Tag Archives: Irish in Canada

February 2, 2025 · 9:47 am

John Palliser and the Expansion of Canada

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 49^th 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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Filed under Anglo-Irish, Canada, Irish Heritage of Canada

Tagged as Fifty Irish Lives in Canada, Irish explorers in Canada, Irish Heritage of Alberta, Irish heritage of the Canadian Mounties, Irish in Canada, John Palliser, John Palliser Alberta, John Palliser Waterford

August 22, 2024 · 4:36 pm

Au Revoir Canada

Ambassador’s Message 22 August 2024

Eamonn McKee

We leave after an amazing four years in Canada, enriched by discoveries and encounters, new friends and collaborators, projects and opportunities. Like the beautiful expanse of Canada itself, there are so many treasures of the Irish influence and impact here to be discovered and honored. We are at the start of a reawakening of Irish Canadian heritage and new opportunities for the future.

***

Autumn five years ago, Mary and I sat at the kitchen table and wondered about our next posting. Our number one choice was Canada for family and professional reasons. Canada’s name and iconic flag resonated with promise and adventure too. With the very welcome support of the then Secretary General (Niall Burgess), the Government nominated me just before Christmas. After four wonderful years in Canada, we won’t be second guessing our decision.

A microscopic entity severely restrained the normal start to a posting which is typically dominated by meetings, networking, and receptions, all voided by the pandemic. We arrived in September 2020 to a near-empty Pearson Airport and isolated at the Residence. These constraints have to be seen in perspective. Lives were lost to COVID-19, families denied the solace of last moments with loved ones. We pivoted to virtual conferences, panel discussions, even virtual receptions and Embassy podcasts (listed below, along with blogs and Opinion pieces).^[1]

Local Irish radio shows like Austin Comerton (Irish Radio Canada), Ken and Mark (Irish Radio Saturday) and supremo host Hugo Straney (Facebook here) were vital platforms to keep people informed and connected. It was always a pleasure to be on their shows. One of my first and strongest impressions was how Irish groups across Canada and ICAN (the Eamonn O’Loughlin Irish Canadian Immigration Centre) retooled to address the pandemic’s impact on the community, from mental health support to food packages.

Anyone familiar with my blogs knows that I look for new stories of Irish heritage on my postings as Ambassador.^[2] Wow, did I hit the jackpot in Canada! Here I discovered an epic story of Irish settlement and influence spanning three centuries, mostly untold and largely unknown.

Some forty blogs later, the story only grows in richness. These explorations uncovered new material to celebrate Irish Heritage Month in Canada, provided fodder from my Opinion pieces in The Globe and Mail, Toronto Star and The Ottawa Citizen, and led me to the project Fifty Irish Lives in Canada 1661-2021.

As I walked to work, my growing knowledge of the depth of Irish settlement in Ottawa turned the town into a home. All around me in the capital region, there is Irish heritage and living Irish communities in the Valleys: Low and Venosta, Arnprior and Smiths Falls, Shawville (with a functioning Orange Lodge!), Eganville, and Douglas to name only a handful.

Prof Mark McGowan, my co-editor for Fifty Irish Lives in Canada (50ILIC), has been an essential collaborator. Mark is the great historian of the Irish in Canada, a man with the integrity and determination of an Old Testament prophet, and a wonderful companion over a pint, whether in Canada or Ireland where I hope to see him often.

Our consortium of writers for 50ILIC is an amazing group of academics who did not hesitate to volunteer profiles: Professors Rosemary O’Flaherty, Michele Holmgren, Elizabeth Smyth, David Wilson, William Jenkins, Laura Smith, and many others. Curator at the Museum of History, historian and skilled editor Tim Foran never refused a request for help, saving me from countless infelicities in some of my blogs about colonization and Indigenous relations.^[3] Grant Vogl of the Bytown Museum, another keeper of stories, was a great supporter and contributor.

The 50ILIC manuscript is near completion, many of the profiles are on the Embassy’s social media, and we’re looking for a publisher. Invaluable support from the President of St Michael’s College at the University of Toronto, David Sylvester, boosted our efforts, notably for the Conference last May that the Embassy and College co-hosted on Canada, Ireland and Transatlantic Colonialism.

Historian of the Irish of the Ottawa Valley Michael McBane is our great story keeper and dear friend. Like Donnie Kealey up the Gatineau Valley, Michael was among the first to reveal to me the extent of Irish settlement in the capital region. He pointed me to the final resting place of 360 Irish Famine victims in the heart of Ottawa, forgotten until now. We hosted the first ever commemoration and remembrance event at MacDonald Gardens Park in August 2022.

The exploration of Canada’s Irish heritage also triggered my interest in extending the National Famine Way from Ireland to Canada and indeed beyond. Caroilin Callery at the National Museum at Strokestown Park proved to be a true leader, harnessing up without hesitation to create the Global Irish Famine Way (GIFW), and indispensable to its development. Her father Jim as founder of the Museum has created an incredibly significant institution at Strokestown, a place for remembrance but dialogue about the Famine, historical legacies, and universal messages about humanitarianism.

Caroilin is a talented logistician whose boundless energy also wrangled a diverse group of us last May halfway across Ireland as we followed the Bronze Shoes of the Famine Walk to the Dublin Docks. Glamorous and physically very fit, she must have covered twice the distance moving between the vanguard and the rearguard as we strung out along the Royal Canal over six days! The symbolic departure of the costumed group, which included Caroilin and the great contemporary historian of the Famine Christine Kinealy, aboard the Jenny Johnson was a very moving finale, a weird time-warp back to the traumatic year 1847.

What a sight it was then last May for Caroilin, Mark and I to stand at Pier 12 in St John’s NL to watch the Marine Institute’s Celtic Explorer arrive after its North Atlantic voyage from Galway. Our fifteen emblematic Bronze Shoes were in its hold. We will never forget the reception at The Rooms, the process to and service at the Basilica, all organized by John FitzGerald who combines his passion for heritage and Ireland in the most effective ways.

The installation of Bronze Shoes is now underway at sites in Newfoundland and Labrador, New Brunswick, Quebec and Ontario. After Canada, we plan installations at sites in Australia, South Africa, and the United States. The 40,000km long Global Irish Famine Way is a project with a long life ahead of it, acting as a vital thread collecting the stories of the migration of two million Irish around the world. Caroilin and our network of volunteers have big plans for the GIFW, the Famine Summer School, and the Famine Walk (locals call it the Famino) in the years ahead.

