unrecorded or anonymized in history. I am grateful to Quinten Mitchell for bringing Mother Barnes to my attention.)

For a woman to earn the moniker ‘Mother Barnes, the Witch of Plum Hollow’, some mystery must have surrounded her.  Elizabeth Barnes earned a reputation as a fortune-teller and finder of lost objects that spread far beyond the farming district near Brockville on the St Laurence River where she lived in frugality.  Claims that she was the seventh daughter of the seventh daughter were said to explain her powers.  While that helped affirm her powers for some, her fame and earnings during her active decades were generated by satisfied customers in a remarkable display of economic agency by an immigrant single mother. 

Born in 1800 in County Cavan to a landlord and British Army colonel and a mother said to be of Spanish descent, Elizabeth Martin was a strikingly beautiful young child.  Admirably willful too; when faced an arranged marriage to an older man, Elizabeth eloped with a young soldier, Robert Harrison, to the United States in 1814.  They settled in Coburg, Canada, but Robert died a few years after the birth of their son Robert Junior.

In 1831, Elizabeth married David Barnes, a cobbler from Connecticut.  Six sons were born, four of whom would survive childhood, and three daughters.  By 1843, they had settled on a farm in Sheldon’s Corners, Ontario, a hub of United Empire Loyalists. David eventually left the family home and moved to Smiths Falls with the youngest son, David Jr, reuniting there with an older child, Sam, (later reeve and Mayor). 

Elizabeth began to monetize her reputation as a soothsayer to make ends meet, receiving clients upstairs in her tiny cottage for 25 cents.  Kindly and slight of frame, wearing a black dress and shawl, her penetrating pale eyes often unnerved her clients. She swirled tea leaves to divine answers to her clients’ concerns. If her eyes hadn’t unnerved them often her penetrating assessments of them did.  Whatever transacted between her and those motivated by curiosity or desperation to see her, word-of-mouth ensured her fame, even across the border in the U.S. 

The situation was ripe with story-telling potential.  To a young lawyer she predicted that the capital of a future Canada would be Ottawa and apparently promised him fame as its leader.  This was the future Prime Minister John A. Macdonald. She was said to possess great powers to recover lost objects.  It was said too that she identified the location of the remains of Morgan Doxtader as well as his murderer, cousin Edgar Harter who was convicted and hanged in Brockville.  From lost sheep and horses, to marriage prospects, Mother Barnes had an uncanny ability to impress her clients and they the capacity to fulfil her predictions.

Some skepticism and closer inspection suggests that willing assumptions about her powers trumped mundane, even obvious, explanations. By the time of John A. Macdonald’s consultation, he was the coming man in the Conservative Party and Confederation on the horizon. Ottawa was widely speculated as the new capital, duly announced in December 1857.  Elizabeth had a life-time of experience to bring to her assessments of marriage prospects as young lovers opened their hearts to her wise counsel.  As for the remains of murder victims and lost or stolen livestock, she no doubt knew the local gossip as intimately as anyone and probably more so. Such stories suggest that Mother Barnes restored social harmony through crime solving and restoration of lost property. If the gullible or curious were prepared to pay the 25 cents, they got their monies worth not through magic but wisdom and experience.  Mother Barnes’ role as local wise woman would no doubt have been of help to the many Irish streaming into the area during and after the Famine, notably the tenantry of the Coollattin Estate arriving in numbers in Smiths Falls in the 1850s.

Elizabeth amassed no fortune but used her earnings to support her family and some orphans. Seven children, forty-seven grandchildren and fourteen great-grandchildren were there to morn her death.  She was buried in an unmarked grave in Sheldon’s Corners Cemetery.

In former times, the label witch or any suggestion of occult powers could have had dire consequences for a woman. By the mid-19th century, the balance had swung toward toleration.  From séances to automatic writing, from ‘scientific’ experiments to photography, Victorians seemed as fixated on the occult as they were on science and progress. Against the backdrop of popular fiction by authors like Arthur Conan Doyle and Bram Stoker, Elizabeth’s fame owed as much to this Victorian Gothic sensibility as to her predictive abilities.

Yet her real success was survival against daunting odds by marketing and monetizing her hard-won expertise. Two years before her death, she chuckled to a journalist that “I’m a bit of a fraud.” By then her record and repute were unassailable. On her death in 1891, The Ottawa Free Press respectfully and more accurately mourned her passing as The Wise Woman of Plum Hollow, noting that she had become an institution in her lifetime. Her reputation was burnished in 1892 when a local writer, Thaddeus Leavitt, published his short novel, The Witch of Plum Hollow.  Mother Barnes’ enduring fame encouraged some locals to erect a headstone at the Cemetery. Today, her cottage can be seen from the road that bears her name.  It has been restored from a state of near destruction.  Its small scale defies belief that it functioned as a home for Elizabeth and her many dependents.

