Tag Archives: Irish Heritage 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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June 17, 2025 · 11:38 am

First Bronze Shoes of the Global Irish Famine Way Unveiled in Ottawa

The first Bronze Shoes of the Global Irish Famine Way were unveiled in Ottawa on Saturday. It was a ceremony of emotions: pride, poignancy, and joy under the blue skies of Canada’s capital city.

The Irish had done so much to build Ottawa from its earliest days when it was known as Bytown. Since the 1820s, an Irish community had taken root and prospered to this day. The Irish community had rallied around the project to establish the Bronze Shoes. They had raised funds and mobilized to ensure that the City Council approved the project. The Irish Seniors of Ottawa were our frontline troops.  We are so proud of them. We are proud too of Michael McBane who had kept the story alive of the common grave that was the fate of over 300 Irish famine refugees who arrived distressed in the summer of 1847 from an Ireland ravaged by hunger and disease. The city’s development in the 20th century had erased any visible trace of the graveyard. But Michael knew it was there.

We began the day with Mass at the chapel of the Sisters of Charity, the Grey Nuns, whose heroism had saved countless victims of disease and hunger. The chapel is a magnificent space, vaulting white walls of cathedral scale. The Grey Nuns shared in this pride because it was their forebears, led by Sister Bruyère and her small band of young nuns, who had come to the aid of the Irish, braving an unknown and potentially fatal disease to care for them. When their efforts failed, they buried them with dignity in the cemetery that is now known as Macdonald Gardens Park. The Oblate Fathers, doctors, nurses, officials and lay people had also volunteered and risked their lives to help. Overall, eighty Canadians died that summer helping the Irish up and down its coast, from Miramichi to Niagara.

There was poignancy is our remembrance of those lying in the soil beneath our feet. Men, women, children, families taken by typhus, a disease of unknown cause, spread by the awful conditions in which they had been forced to flee. Converted lumber ships without enough food, water, or sanitation taking them across the North Atlantic. Upwards of 7000 Irish packed standing room only on barges taking them to the Ottawa and Gatineau Valleys to find their people, find hope and a future. Poignancy too in the fate of all emigrants forced to leave their homes by necessity.

And there was joy too. That we had succeeded in only two years to turn an idea into a reality, a monument to our dead. That that monument was the first of the Global Irish Famine Way that will trace the journey of all famine refugees around the world, a journey of 40,000km to Canada, the US, South Africa, Australia, and Tasmania. Joy that they had created a diaspora of 70 million who had wielded great influence wherever they had gone. Joy at the thought that while many had died, most had survived and prospered, their descendants part of a great global community.

At Macdonald Gardens Park, speakers addressed the large crowd, all with different things to say about the significance of the day. Mayor Sutcliffe and half the City Council. Anishinaabe Elder Claudette Commanda offered a welcome of wisdom, love, and warmth. She could sense the presence of the dead alert to the living memorial above them.

Michael McBane was Master of Ceremonies, those speaking also included the Irish Ambassador John Concannon, James Maloney MP, Nicolas McCarthy of Beechwood National Cemetery, Theresa Kavanagh (who spear-headed approval on the City Council), Kay O’Hegarty of the Irish Seniors, Caroilin Callery of the National Famine Museum of Ireland and founder of the National Famine Way Ireland, our historian Professor Mark McGowan, and finally I spoke just before we unveiled the Bronze Shoes. There was music and poetry. Caroilin and I hugged at the sight of this solid, emphatic, empathetic monument of granite and bronze. The Global Irish Famine Way had its first marker in Canada.

We closed with prayers from Sister Rachel Watier, Oblate Father Robert Laroche, and Rev. Dr Karen Dimock.

People came to touch the shoes. The Bronze Shoes invite this response, fingertips feeling out the history here, the reality of the dead beneath us, the awareness of how and why they died. Everyone who touches them is part of our community of memory.

The Bronze Shoes are a memorial to the dead. They are a symbol too of the journey onward of the living who had passed that way. The Bronze Shoes are themselves on the move, with unveilings due in St John’s, Grosse Île, Quebec, Montreal, Saint John, Toronto, Hamilton, and Niagara. Along this central trail, other sites will be added over time. We will collect more stories, find more dead, honour them with our recall and ceremonies, celebrate their resilience and their achievements. Grow our community of memory.