James Maloney MP from Toronto has just been terrific. He leads the Canada Ireland Parliamentary Friendship Group with great passion and was instrumental in designating March as Irish Heritage Month. James has also been my go-to-guy, for tasks great and small. For example, thanks to James’ influence, Prime Minister Trudeau joined us for the first and necessarily virtual launch of Irish Heritage Month back in 2021 and again for a meeting with the Tánaiste in PJ O’Brien’s for St. Patrick’s Day 2024.

Thanks to a dedicated GIFW Committee in Ottawa, Bronze Shoes are soon to be installed at Macdonald Gardens Park as part of the Global Irish Famine Way. This installation is a project that rallied passionate support from the Irish community in Ottawa and from many quarters: Mayor Mark Sutcliffe, Councilors Theresa Kavanagh and Rawlston King, the expertise of Nick McCarthy at Beechwood National Cemetery, generous local fundraisers, and of course the Irish community who flooded public hearings to push the proposal over the line.

Our motto about the Irish in Canada is ‘It’s complicated!’ because it was one colony helping create another. Both Protestant and Catholic Irish were heavily involved in settlement and colonization, as leaders as well as settlers, from the RCMP to the residential schools, from opening up Alberta to widespread land cultivation and the lumber industry. That said, we have to be careful about accountability. This was Britain’s Empire, not Ireland’s. The abolition of the Irish Parliament in 1800 inflicted major macroeconomic damage to the island, set Dublin into a spiral of decline, and denied the middleclass jobs in the apparatus of national government. There were few options for a career outside the British Empire and emigrants followed its expansion east and west. It is notable that most Irish emigration to Canada occurred between 1800 and 1847.

We can explain the Irish role in the Empire but we cannot nor should not ignore this historical record. There is a new generation of young Irish wanting to embrace this complication through ‘a more appropriate relationship with history’, to borrow historian David Olusoga’s fine formulation. The role of the Irish influence in Canada deepened my understanding of Ireland’s own history, how up to 1916 Canada was the future that Ireland never had. Look at from the wider historical narrative, there is far less dividing nationalism from unionism than Northern Ireland, seen alone, would suggest.

Yet for all that we contributed to the disasters visited on the Indigenous, we Irish have a rapport with them. Our respective forebears survived colonization and catastrophic famine, preserved our culture and language, and made a success of forced migration. Against the odds, Ireland achieved Independence and economic prosperity. We proudly assert our values on the world stage.

It is by nature difficult in the course of a mere diplomatic posting to develop relationships with Indigenous communities. However, the discovery and research by Mark McGowan and Jason King, historian at the National Famine Museum, that the Anishinaabe, Wendat and Haudenosaunee gave aid to support Irish Famine relief in 1847 provided opportunities for outreach. The Gratitude event at the Residence last April was very moving. We used the Famine Walk to promote the story, both events captured in the documentary that Jason produced.

Anishinaabe elder and Chancellor of the University of Ottawa, Claudette Commanda spoke movingly at the Residence about her love for the Irish and the significance of the Gratitude event. She had previously spoken at our St Brigid’s Day event where she and Bridget Brownlow, who works on reconciliation in East Belfast, discussed colonization, gender, and reconciliation (podcasted here). Claudette is truly inspirational and I am honored to call her my friend. We have plans to invite her to Ireland to share her wisdom and insights.

No reception at the Residence would have been complete or Irish enough without Pat Marshall, plucking the harp or offering a recitation, nor the music of the Rideau Ramblers or the dancers from Fay Healy’s School of Irish Dance. We have a great Irish community in Ottawa, anchored in St Bridget’s Well in an old Irish Church saved from neglect and decay many years ago by Pat Kelly, Paddy McDonald, Rosemary O’Brien, and Fran Healy. Thanks to them musicians, the Joyce Association, the GAA, the Embassy and many others have a venue we can call a home from home. Our active and beloved Seniors’ group have been a joy and a blessing to Mary and me. President Kay O’Hegarty and leading figures like Claire O’Connell Noon and Norita Fleming organized the Seniors’ glamourous annual summer garden parties, genuine highlights of our time in Ottawa.

Over in Dublin, Nancy Smyth has been an outstanding Ambassador and a wonderful friend. The tempo of our bilateral relations has markedly increased thanks to her ceaseless energy and networking over the past three years She joined us on the Famine Walk for over two days of trudging along the Royal Canal. Every year she supported the Valentia Island Transatlantic Cable conference. When I joined her at the opening of the garden at the Emigrant Museum in New Ross last October, she was greeted ‘Hi Nancy’ by many. Says it all.

Robert Kearns, the visionary founder and leader of the Canada Ireland Foundation, has been a towering advocate for the Irish in Canada, from supporting peace in Northern Ireland through the Canada Ireland Fund to promotion of the Irish story here. We have formed a deep friendship through this and shared interests ranging from Ancient Rome to the minutiae of Irish history. Executive Director William Peat is one of the most talented, skilled, and informed people I know. His impact on the Irish cultural exchange between Dublin and Toronto is immense. Robert and William are building the Corlek Arts Centre in Toronto and it is going to be a jewel.

I met many Irish in Canada whose families had fled Northern Ireland’s sectarianism and conflict from the 1960s onwards. During my twenty-odd years working on the Northern Ireland Peace Process, Canadians made vital appearances. I had worked closely with Supreme Court Justice Peter Cory on his investigations of collusion, a wonderful man of immense integrity. I had often heard the name General John de Chastelain but had never met the man. The decommissioning of paramilitary weapons was the sharp edge of conflict resolution. John was a key figure in that process, literally helping take the gun out of our politics. A scholar, a gentleman, a painter, a genial host with wonderful stories to tell, getting to know John and his wonderful wife Maryanne, is one of the treasures we take home from Ottawa. Likewise, indeed, the warmth and hospitality of neighbours Scott and Elizabeth Heatherington who introduced me to much of Ottawa’s history and Nick McCarthy at Beechwood Cemetery. Scott, a retired Canadian diplomat, and Elizabeth’s joie de vivre, erudition and style is an inspiration.

I joined John and Maryanne when they came to Belfast and Dublin last year to participate in the celebration of 25 years of the Good Friday Agreement, notably at the Queen’s University Belfast Conference, the lunch for them graciously hosted by the Tánaiste Micheál Martin in Iveagh House, and the wonderful dinner hosted by Ambassador Smyth. As I am the last serving official from the GFA Talks Team, the visit had plenty of resonant moments for me. Representing the Canadian Government on the trip, Minister Seamus O’Regan’s eloquence when called upon revealed both the depth of his intellect and his passion for Ireland.

I could go on with all the stories, people, and connections that made this posting so enriching. Let me just say that we are only at the start of the reawakening of the Irish-Canadian relationship and its place in our Diaspora.