Mother Barnes managed to achieve some economic agency in the only way she knew how.  More typical was Eliza Grimason, born Elizabeth Jane Deacon in (Northern) Ireland, who successfully ran her deceased husband’s Royal Tavern in Kingston.  Less typically, and with a whiff of scandal, she was from an early stage a close confidante of John A. Macdonald.  Her political support for him increased as her wealth grew. 

Both Elizabeth and Eliza represent countless other women who wielded influence unseen in the pages of history.   Most were denied remembrance, their lives of hard work, caring, intergenerational childrearing, agency, and resilience forgotten or dismissed by the men who wrote the record. Even those women who achieved distinction were far less likely to feature in the histories of Canada than men who achieved less.  Albeit in folklore and in the modest remains of her cottage, Mother Barnes scored another distinctive success in the mere fact that she and her life are remembered today.  That in its own way was a big of magic.

Further reading

Eamonn McKee

Ottawa, 13 June 2024

Further reading:

The Witch of Plum Hollow « arlene stafford wilson (wordpress.com)

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March 8, 2023 · 8:30 pm

50 ILIC: Bishop Michael Fleming, radical pastor with a long legacy in Newfoundland

The monumental Basilica of St John’s, the Taj Mahal of the Irish in Canada, is the legacy of Bishop Michael Fleming.  Son of a tenant farmer in Kilkenny, Fleming was educated and ordained in Wexford at a time of growing Catholic mobilization. Fleming modelled his episcopal leadership in Newfoundland on Daniel O’Connell’s campaign for Catholic emancipation and the Catholic Church’s Ultramontanism. He transformed the Irish Catholic community, colonial politics, and Newfoundland itself in a lasting way.

From the 1680s Irish fisherman had joined in the annual migratory cod fishery to Newfoundland, the only place outside of Ireland bearing an Irish name, Talamh an Éisce, land of the fish.   The resident Irish Catholic population grew in parallel with its English Protestant counterpart. With Newfoundland under the Penal Laws, each occupied different ends of the socio-economic scale.

Arriving in 1823, Fleming found Newfoundland grimly familiar: a comfortable mercantile Anglican elite led by the Crown-appointed Governor that discriminated, disenfranchised, and marginalized the Catholic Irish from all offices of influence. Lives were brutishly hard fishing, seal hunting, or scrimping a living from smallholdings Catholics were debarred from owning. When a smallpox epidemic broke out in Petty Harbour in the winter of 1835-36, Fleming lived with the poor, tended to their sick, and built a church. That was what he had done everywhere he travelled, leaving a trail of churches and newfound pride in his wake.

Fleming treated Newfoundland as if it were Ireland and determined to reverse Catholic humiliation and poverty.  On trips home, he recruited 36 priests, forged like him in O’Connell’s Ireland of politically mobilized Catholics. Fleming opened a school for young girls in 1833 run by Presentations Sister from Galway. The Sisters of Mercy from Dublin established a girls’ school for the small Irish middle-class, while Franciscans were brought to teach boys.  For Fleming, the students were future leaders.

Pastoral work paralleled fearless engagement in politics.  O’Connellite mobilization, fundraising, boycotts, and even excommunications were deployed. Support was offered to Liberal candidates who endorsed Fleming’s agenda.  Governor Thomas Cochrane and a handful of ‘respectable’ Irish Catholics (dubbed “Mad Dogs”) resisted, prompting sectarian tensions and, on occasion, riots. By 1832 Fleming and his reformers had won Catholic Emancipation. Formidable Catholic voter support for the Liberal Party, and state funding for Catholic schools soon followed.

Crown vexations over this ‘troublesome priest’ led to protests to Rome. In response, Fleming cultivated the cardinals. Through St. Isidore’s Irish Franciscan College in Rome, he sent them smoked Newfoundland salmon. He visited the Holy See and in 1837 submitted his report, Relazione, an impressive account of his travels and pastoral work along with counter-allegations of persecution by the colonial authorities. By 1840, fresh complaints from Newfoundland’s new governor, Henry Prescott, prompted Foreign Secretary Lord John Russell to ask Rome to remove Fleming.  Rome summoned Fleming.  The bishop ignored it. When British mandarins let Fleming see the secret inflammatory correspondence of Prescott, it was Prescott who packed his bags.

A factor in Fleming’s strong position was his ambitious cathedral. In Relazione, Fleming cleverly alluded to obstacles put in his way to securing land for this project, five years of “vexation and annoyance”. By 1838 Fleming had secured the Barrens, formerly site of the garrison overlooking St Johns, informally a location of Irish faction-fights and hurling matches. He put his formidable organizational and fundraising skills into top gear.  Small donations from low-income Catholics and some sizeable ones from the wealthy, including Protestants, flowed.  The larger Newfoundland community marshalled as a workforce, cutting timber and fencing land. In two days during May 1839, thousands of men, women, and children excavated over 4,250 tonnes of soil, women hauling it away in their aprons. 