Eamonn McKee

Ottawa

17 June 2025

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March 23, 2024 · 11:39 pm

Ottawa Valley Irish: Douglas, where our Canadian journey really began

[The following article is courtesy of The Eganville Leader’s 13 Annual Irish Edition.]

Mary and I arrived in Ottawa in September 2020. As far as we were concerned, Ottawa might be the capital city of modern, liberal Canada but its foundations were steeped in the traditions of colonial times. The Canadian coat of arms bears the royal standard of its British monarch, along with the Union Jack. The Governor General of the then Queen of Canada resided in nearby Rideau Hall. Parliament Hill was created when Canada became the first dominion of the British Empire in 1867 and remained a steadfast ally through two world wars. My British counterpart was not an ambassador but a high commissioner, as befits a country with a shared head of state and membership of the British Commonwealth. True, Irish workers helped build the Rideau Canal, and many died as a result, but the chief engineer was the British Army’s Colonel By who gave his name to the settlement, Bytown, until it was changed to Ottawa in 1855.

The first inkling of local Irish heritage came from a neighbour, Joseph Cull. His people hailed from Douglas, up the Ottawa Valley. In 2021, Joseph beseeched us to come to celebrate St Patrick’s Day there, even though we were in the midst of a pandemic lockdown. Terry and Evelyn McHale, who had served the Irish community at the Douglas Tavern for decades, were now retiring. So we hit the road and though we observed pandemic protocols, we enjoyed a wonderful visit, complete with pints of Guinness, in honour of the McHales’ service to the community. It was a joyous but poignant end to a fine Irish establishment.

The following year, Joseph invited us back for a larger-scale SPD celebration. As we drove through the snowbound farms under a leaden sky, we did not know what to expect at the Cull farm. Cardboard leprechauns appeared on the telephone poles. At the barn in the silence of the country, the doors opened to almost three hundred Irish celebrating St Patrick’s Day. The cacophony of music and chat swept over us. The barn was festooned with green glittering welcome signs and orange balloons. We plunged in to meet the Irish of the Ottawa Valley, led by Joseph’s brother Preston whose farm and barn it was. They were all sure of their roots, knew the towns in Ireland from where their people had come, and many were regular visitors to Ireland. I said to one old farmer ‘you have an Irish accent’ and he said ‘yes, outside of Douglas everyone thinks I’m a Newfie!’ As I told the crowd, you cannot throw a stone in Canada without hitting something Irish!

Ever since I have been exploring Canada’s Irish heritage. There is so much Irish influence in Ottawa that I wrote an Opinion Piece in the Ottawa Citizen entitled ‘Move over Colonel By, the Irish also helped found Ottawa.’ That influence spreads from Smiths Falls and Almonte to Renfrew, Low and Venosta in the Gatineau Valley, and throughout the Pontiac. Sparks and O’Connor, the Hamiltons of Hawkesbury, Andrew Leamy of the eponymous Lake, founding father D’Arcy McGee, the three Irish Governor Generals of Monck, Lisgar, and Dufferin, the inventor Tom Ahearn who brought electricity to Ottawa, JR Booth the great lumber baron, three of the Famous Five woman suffragettes, and even Canada’s greatest soldier Arthur Currie were either born in Ireland or had Irish parents or grandparents. Eganville was named in honor of John Egan who arrived penniless from Ireland and rose to be a great lumber baron and politician.

My search widened to include the Irish-born who helped shaped Canada, from the explorers of the prairies like William F. Butler and John Palliser to the father of Canadian natural history John Macoun, and the businessman Timothy Eaton who pioneered department stores and mail order catalogues. The Mounties were based on the Royal Irish Mounted Constabulary and Canada’s flag was designed by Paddy Reid.

Mary and I are approaching our last St Patrick’s Day. I am delighted to say that our Tánaiste (Deputy Prime Minister) and Minister for Foreign Affairs Micheal Martin TD, is visiting Canada for the celebrations, travelling from Vancouver to Montreal and Toronto. So we will not get to Douglas this March. We will miss the craic in Preston’s barn. But we plan to visit Douglas one more time before we go because that was where our Canadian journey really began.