There are so many reasons to be confident about the future. We’ve a great Local Market Team and it has been a particular pleasure to work with Deirdre Moran and Mark Shorten at the IDA, David McCaffrey at EI and Sandra Moffat at Tourism Ireland when and where opportunities arose. We all regularly called for support from the Irish Chambers of Commerce, from BC and Alberta to Quebec, and Ontario. Along with benevolent and cultural societies, this network greatly magnifies Ireland’s presence throughout Canada. With anchors in Ireland like the Ireland Canada Business Association and the Ireland Canada University Foundation, the bilateral relationship is in great shape.

Frank Flood and then Cathy Geagan as Consul Generals in Vancouver have shown how it’s done when a new consulate opens, engages with the community and makes an impact. They have been great colleagues and friends. Building on the leadership of our former Honorary Consul Eithne Heffernan and other community leaders there, Janet and William as Consul General and Vice-Consul have gotten the new Consulate in Toronto off to a flying start, tapping into the energy of one of North America’s greatest cities. The city now ranks third among the IDA’s North American offices for inward investor visits to Ireland. Both Consulates, with terrific local staff, are great examples of the outworking of the Government’s Global Ireland strategy.

Mary and I had the pleasure of meeting so many Irish communities bound by heritage and buoyed by their commitment to each other and each new generation. This manifests in many forms, from parades and gala balls, to sponsorship, sports events, and charity. Above all, they care. They range from the big ones in Toronto, Montreal, and Quebec to myriad others seeded by previous generations. New ones are springing up, particularly in Vancouver with the new Irish there.

Mary and I had memorable visits to Irish societies, ones with deep Irish heritage like St John’s and Halifax. In Edmonton, Calgary, and Hamilton, we heard stories of emigration from Ireland in the 1960s and 1970s, inspiring and sometimes painful. They built social and sporting clubs, organized chartered flights to Ireland to assuage their homesickness. The heritage and strength of the Irish communities in Montreal, along with the Irish Studies programme at Concordia University, has always impressed me, not least because of how they sustain their Irishness through successive generations.

Thanks to the McGaherns’ and their wonderful antiquarian bookshop in Byward Market here in Ottawa, I was never short of a resource when I needed it, like the pristine copy I picked up of the ground-breaking Palliser Report and the edition of William F. Butler’s, The Great Lone Land.^[4]When I was writing a profile of Lord Dufferin (for the book Forgotten Heros of Ireland’s Great Hunger, just published, edited by Christine Kinealy and Gerard Moran), a box of reference material arrived in the nick of time. Only recently Liam McGahern found a photograph of Thomas D’Arcy McGee which I have long sought to hang in the Residence.

Our expanded slate of Honorary Consuls in Alberta (Colm O’Carroll and Deirdre Halferty, with Laureen Regan dynamically leading the Ireland Alberta Trade Association), Nova Scotia (Brian Doherty), Quebec (Bryan O’Gallagher), and Newfoundland and Labrador (Mark Dobbin) are terrific resources, bound by their love of Ireland and the Irish. Likewise, our Honorary Consuls in Jamaica and The Bahamas, Brian Denning and Bill Mills, represent Ireland with distinction and never hesitate to answer a call to help the Embassy or an Irish person in distress.

One very visible thing of which I am proud is the new Chancery in Ottawa. Years in the planning and execution, we moved in just a few months ago. We’re very proud of our new space. We hosted our first public event there with international students from the University of Ottawa. Last week we hosted Ireland’s first astronaut Dr. Norah Patten, along with her colleagues Aaron, and Shawna, an incredibly accomplished, visionary, and inspiring group (I wish I’d recorded our conversation because it would have made a fascinating podcast about microgravity, the Irish in space, and the logic of nothing over something!)

One thing less visible of which I am very proud is our team at the Embassy. In a small diplomatic mission, the quality of officers makes a huge difference. Deputy Head of Mission Dymphna Keogh did Trojan work, notably on the successful visit of the Tánaiste’s visit and the planning for the new chancery. Second Secretary Elisabeth O’Higgins’ leadership and management skills affirms my confidence in the latest generation of diplomats joining the Department. Local staff Glauciene, Daniele, Erin and Jenny have joined existing colleagues Breda, Aaron and Anna, and through some alchemical process, we have become one of hardest working, committed and funniest groups that I ever had the pleasure of working with. I will miss them greatly.

There is a special bond between a Head of Mission and Executive Assistant. Daniele has worked with me for just about a year. I could not have asked for more diligent and effective support. Our coordinator for the GIFW, Daniele did a terrific job organizing its launch with historian and passionate heritage advocate John FitzGerald at St John’s Basilica, NL.

It is stating the obvious that while Canada is a large, influential country, its southern neighbour is the big kahuna, the indispensable world leader, the location of our most prominent Diaspora, and the source of most of Ireland’s critical FDI. It gets a lot of attention from HQ. Yet colleagues at Iveagh House spared no effort to support and encourage us, whether from the Canada desk or from HR. HQ have approved new positions at the Embassy and expanded the team. David Guildea and Jennie Quin have been terrific temporary assignments at the Embassy.

All this culminated in the week-long visit last March of the Tánaiste and Minister, Micheál Martin TD, to Canada. He and his delegation, including our own Secretary General Joe Hackett, traversed Canada, from Vancouver to Montreal to Toronto, meeting our communities, launching new Irish companies here, and getting a genuine sense of the energy in the relationship. It was a wonderful way to spend my last St. Patrick’s celebration in Canada. Quite a contrast to my first one during the pandemic!

We have a very friendly diplomatic community with lasting friendships formed through many shared events and informal groups. Global Affairs Canada ingeniously organized virtual speed dating for us Covid Ambassadors to meet key contacts. I will be forever grateful to GAC for taking a group of Ambassadors on the Northern Tour of Arctic Canada through the Yukon, NW Territories and Nunavut. My search for Irish connections became a running joke during the trip but I found them, from the Dublin-born manager of the most northerly grocery store at Cambridge and Kono, an Inuit from Rankin Inlet, whose grandfather was born in Newry. Incredibly, this was only ten miles from the birthplace of my own grandfather in Newtownhamilton so they could have known each other! The trip was a privilege, revelatory, awe-inspiring, and unforgettable.

The career of a diplomat involves family. Separations and reunions, visits and departures have to be navigated in ways uncommon to more settled families, though reflective in ways of the emigrant life. You can be there for some family events but not all. Two of our children were born in the US, one in Ireland. They pay a price they were never asked to make. There are rewards for them too in many ways of course. They are making their own lives now. We gathered Eamonn Jr, Kali and Courtney for magical reunions and temporary stays from time to time in Ottawa.