Construction of the cathedral took fourteen years and 35,000 tons of granite.  In wintertime, up to his waist in water on the beach at Kelly’s Island in Conception Bay, Newfoundland, Fleming loaded cut stone into small boats for transport to the building site. Limestone from Galway was used on exterior walls, and granite from Dublin was used for the quoins, mouldings and window frames. Five

 times he scoured Europe for materials.  By 1847 he was too ill to travel. Financial setbacks and a great fire in St John’s the previous year did not deter him, even as the fire consumed his papers.  Frail and failing with tuberculosis, Fleming whispered the first mass within the cathedral in January 1850, its chill cavernous shell a glimpse of future grandeur beyond the dust, scaffolding and exposed rafters. He knelt in prayer, occasionally helped, but finished the Mass.  That was his last public rite. He was sequestered until July when he died and was interred in his cathedral’s vault.

The cathedral, finished by Fleming’s successor Bishop John Mullock of Limerick, was a triumph of Ultramontanism and neoclassicism, embellished with statues by the best Irish artists. Fleming’s cathedral was the largest architectural and cultural achievement of Ireland’s pre-Famine diaspora, a statement of faith in the future. At its consecration in 1855, Archbishop John Hughes of New York left determined that his city should have a cathedral to match the achievement of Newfoundland’s poor fishermen.

Fleming’s achievements were extraordinary.  Fired by injustice and inspired by his hero O’Connell, he used his determination, guile and talents to advance the status of Newfoundland’s Catholic Irish.  In the Franciscan tradition, he eschewed the fine living and clothes customary of many bishops.  Fleming devoted his life to the young and the poor through the provision of opportunity and pride. His cathedral (named Minor Basilica in 1955) was designed to instil that pride, its grandeur hardly out of place had it been built in Rome itself.  Just as enduring was Fleming’s political legacy which forged the politics of his Irish community and of the island, orienting Newfoundland away from Canada and towards Ireland and Europe. If Fleming had had his way, Newfoundland might well have become Ireland’s fifth province. Newfoundland only officially joined Canada in 1949.

Further reading:

Susan Chalker Browne, The Story of the Basilica of St. John the Baptist, (St John’s, 2015).

J.B. Darcy, Fire Upon the Earth – The Life and Times of Bishop Michael Anthony Fleming  (St. John’s, 2003).

“Michael Anthony Fleming“, Dictionary of Canadian Biography Vol. VIII, at http://www.biographi.ca

J.E. FitzGerald, “Michael Anthony Fleming and Ultramontanism in Irish Newfoundland Roman Catholicism, 1829-1850,  CCHA Historical Studies 64 (1998): 27-45.

J.E. FitzGerald, “Conflict and Culture in Irish-Newfoundland Roman Catholicism, 1829-1850” Ph.D. thesis, Univ. Ottawa, 1997.

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March 3, 2023 · 6:41 pm

50 ILIC: Tadgh O’Brennan and the Irish of New France

Born Castlecomer, County Kilkenny, 1632. Died Pointe-aux-Trembles, Quebec, 1687.

Eamonn McKee and Mark McGowan

Tadhg Cornelius Ó’Braonáin, Tadhg O’Brennan, known as Tec Cornelius Aubrenan, may have been the first documented Irish-born immigrant to Canada.  There had been other Irish who had set foot in Canada before him, such as the fishermen who had settled in Newfoundland, and perhaps Irish women among the Norse explorers to what was known in their sagas as Vineland, now disputed as either Newfoundland or Cape Breton. The honour of being known and named in official records, however, lies with Tadhg O’Brennan.

Born around 1632, it appears that Tadgh was from a parish near Castlecomer, County Kilkenny.  In a thoroughly researched paper published in 2002, Louis Aubry, one of his descendants, suggested that his father was Connor O’Brennan who held lands in Kilkenny.  He further speculates that ‘Diasonnay’, the phonetic record of Tadhg’s birthplace recorded on his marriage certificate, is probably a parish called Dysert near the river Dinin, a tributary of the Nore River just north of Kilkenny city.  There he finds Dysert Bridge where the two rivers called Dinan converge.

The O’Brennans held their strategic lands and became known as a military force in the region. By the time of the Cromwellian invasions, in 1650, however, the O’Brennans were unable to hold their estates and it is likely that Tadhg was one of the many Irish soldiers allowed to leave for France after the Cromwellian invasion.  In France, and though likely illiterate, Tadgh would have learned French, essential to his decision to move to New France. 