And if you look closely at the Canadian coat of arms, you will notice shamrocks at its base, a fitting tribute to Canada’s Irish foundations.

Eamonn McKee

Ambassador of Ireland to Canada

Ottawa

1 March 2024

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December 18, 2022 · 7:51 pm

Lilias Ahearn Massey: The Utility of Glamour and the Value of Privacy

(The Bytown-Ottawa Heritage Trail: the Fabulous Ahearns concluded)

Lilias Evva Ahearn was born in 1918 into a family that had a local dynasty in Ottawa. Her father Frank had married Nora Lewis in 1909. Frank returned from the front in 1916, having been wounded.  As a war hero, scion of the business empire built by his father Thomas, and soon-to-be sports mogul, Frank was quite the man about town.  She was named after Frank’s mother who had tragically died giving birth to her aunt, also called Lilias. The family home was 7 Rideau Gate, a walk across the road from the gates to Rideau Hall, official residence of the GG.[1] 

Lilias would have learned from the outset of her life that attention was her due; from her doting parents, from the powerful people that visited them, and from the press.  As a young girl, she was often the prized flower girl at weddings of the local elite.  As she grew, her life was regularly reported in the press.  Gregarious by nature, a natural and witty hostess, Lilias learned to use to tools of glamour as an asset.  And then she had the wisdom to leave that behind, to discover the value of privacy.  

The Ahearn family were no mere spectators to the comings and goings of the Governor Generals that passed their door on their way to their official residence at Rideau Hall.  Her grandfather Thomas was a confidante of Prime Minister MacKenzie King and later a member of the Privy Council.  Her father Frank was a busy man in a city that the family had done so much to modernize and develop.  Lilias grew up in an atmosphere of politics and glamour within the small resident elite of Ottawa.  Family lore was rich, reaching back to John Ahearn, her great-grandfather and the Irish-born blacksmith who had come to what was then the rough lumber Bytown in the late 1840s or early 1850s.

In her perceptive view, the historian Charlotte Gray wrote that the Ahearns were Ottawa ‘lifers’, not like the ‘self-important comings and goings of the Dominion capital’.  The Ahearns and their Ottawa friends took access to the GG’s Residence as a right, not a privilege, she notes.  When she was 18, Lilias the debutante was presented at Rideau Hall:

“They [the lifers] included the Southams, the Sherwoods, the Scotts, the Keefers – and the Ahearns.  Thomas Ahearn, known as the King of Electricity because he brought electric street cars to Ottawa, was Lilias’ paternal grandfather.  Lilias Ahearn was born in the family cottage at Thirty One Mile Lake, a grew up with both the assurance of a rich man’s daughter, and the insecurity produced by Establishment Expectations.”[2]

The first years of Lilias’ life were momentous.  Canadians had just come through the trauma and victory of Vimy Ridge in 1917, a decisive episode in the formation of Canadian identity.  The Winnipeg General Strike put government on notice that Canada had to provide decent lives for all its citizens. The year she was born saw women granted the vote. This, combined with social change and the impact of technology, gave Lilias a degree of freedom and autonomy that generations of Ahearn women could not have dreamed.

Other reliefs to the slavish lives of women were coming on stream. Like her mother Nora, Lilias would have servants in the house, a dramatically different lifestyle to that of her grandmother, and even more so that of her great-grandmother. At any rate, the harnessing of electricity for domestic appliances achieved by her grandfather would transform households. He had invented the electric oven but others would apply the technology to a host of other functions, including fridges, irons and above all the washing machine, the greatest liberation from drudgery since the invention of clothes.

As a toddler, Lilias would have been known to Lord Byng (GG 1921-26), who had been the Commander of the Canadian Army Corps at Vimy and a Canadian hero.  Byng was an avid sportsman and loved the Ottawa Senators so much that he rarely missed a game.  That the Senators were owned by her father reinforced the social ties. However, the Byng-King crisis must have strained relations.  It was a complicated tussle between Prime Minister MacKenzie King and the Governor General about the dissolution of parliament.  As the crisis roiled, Frank and his father Thomas no doubt supported their friend, the Prime Minister. The outcome saw a significant evolution in the role of the Governor General.  At the Prime Minister’s insistence, the Governor General from then onwards represented the British monarch only, not additionally the British Government.