Through it all, I have had the unstinting support of Mary, her partnership in running the Residence, her engaging presence at events. She turned a capacious Residence into a warm and welcoming space, and well run to boot! I can say, to a certain chorus of support from the community here, that she made this as rewarding a posting as it became. And since we picked up a Canadian son-in-law along the way, Quinten Mitchell, a wonderful lad from Brockville, our family bond with Canada runs deep now.

We have packed up our goods. The twenty-foot container has departed to Montreal for its voyage across the Atlantic. However, the most valuable things we carry in our head and in our hearts. Great memories, unexpected discoveries, a new member of our family, and dear friendships that will all draw us back to Canada.

Canada’s name and flag now have altered connotations and not just because I learned that an Irishman had been integral to its design. Canada now evokes the past four years and all the new treasures that we carry with us on our journey home.

Eamonn

Ottawa

22 August 2024

^[1] The Presentation on Ancient Ireland with Prof Mark McGowan of St Michael’s College Toronto has clocked 11,000 views.

^[2] In Korea, the heroic role of the Royal Ulster Rifles led to a monument at the War Memorial in Seoul to the Irish who died during the conflict, including members of the Columban fathers. In Israel, the story of John Henry Patterson as the founding father of the Israeli Defence Forces was a revelation about a fascinating character whose life inspired work by Hemingway and Hollywood movies. By coincidence, I was there when his remains were moved from the US to the military cemetery in Moshav Avihayil so they could lie with his comrades in the Jewish Legion.

^[3] This was particularly vital when it came to the issue of the Indigenous and the Irish role there, as for example on the colonisation of the Prairie NW, the Irish heritage of the Mounties or indeed the Residential schools and all their terrible legacies.

^[4] Searching for the Graves of Palliser and Butler in Ireland in the Summertime | eamonncmckee

Appendix: Op Eds, Blogs and Podcasts

Opinion Pieces

Dr. Eamonn McKee

November 2020	Opinion: At its core, Halloween is an Irish celebration of the rhythms of nature – The Globe and Mail
March 2021	Opinion: Today’s St. Patrick’s Day is a celebration of diversity – The Globe and Mail
March, 2022	Opinion: Celebrating Irish-Canadian relations past, present and future – The Globe and Mail
March 2022	St. Patrick’s Day: What a century of Irish independence tells us (thestar.com)
December 2023	ottawacitizen.com/opinion/mckee-move-over-colonel-by-the-irish-helped-found-ottawa-too
March 2024	Opinion: Celebrating Irish-Canadian relations past, present and future – The Globe and Mail

Blogs


October 2020	To Canada! \| eamonncmckee
November 2020	Impressions of Ireland-Canada: Building on Progress \| eamonncmckee
December 2020	Ireland’s Economic Resilience, Canada’s Market Opportunity \| eamonncmckee
February 2021	St Brigid’s Day Festival Vancouver \| eamonncmckee
March 2021	Matonabbee and Mr Dobbs: How an Irishman Accidentally Helped Create Canada \| eamonncmckee
August 2021	Canada’s Capital and the Rideau Canal: The Irish Connection \| eamonncmckee
October 2021	Reasons to Read the Canadian Journal of Irish Studies \| eamonncmckee
November 2021	Confluence, Divergence, and Convergence: the Irish Window at St Bart’s Church, Ottawa. \| eamonncmckee
December 2021	Canada’s Exploring Irish \| eamonncmckee
January 2022	Canada is the Future that Ireland Never Had \| eamonncmckee
January 2022	A History of Canada and the Irish in Canada in 250 Words \| eamonncmckee
April 2022	Ireland at 100: Colonization, Self-Determination and What the Census Tells Us \| eamonncmckee
August 2022	Black ’47 Commemoration and Remembrance, Ottawa \| eamonncmckee
September 2022	Joseph Quinn, Montréal Irish Person of the Year \| eamonncmckee
October 2022	Fifty Irish Lives in Canada: It’s Complicated and That’s Great \| eamonncmckee
October 2022	Tadhg O’Brennan, a great candidate as the first recorded Irishman in Canada \| eamonncmckee
October 2022	Bram Stoker’s Dracula, A Novel for Our Times \| eamonncmckee
October 2022	Wellington and Ottawa: How an Irishman and a Pot of Spanish Silver Transformed Canada \| eamonncmckee
November 2022	Memorial Service and Rededication of the Restored Geddes Window \| eamonncmckee
November 2022	I’m adding Rideau Hall to the Bytown-Ottawa Irish Heritage Trail \| eamonncmckee
November 2022	Irish Night on the Hill, 23 November 2022, Remarks \| eamonncmckee
December 2022	John Ahearn, founder of an Irish Canadian Dynasty \| eamonncmckee
December 2022	Thomas Ahearn, the ‘King of Electricity’ and the Man who Made Ottawa \| eamonncmckee
December 2022	Frank Ahearn: Businessman, MP, and Sports Mogul \| eamonncmckee
December 2022	Lilias Ahearn Massey: The Utility of Glamour and the Value of Privacy \| eamonncmckee
December 2022	Christmas Message 2022 \| eamonncmckee
March 2023	Fifty Irish Lives in Canada: Preface \| eamonncmckee
March 2023	50 ILIC: Tadgh O’Brennan and the Irish of New France \| eamonncmckee
March 2023	50 ILIC: Bishop Michael Fleming, radical pastor with a long legacy in Newfoundland \| eamonncmckee
June 2023	Colonial Twins: Ireland, Canada, and the Great Irish Famine \| eamonncmckee
August 2023	The Irish and the Colonisation of the Prairie North-West \| eamonncmckee
August 2023	Searching for the Graves of Palliser and Butler in Ireland in the Summertime \| eamonncmckee
November 2023	Software and the Singularity: Ireland at the Cutting Edge of Quantum Technology \| eamonncmckee
February 2024	How the County Meath brothers Richard and Arthur Reshaped the British Empire East and West \| eamonncmckee
March 2024	Ottawa Valley Irish: Douglas, where our Canadian journey really began \| eamonncmckee
April 2024	Gratitude Event at the Irish Residence \| eamonncmckee
May 2024	Global Irish Famine Way: Update! \| eamonncmckee
June 2024	Mother Barnes, ‘The Witch of Plum Hollow’ \| eamonncmckee
August 2024	Irish Lumber Barons and the Making of Modern Canada \| eamonncmckee