Tadhg arrived in what was then New France in 1661 at the age of 29.  He married Jeanne Chartier on 9 October 1670 in Notre Dame Cathedral in Quebec City, although they moved to the Montreal area where they had their family.  Tadhg and Jeanne had seven children, Madeleine Therese (1671), Catherine (1673), Jean-Cornelius (1675), Jean-Baptiste (1676), Francois (1677), Geneviève (1679), Etienne Aubrenon, who died in infancy at Repentigny, in 1681.  Tadhg died at age fifty-five in 1687 and is buried at Pointe-aux-Trembles, near Montreal.

Tadhg would have not felt isolated as an Irishmen in the St. Lawrence Valley. In 1700, “Tanguay’s Parish Registers” report that of the 2,500 families living in the colony, about 100 were natives of Ireland, and there were 30 other cases where either the husband or the wife was Irish-born. In parish registers, the local priest just listed the individuals as “Irlandais,” without reference to county of origin. Among those discovered in the  records of 17th century include Jean Houssye, dit Bellerose, who was actually John Hussey, married in New France in 1671. He was a native of Dublin and son of Matthew Hussey and Elizabeth Hogan of St. Lawrence O’Toole Parish. In 1688, Pierre and Jean Lehait were living in Quebec City, and were brothers formerly known as Peter and John Leahy from County Wicklow. Peter was a servant in the entourage of Governor Louis de Baude, Count de Frontenac. Similarly, two other Irishmen, Jean Lehaise (John Leahy) and Jean LeMer St.Germain, dit Irelande, of Thurles, were both granted land by the Sulpician Fathers, the seigneurs of the island of Montreal. Finally, in 1704, Jean Baptiste Riel was married at Isle du Pads. Antiquarian, John O’Farrell, suggests that he may actually be John Rielly of Limerick, and a distant ancestor of the famous Canadian patriot, Louis Riel.

The naturalization records from 17th century New France also list a number of women whose sometimes Gallicized names suggest Irish origin: Marie Washton (married to an Irish colonist); Anne Lord (Tierney); Catherine Dunkin (O’Dongen); Martha Finn; Madeline Alleyne (O’Halloyne); and Marie-Charlotte Brojon (O’Brogan). They may have come directly from Ireland, been refugees from the English colonies, or taken captive by French and Indigenous raiding parties on the frontiers of New England.

While Catholic refugees fleeing from the English and Protestant Colonies as far south as Virginia provided one of the sources of Irish migration to New France, the French and Spanish militaries were another important agency of emigration. Irish expatriates, like Tadhg who had joined the French army of Louis XIV often appeared in the regiments stationed in New France. Timothy Sullivan, for example, was a native of Kerry who had served with the Spanish Dragoons, and after having escaped capture by the English, fled to Montreal via the New England colonies. In 1718, he appears as a physician in Montreal, with a Gallicized surname Sylvain, and married the widowed mother of Marguerite D’Youville, the founder the Sisters of Charity, or Grey Nuns. Similarly, Charles de Latouche McCarthy, was born in Brest in 1706, France, son of Irish refugees. He was a decorated captain in the French navy and served in New France from 1737 to 1763. He married Angelique-Jeanne Guillimin, the daughter of a member of the Sovereign Council. He served New France with distinction through the wars of the Austrian Succession (1740-47) and the Seven Years War (1756-63). During the latter war, Governor Pierre Riguad de Vaudreuil assembled an Irish Company of troops consisting of deserters from the English army, Irish colonists, and refugees in New France. His Irish company was transferred to the European theatre of the war before the fall of New France in 1760.

We do not know much about Tadhg O’Brennan’s life in Quebec.  Nevertheless, he represents several generations of Irish men and women who recognized that there was no future for themselves or their faith after the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland. They found temporary homes in France, either through the military or the merchant trades, and many ended up in France’s colonial possessions in North America. Other Irish had found themselves in the New England colonies, but fled to New France for the liberty of practicing their Catholic Faith. Tadhg’s family lineage, and that of Sullivan and McCarthy, were in themselves a plumb line that reached deep into Ireland’s history.  As a microcosm of early Irish migration to Canada, Tadhg is a fitting character to have the honour of being the first officially recorded Irishman in Canada.

Further Reading:

Thomas Guerin, The Gael in New France (Montreal: Private, 1946)

John O’Farrell, “Irish Families in Ancient Quebec,” in Robert O’Driscoll and Lorna Reynolds, eds., The Untold Story: The Irish in Canada. Toronto: Celtic Arts of Canada, 1988. Pp 281-94. Originally published on 15 January 1872 as a speech to the Hibernian Benevolent Society of Quebec.

Tanguay Collection, Dictionnaire généalogique des familles canadiennes Québec, 1608 à 1890. Online: https://www.ancestry.ca/search/collections/2177/

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