As Lilias matured into a young girl, Viscount Willingdon arrived at Rideau Hall in 1926.  This was also a momentous year as the Imperial Conference degreed that all Dominions within the Commonwealth were members equal in status to Britain.  The Governor General henceforth represented the crown but acted on the advice of the Canadian Government.

Society was changing fast, driven by the upheavals of war and the speed of technological development. Willingdon was the first Governor General to travel by air, flying return to Montreal.[3]  Telecommunications technology had fascinated her grandfather as a boy and propelled him into fame as an inventor and wealth as a businessman.  Telecommunications were was developing apace.  Grandfather Thomas was the technical expert for the first official transatlantic phone call made a Canadian Prime Minister in 1927.  “The same year he was appointed the chairman of the broadcasting committee for the diamond jubilee [60th] of confederation and oversaw the earliest coast-to-coast radio broadcast.” [4]  Thanks to his expertise, the celebrations were broadcast on radio, including the first ringing of the new carillon at Parliament’s Victoria [now Peace] Tower. A year later her granddad was appointed to the Privy Council.

By 1932, Canada had its first trans-Canadian phone system, thanks in large part to Thomas Ahearn.  The Governor General by then was the Anglo-Irish Earl of Bessborough who inaugurated the system from his study in Rideau Hall with calls to all his Lieutenant Governors.

When World War II erupted, Lilias joined the Red Cross and was part of the Royal Canadian Airforce. She met and fell in love with Flying Officer Douglas Byrd Van Buskirk from New York. As reported in the press, on 9 November 1941, Lilias learned that her husband was missing in action.  Then she received the fateful telegram from London that he had been killed in an air raid over Germany. It had been a massive formation flying in bad weather.  It took severe casualties with 37 bombers and 15 fighters failing to return.  Buskirk and his crew were buried in Dusseldorf, according to the German authorities. Lilias had just enlisted in the Canadian Women’s Auxiliary Air Force. She then joined the Canadian Red Cross in England as an ambulance driver, the press reported.[5]

Charlotte Gray again: “Then she reverted to type and married into the closet thing that Canada could offer as an aristocracy: the immensely rich Massey family.”  The splashy wedding in 1946 certainly lit up dreary post-war Ottawa.  Lilias had a blast and her wedding photo with her handsome husband Lionel and five bridesmaids shows it.

Lionel Massy himself had by this stage an interesting career.  He had served as Press Attaché for the British Commonwealth Relations Conference in Australia in 1938 which might have started a diplomat career (his father had been Canada’s first High Commissioner or ambassador in Washington).  However, he joined the army on the outbreak of war and served as a captain in the King’s Rifle Corps.  He fought in Egypt and Greece where machine gun fire injured both knees and he was a German prisoner of war between 1941 and 1944. 

In 1952 Lionel’s father Vincent Massey was appointed as the first Canadian to serve as Governor General.[6]  Lionel accepted the post of Secretary to his father but with reservations about the impression it might create of turning the office into a family affair.

No such reservations dogged his wife.  All of Lilias’ background, character and natural gifts had prepare her for her next and most significant role.  Since Vincent was a widower, Lilias was a natural choice to act as chȃtelaine, or vice-regal consort. Once she, Lionel and their three daughters were ensconced in the cottage on the grounds of Rideau Hall, Lilias took up her duties with gusto. “The Masseys organized the most divine dinner dances.  Vincent had a sense of style from his years in the diplomatic service, and Lilias was an excellent hostess,” recalled one contemporary.[7]  Dinners, lunches, receptions and even movies filled the Massey calendar. Lilias hosted with aplomb guests like Eisenhower, Nehru, Elizabeth the Queen Mother, Princess Margaret, Queen Juliana and Haile Salassie, and a host of European crown heads.