Podcasts

Embassy of Ireland

March 2022	Arrivals: The Voyage of St. Brendan – Embassy of Ireland to Canada \| Podcast on Spotify Arrivals: The Voyage of St. Brendan, part two – Embassy of Ireland to Canada \| Podcast on Spotify
April 2022	The Voyage of St. Brendan: 1 Barrind’s Story – Embassy of Ireland to Canada \| Podcast on Spotify
May 2022	Visit to Newfoundland and Labrador May 2022 – Embassy of Ireland to Canada \| Podcast on Spotify
October 2022	Ambassador Eamonn McKee in Conversation with Jillian van Turnhout – Embassy of Ireland to Canada \| Podcast on Spotify
January 2023	The Women of Ulysses – with Ambassador Eamonn McKee and Mary Durkan – Embassy of Ireland to Canada \| Podcast on Spotify
February 2023	Brigid: Resistance and Resilience – Embassy of Ireland to Canada \| Podcast on Spotify
February 2023	Ancient Gaelic Ireland and All That Remains of It – Embassy of Ireland to Canada \| Podcast on Spotify
March 2023	Irish Heritage Month – Three Irish Governors-General – Embassy of Ireland to Canada \| Podcast on Spotify
March 2023	Irish Heritage Month – the Aherns – Embassy of Ireland to Canada \| Podcast on Spotify
March 2023	Irish Heritage Month – Richard Bulkeley – Embassy of Ireland to Canada \| Podcast on Spotify
March 2023	Irish Heritage Month – Fifty Irish Lives Launch – Embassy of Ireland to Canada \| Podcast on Spotify
March 2023	Embassy of Ireland Book Club – Canadian Spy Story: Irish Revolutionaries and the Secret Police by David Wilson – Embassy of Ireland to Canada \| Podcast on Spotify
November 2023	Embassy of Ireland Book Club – The Imperial Irish by Dr. Mark McGowan – Embassy of Ireland to Canada \| Podcast on Spotify
December 2023	Embassy of Ireland – Discussion with Ambassador Jacqueline O’Neill – Embassy of Ireland to Canada \| Podcast on Spotify
February 2024	Embassy of Ireland – Elisabeth Barnes, The Witch of Plum Hollow – Embassy of Ireland to Canada \| Podcast on Spotify
February 2024	Embassy of Ireland – Panel Discussion with Chan. Claudette Commanda and Prof. Bridget Brownlow – Embassy of Ireland to Canada \| Podcast on Spotify
March 2024	Embassy of Ireland – Saturday Irish Radio with Amb. McKee – Embassy of Ireland to Canada \| Podcast on Spotify
April 2024	Ambassador McKee reads out the Irish Heritage Month Declaration – Embassy of Ireland to Canada \| Podcast on Spotify
June 2024	Embassy of Ireland – Global Irish Famine Way – Embassy of Ireland to Canada \| Podcast on Spotify

ENDS

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Filed under Canada, Irish Heritage of Canada

Tagged as Canada Ireland Foundation, Embassy of Ireland Canada, Global Ireland, Global Irish Famine Way, Irish Diaspora, Irish Heritage of Canada, Irish in Canada

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-19^th 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.

Gratitude Event at the Irish Residence

Remarks in Honour of Indigenous Famine Relief, 1847

11 April 2024

H.E. Eamonn McKee, Ambassador of Ireland

Fáilte roimh, bienvenue, welcome, biindigen! Distinguished visitors, guests, friends.

I want to begin by formally thanking the representatives of the Anishinaabe, Haudenosaunee and Wendat nations who gave us aid in the worst year of the long history of the Irish, 1847. They saw our refugees arrive on these shores and river banks, stricken and starving. They collected food for those already here. They collected money to send to Ireland. That act of compassion, of agency in the face a catastrophe that had befallen another people, shines out from the pages of history. Go raibh míle maith agaibh! Thank you! Merci! Kitchi Megwitch.

That page in our shared history would have remained closed were it not for the story keepers and on this occasion the story finders. I want to acknowledge Jason King, historian at the National Famine Museum and Professor Mark McGowan for not only finding this story but for promoting it. Their efforts have shone a light on this page of history and led this event and other events of gratitude and commemoration for the historic support of our Indigenous friends.

I want to acknowledge Jason King, the Museum and the Irish Heritage Trust for inspiring these events. I want to sincerely thank the team at the Embassy, particularly Anna McCready, for organising this event at the Residence. She’s done a magnificent job.

Thank you to Ross Davison for his wonderful music on the Uilleann pipes and to Two-Spirit David Charette for his powerful singing and drumming.

As always, to Anishinaabe Elder and Chancellor of the University of Ottawa, Claudette Commanda, your land acknowledgement and words were beautiful and inspiring.

In gratitude and commemoration, we are planting a copse of River Birch here at the Irish Residence. We could not think of a more appropriate symbol of thanks for this occasion. It is a native species, one used often to sustain lndigenous life, like the birch bark and resin used to make the emblematic canoe. The gardener, Ian Lawford, who planted the first one told me that by the time he had begun to plant the second tree, a small bird had landed on the first one to watch him. I like to think this was a good omen. I want to thank Ian and his team for the great job that Urban Tree Works have done. We look forward to seeing this copse grow in the years to come, just as we look forward to the growth of our relationship with our Indigenous friends.

In May, we are launching the Global Irish Famine Way. It is a heritage trail that will mark the passage of Irish famine emigrants in Britain and Canada, and later in the US, South Africa and Australia, even as far as Tasmania. With QR codes, it will be both a physical and a digital telling of this story, one of agency and resilience in the face of catastrophe, in the main man-made.

Each location will have a set of Bronze Shoes, cast from a pair found in the thatched roof of a 19^th century cottage in Ireland. They were bound together and hidden as if to say that though we may depart, we remain bound to our home.

One plinth will mark the grave of some 300 Irish famine refugees who died here in Ottawa and lie somewhere in Macdonald Gardens Park. Ottawa City Council will vote on a very strong motion of support for this on 1 May.

We also plan to put a plinth and Bronze Shoes here in this Birch copse to tell the story of the help we got from our Indigenous friends and allies.

The Global Irish Famine Way will be dedicated to all those who gave hope through compassion and success through opportunity to the strangers on their shores.

To me, this sums up the philosophy of the Indigenous, demonstrated not just in 1847 but throughout history and sustained to this day.

Thank you.

Go raibh míle maith agaibh. Kitchi megwetch

Embassy of Ireland

Ottawa

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Tagged as #GlobalIrishFamineWay, Bronze Shoes, europe, Great Irish Famine Canada, history, Indigenous Relief Great Irish Famine, Ireland, irish, Irish Heritage of Canada, Irish in Canada, National Famine Museum, National Famine Way, Residence of Ireland Ottawa, travel

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 17^th 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 49^th 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 19^th 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 19^th 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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Filed under Anglo-Irish, Canada, Ireland, Irish Heritage of Canada

Tagged as Bansha Castle, Bansha House, Darby Ryan, Irene Spry, Irish in Canada, John Palliser, Red Cloud The Solitary Sioux, Story of the Irish in Canada, The Great Lone Land, The Palliser Expedition, William F Butler

August 3, 2023 · 6:13 pm

The Irish and the Colonisation of the Prairie North-West

Ever heard of John Palliser, William Francis Butler, John Macoun, Garnet Wolseley, George and John French, Lief Crozier, or Frederick Middleton? All were leading figures in the colonisation of the Prairie North-West. All of them were from Ireland.

Some context. Canada confederated in 1867 following an earlier phase in the 1840s of responsible government that held the British appointed executive accountable to locally elected assemblies. Canada as a Dominion consisted initially of Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia. Manitoba became the fifth Province in 1870, British Columbia the sixth in 1871, and PEI the seventh in 1873.

The one and half million square miles to the north and west of Canada was Rupert’s Land, granted to the Hudson’s Bay Company by Charles II in 1670. The rest was the North-Western Territory, ‘added’ in 1821. The Indigenous inhabitants who had called it home since time immemorial were not consulted about the HBC’s charter or its claims to civil authority over their ancestral lands. (There is evidence of human settlement in Bluefish Caves, fifty miles from Old Crow in Yukon dating to 24,000 BCE: the first human presence in Ireland is 8,000 years ago.)

By the 1860s and the development of railways, British officials in the Colonial Office in London blanched at the cost of opening of this land to settlement. Yet they feared too that the United States might shift their manifest destiny northward after reaching the Pacific. Britain was keen that the newly confederated Canada establish its claim to the North-West before the Americans got any ideas. Enter John Palliser proposing an expedition to the North-West.

John Palliser grew up in an Anglo-Irish family settled in Ireland for many centuries. By the 1840s, Palliser’s devotion to big-game hunting had taken him deep into the interior of northern North America. His proposal to return came at an opportune time for the Colonial Office. With persistent support from fellow-Irishman at the Colonial Office John Ball, the Colonial office agreed to sponsor a scientific expedition to the Northwest. With an eye to projecting sovereignty and learning about the region, the Colonial Office offered support of £5,000 (over £400,000 today).

We cannot tell when Palliser himself reframed the expedition in his mind from hunting to exploration, but his leadership of the expedition over three seasons was marked by indefatigable good humour, no matter the hardship, and egalitarian charm to all he met. This kept his team together despite the truculence of one member. Significantly and singularly, it meant that the expedition avoided any violence in what was widely regarded as the hostile territory of the Blackfoot Confederacy (Siksika). Lewis and Clark’s violent encounter with members of the Confederacy in 1806 had not been forgotten. The lack of violence around Palliser’s travels through the region was all the more noteworthy because both Palliser’s party and the Indigenous knew that the expedition portended settlement, colonisation, and profound changes ahead.

Indeed, the “scientific” purpose of the Palliser Expedition was to investigate the potential of the land for transport infrastructure, agricultural and mining development, with the intention of settling a whole new European population there. This was science as colonisation. Even Palliser’s recommendations were not ultimately heeded by this impulse to colonise. He recommended against trying agriculture in a triangle of semi-arid steppe that later bore his name, the Palliser Triangle. Yet indeed homesteads were established in Palliser’s Triangle and the region was subject to punishing periodic droughts.

Palliser’s report was prodigious, full of data. It would remain a standard reference point for many years. Writes Irene Spry: “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.” [Palliser Papers, pp cxxxii-cxxxiii]

Palliser is remembered today in many place names in Alberta. However, like so many of the Anglo-Irish in British North America, both his direct contribution and his Irish identity has been largely forgotten. Comeragh House was burned down at the end of the Troubles in 1923, along with his personal papers. Thanks to the efforts of The Champlain Society, devoted to the preservation of the stories, rigorously tested against the highest academic standards, of those who helped create Canada, Palliser’s papers were compiled and published in 1968, superbly edited by Irene Spry. Her introduction is marvellous. She captures so much detail and personality, without losing sight of the geopolitical context and the consequences of the Expedition. Spry’s account of the Expedition is a classic: The Palliser Expedition, The Dramatic Story of Western Canadian Exploration 1857-1860 (1963). Palliser is buried at the Comeragh Church of Ireland cemetery, near Lemybrien, Waterford.

The American Civil War had consumed not just vast numbers of people, property, and materiel, but any capacity for foreign affairs beyond the demands the war. (The transatlantic cable between NL and Ireland was delayed until 1866). After 1865, Reconstruction was a priority and would remain so for years.

Almost immediately after Canadian Confederation, London set about organising the transfer of Rupert’s Land and the North-Western Territory to the Dominion of Canada through a sale agreement for £300,000 in 1869. A sale was prosaic but profound; who could challenge a transaction with money changing hands?

Another key advocate for Canada’s westward expansion getting Prime Minster John A. Macdonald’s attention was John Macoun from County Down, hired as the Geological Survey’s first naturalist and an obsessive collector of flora and fauna. Macoun, at the time a 51 year old botanist, would lead the development of the first natural-history collections for the Museum of Nature and become the founder of Canadian natural history. Through his popular talks in Ottawa he promoted the productive capacity of the North-West, while underplaying the rigors of its winters.

Before the Dominion of Canada could establish its control over the North-West, the Métis of the Red River Settlement mounted an armed resistance and asserted their rights to their land, culture, and livelihood. Under the leadership of Louis Riel (his surname possibly from Reilly or O’Reilly some generations previously), the Red River Métis established a provisional government in late 1869 and negotiated the establishment of Manitoba as the fifth province to enter the Confederation the following year. The Manitoba Act however did not contain an amnesty for the members of the Provisional Government.

To assert its authority in the region, Canada organised a military expedition under the command of Garnet Wolseley. 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 made his way up the ranks through energy, bravery, and leadership. A decorated soldier who saw active service in colonial wars in Burma, India (rebellion), and China (Opium War), and losing sight in one eye in the siege of Sevastopol during the Crimean War, Wolseley travelled to and investigated the American Civil War from the Confederate side. He was active countering the Fenian raids into Canada as Deputy Quartermaster (at 34, the youngest ever in that role).

Macdonald therefore picked a brave and experienced officer, “the most capable British soldier of the period” says the Dictionary of Canadian Biography (DCB), to lead the Red River Expedition against Riel and his provisional government. The Expedition had a two-fold purpose: end the Red River Resistance and project sovereignty over the region to forestall any American intentions.