One of Lilias’ first duties was to represent her father-in-law at the 1952 coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in London.  Interestingly, Vincent himself opted to stay in Canada:

“Mr. Massey revived the use of the State carriage in 1953 when it was used in Ottawa for the Coronation celebrations of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. Amid much pageantry, the carriage brought Vincent Massey and his staff to Parliament Hill under escort by members of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Mr. Massey introduced Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II’s Coronation speech, broadcast in London and around the world. The carriage he used that day is still used for the opening of Parliament and during official State visits. To commemorate Her Majesty’s Coronation, Mr. Massey issued silver spoons to all Canadian children born on that day, June 2, 1953.”[8]

As the first Canadian citizen to be Governor General, Vincent Massey was a tireless champion for Canada, making 86 trips around the vast country.  He travelled extensively “visiting every corner of the country – where plane or ship couldn’t reach, he went by canoe or dog team.”[9]  On all but two of his travels, Lilias went with him, showing again that adventurous streak, grabbing life with both hands. When he had decided to remind Canadians about their great arctic territory and its Inuit culture, she flew with him when such air travel still had its dangers.  She was the first airborne woman over the North Pole.

Lilias used her talents and glamour to support the image of Canada’s first native Governor General and to demonstrate that Canada could hold its own with world leaders. She and her family illustrated too what an immigrant family could do if and when given the opportuntity. Canada had given them that. And they had given Canada much.

When Vincent’s term concluded as Governor General in September 1959, the Masseys left Rideau Hall.  Lionel took up a post as administrative director at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, promoted to Associate Director in 1963.  He died suddenly two years later of a stroke, aged 49.  Lilias moved back to Ottawa and into an apartment. She passed away three decades later in January 1997.  

In a way, an era ended not with her death but thirty years earlier when she returned as a widow to her home town.  By the time she had left Rideau Hall, Canada had established itself as a nation in its own right.  A new chapter was beckoning in which Canada would forge its own modern identity with a refashioned constitution, a new national flag, and a vibrant creative culture. As members of the jet-set, Pierre Trudeau and his wife Margaret channelled a new kind of glamour. 

At so many levels, the 1960s and 1970s challenged virtually every aspect of the society in which Lilias had grown and prospered. With a strategic insight worthy of her father and grandfather, she manifestly grasped this.  Privacy was her new value. On return to Ottawa in1965, she closed the door on the limelight.  Perhaps she intuited too that the iconoclastic new era would change the traditional deference of the press to social elites, rip the veil that shielded their affairs, illnesses and scandals from the public eye.  Glamour had utility but now demanded more imtimacies and with it more dangers for those who wielded it.

From now on, as Gray records, Lilias’ social circle were the friends she had known all her life, the aging lifers of Ottawa.  Lilias and her friends no doubt watched with interest the political and cultural forces reshaping Canada but their greatest adventures were in their memories. 

Lilias was the last leader of the Ahearns.  They had made an enormous contribution to Ottawa and a significant one to Canada.  Within three generations they had through talent and energy moved from a blacksmithing immigrant from Ireland to a business empire, the Privy Council and on to Rideau Hall.  That said something about them, the fabulous Ahearns, and it said something too about Canada, their land of opportunity.

Today, Lilias’ old family home at 7 Rideau Gate is the Canadian Government’s official guest accommodation and the Prime Minister lives in the cottage that hosted Lionel, Lilias and their family in the glory years when the Masseys ruled Rideau Hall.

Eamonn McKee

Ottawa

18 December 2022

[1] As I have written elsewhere, bought by Irish GG Monck and extensively developed by the Anglo-Irish Lord and Lady Dufferin.

[2] https://www.facebook.com/wwiicdnwomensproject.org/photos/pcb.248477750075474/248477500075499/?type=3&theater

[3] https://www.GG.ca/en/governor-general/former-governors-general/viscount-willingdon

[4] http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/ahearn_thomas_16E.html

[5] There is also a strange reference to the granting of annulment in the marriage of Lilias Ahearn and Wilbur Pittman Roberts, ibid, WW II Canadian Women’s Project, ibid.

[6] The family had made its fortune with the Massey-Harris company, founded in 1891, the largest producer of agricultural machinery in the Commonwealth, later Massey-Ferguson, so well known and loved in Ireland that the Massey-Ferguson is synonymous with tractor.  Vincent’s brother was the Hollywood actor Raymond Massey.

[7] Cited by Gray, op cit.

[8] https://www.GG.ca/en/governor-general/former-governors-general/vincent-massey

[9] Ibid.

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