Wolseley wanted to know more about the territory before committing his troops. He picked another Irishman as an intelligence officer to go in advance of the main force and report back. William F. Butler was born in 1838 in Tipperary and as a young boy witnessed the terrible effect of the Great Famine. As the DCB notes: “William Francis Butler was born into an impoverished family of Tipperary gentry with a tradition of service to the British crown. As a child, he observed the ravages of the Great Famine and seems to have been left with a permanent sympathy for the underdog. Although his education was interrupted because his father spent all his money aiding famine victims, Butler developed a passion for history and biography that occupied his leisure until his death.”

An experienced soldier, Butler had no experience of the rigors of the Northwest but he was tough and learned quickly from Indigenous guides and trappers. He convinced Riel of his peaceful intentions and was free to travel. Butler covered over four thousand miles on foot, horseback and dogsled, from Lake Superior to the Rockies, north to Edmonton and Lake Athabasca, along the Saskatchewan River, and back to Winnipeg. A talented writer, like Wolseley himself, Butler’s report was published as The Great Lone Land. It became a best seller and instant classic of Western Canadian History. Thanks to the great McGahern’s Antiquarian Books here in Ottawa, I got a copy. It is a great adventure story, with beautifully descriptive passages and vivid characters he meets along the way. Butler, from a Catholic family that survived centuries of turmoil in Ireland, demonstrates a huge empathy with the Indigenous communities whose lifestyle and even existence faced extinction in the face of the white settlement to come.

One of Butler’s tasks was to make recommendations to ensure the rule of law before an influx of white settlers in an area that had been roiled by tensions between Indigenous people, commercial hunters and trappers, stoked often by sales of whiskey (one of the forts, near present-day Lethbridge, Alberta, was actually named Whoop-Up). A Catholic and life-long advocate for Home Rule for Ireland, Butler was keen to bring order with the least amount of corruption. His recommendations led to the establishment of the Northwest Mounted Police, modelled on the Royal Irish Mounted Constabulary.

Like Palliser before him, Butler was acutely aware that he was participating in work that would bring an end to an Indigenous way of life in areas whose very lack of European settlement was what he found most alluring about it. The Cree, he wrote, had yet to suffer injustice at the hands of the white man because their land was theirs, their hunting grounds undisturbed. But their days were numbered, he lamented, “and already the echo of the approaching wave of Western immigration is sounding through the solitudes of the Cree country”. He continued in an eloquent summary of colonialism’s progress:

“It is the same story from the Atlantic to the Pacific. First the white man was the welcome guest, the honoured visitor: then the greedy hunter, the death-dealing vender of fire-water and poison: then the settler and exterminator – everywhere it has been the same story.” [The Great Lone Land, p 242.]

(Interestingly, Butler rose to become Commander of British Forces in South Africa in 1898 but resigned, sympathetic to Boer demands for home rule and unwilling to take the offensive against them. Failure in the war fanned Butler’s fame. He died in Bansha Castle, Tipperary, in 1910. Bansha Castle is a wonderful guest house today.)

Briefed by Butler and very well prepared, Wolseley led the Expedition from Toronto in May 1870. Expectations, notably in the US, were high that it would end in abject failure. They had not reckoned on Wolseley. 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.”

Wolseley’s expedition completed its mission, though Riel and his followers had abandoned Fort Garry and Riel himself fled south to the US. This was itself a good outcome, considerably easing tensions. The Anglo-Irish Governor John Young (Lord Lisgar) had warned Macdonald against execution were Riel intercepted. Years later, Riel’s execution after the 1885 North-West Resistance was a travesty of justice. It embittered the Métis and French Canadians against the federal government and exacerbated tensions along ethnic, linguistic, and confessional lines across Canada.

One of the most arduous military marches in Canadian history, hacking out new roads in places, Wolseley proved it was possible to reach the North-West without a major detour into US territory. (US refusal to allow Wolseley pass on their side of the rapids on the St Mary River led to the construction of the Salte Ste Marie Canal.) If Palliser had avoided provoking confrontation through inter-personal skills, Wolseley did so through the size of his force and the overweening power of the British Empire he represented. The expedition’s projection of Canadian authority was an unmistakable signal to the US about who ruled north of the 49th parallel.

Informed by Butler’s report, Macdonald instructed that the policing of the Northwest should be modelled on the Royal Irish Mounted Constabulary. The man he picked to lead it had briefly served in the Royal Irish Constabulary, George Arthur French from Roscommon.

The extended French family was deeply rooted in Galway for centuries, with a base created in Roscommon through a grant of five thousand acres. French found himself impecunious like successive Anglo-Irish generations who did not inherit land. They had to fend for themselves, often finding employment in the service of the British Empire. George French’s professional career personified this. French enlisted in the Royal Artillery, a branch of the armed services open to those who could not pay for commissions in, for example, the cavalry. Before he did so, he briefly joined the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC), which was to prove consequential for him. In 1862, two years after being commissioned as a lieutenant, French arrived in Kingston as an inspector of artillery for the Canadian militia. Canadian Confederation in 1867 was followed by plans for the withdrawal of British forces in 1870. French was in a key role overseeing the transfer to Canadian militia of forts and artillery. The militia would need artillery batteries and at his urging the Department of Militia and Defence instructed him in 1871 to establish and run artillery schools at Kingston and Quebec. In the 1870s then, French was one of the many Irish, Anglo-Irish, and Irish Canadians making Canadian nationhood a reality.

The foundational event in the establishment of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police was its famous March West in 1874. Its purpose was to bring ‘order’ by establishing a presence in key locations and project Canadian authority over the region. Macdonald chose French to become the first Commissioner of the North-West Mounted Police, the RCMP’s forerunner. Aged 32, he served from October 1873 to July 1876. The Government in Ottawa refused London’s request to send him back to the British Army because he was “urgently required.” The March West made the arduous journey of 2000 km and established bases at Fort Macleod, Swan River, Bow River, Fort Walsh and Fort Saskatchewan.

Enforcing strict standards of probity in the new force, a strict disciplinarian and very assertive with the authorities in Ottawa, there were tensions between French and the Government. Yet a review of what he and the NWMP police had achieved was deemed very successful and French demanded that Ottawa thank his force for their accomplishments. After fifteen years’ service in Canada, French returned to his British military career and rose to the rank of major-general in 1902, retiring two year later. It was a measure of the dramatic changes in Canada that French travelled across Canada in his seventies by train on the eve of WWI.

Among French’s 16 officers during the March West was his dashing and fearless brother John. An expert horseman, he cut quite a figure with his jet black hair and beard. John built a career in the NWMP (as would two of his sons), retiring in 1883 with the rank of Inspector, to take up farming and become a local politician. With the outbreak of Riel’s North-West Resistance in 1885, John raised a militia of 34 men, known admiringly as French’s Scouts. John was killed at the Battle of Batoche, shot through the chest reputedly by Métis combatant Alexander Ross who also died in the battle.

By 1885, another member of the famous March West, Lief Crozier from Newry, had been promoted to Inspector in the NWMP. (The only surviving red tunic from the March West was worn by Crozier and is currently on display at the Canadian Museum of History.) Crozier was prone to bouts of irrational behaviour that at times convinced his soldiers he was insane. He explained this as “prairie madness” and the episodes did little to thwart his career. Crozier warned Ottawa that Louis Riel’s return the previous year would cause trouble but Ottawa did nothing. Outnumbered by Métis at the battle of Duck Lake, nine volunteers and three NWMP officers were killed but Crozier escaped thanks to the intervention of Riel. He was promoted to Assistant Commissioner and resigned in 1886, disgusted that he was not chosen to take command of the force. He opened a general store in Oklahoma and became a popular figure regaling his customers with stories of his adventures.

The North-West Field Force sent to suppress the Second Resistance was led by Major-General Frederick Middleton, born in Belfast in 1825. “Middleton was 59 and his days of active soldiering should have been over, but under a Blimpish exterior he hid remarkable courage and endurance, considerable common sense, and more practical experience of frontier warfare than most British officers of his seniority.” [DCB] By 15 May, the Métis stronghold of Batoche had fallen and Riel was in custody.

Pompous, bad tempered, and fearless, Middleton was a canny soldier but failed miserably at winning friends and influencing people. He left a trail of outrage when he left Canada, accused of stealing a Métis’ furs and being dishonourable to his fellow officers. The DCB concludes: “In 1896 he was appointed keeper of the crown jewels, a fitting rebuke to those who had harried him from Canada as a thief. To the end, he remained fit and active, walking daily and skating when he could. He died suddenly in his quarters at the Tower of London.”

Of course I write all of this from my privileged position and white, European, Irish perspective. The view from the Indigenous side is profoundly different. I can only guess at it principle features, knowing nothing of the trauma and damage inflicted on generations of Indigenous families and communities. The fate of their homeland was decided across the ocean by kings, merchants, and strokes of a pen. The Indigenous assisted and rescued trappers and travellers (explorers only to us Europeans!). This hospitality facilitated the mapping and observations that led to colonisation. Treaties entered into with great solemnity and trust were vitiated, by London but in the main by Ottawa. Confederation and colonial legislation led to the expropriation of their land and the near destruction of their freedom, languages, ways of life, and culture. The formation of the NWMP and later RCMP became the cutting edge of imperialism, enforcers of the pass system on reserves, and the detention of their children in the Indigenous Residential School system.

A balanced and accurate account must record Indigenous agency. Indigenous communities had over millennia developed their societies and cultures in some of the most challenging environments on earth. As keepers of knowledge and in their relationship to the land, they lived far more sustainably than the European socio-economic model that colonised their homeland. They responded to the European presence as guides, allies, trappers, and traders. As the 19^th century progressed, Indigenous people faced almost impossible odds with concerted attempts to annihilate their culture and identity. The Residential School System was established on the basis of a report by Nicholas Flood Davin from Limerick.

The Irish involved in the colonisation of the Prairie North-West shared characteristics. They were Irish, deeply rooted in Ireland. Anglo-Irish by birth, heritage, upbringing, and lifestyle, they made choices based on necessities and the opportunities available to them. Most of those opportunities were available through service or business in the British Empire. Whatever they thought about the demands for Irish Home Rule, or indeed the impact of the Empire on the Indigenous peoples forcibly brought within its ambit, they were loyal servants of the Empire. They doubtless shared its self-declared values as well as the biases of the age when it came to notions of what constituted ‘civilisation’. Some of those opportunities, notably those in Canada, called for an adventurous spirit, courage, good horsemanship, and a hardy constitution.

The Irish of the North-West were not alone as émigrés from a colonised Ireland engaged in colonisation on behalf of the British Empire. Over 30% of the British Army throughout the 19^th century were from Ireland. They were many generations of Irish similarly engaged in British North America, whether willingly like the Anglo-Irish leaders of the late 18^th century (the Carletons, Parr, Bulkeley, Patterson, Hamilton et al), or unwillingly like the Famine refugees. People made choices in circumstances scarcely conceivable to us today.

We in Ireland have notions about constitutes our history, derived in part from our struggle against the very Empire that many Irish served. Our perspective in the 20^th century was derived too from an official narrative that was largely shaped by the republican seam in our history which took root after the French Revolution and was canonised by the Easter Rising in 1916. It is as satisfying as it is simplistic. Yet the Irish in history are all the more fascinating when looked at in their myriad roles from in and not just against the British Empire.

The Irish in Canada remind us that our history is more complicated than official narratives and approved perspectives allow. Exploring these complications allows us to embrace all of the seams of Irish history – Catholic, Protestant, nationalist, unionists, loyalist, republican, imperial Irish, and the many identifies that formed and changed over the generations.

Eamonn McKee

Ottawa

3 August 203

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Filed under Anglo-Irish, Canada, Irish Heritage of Canada

Tagged as Frederick Middleton, Garnet Wolseley, Imperial Irish, Irish in Canada, John Macoun, John Palliser, Lief Crozier, North -West Mounted Police, NWMP, William F Butler

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 17^th 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 17^th 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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Filed under Irish Heritage of Canada

Tagged as 50ILIC, Fifty Irish Lives in Canada, Irish in Canada, Irish in Quebec, Irish of New France, Tadgh O'Brennan

March 2, 2023 · 1:34 pm

Fifty Irish Lives in Canada: Preface

Today we celebrate the start of Irish Heritage Month, officially recognized as such by the Government of Canada thanks to the leadership of James Maloney MP and the Canada Ireland Parliamentary Friendship Group.

In celebration of Irish Heritage Month, we will launch Fifty Irish Lives in Canada on Friday March 3rd. Please join James, me, and our guests online for the event. From this day onwards, we will publish one profile of the Irish in Canada over the past three centuries. The profiles we are launching resoundingly affirm that indeed the story of the Irish in Canada is a fascinating one. Its richness lies in its complexity.

The launch of Fifty Irish Lives in Canada is the culmination of over a year’s work. The project was inspired by the Royal Irish Academy’s (RIA) publication of Irish Lives in America in December 2021. Surely, I thought, the story of the Irish in Canada deserved no less.

Professor Mark McGowan immediately endorsed the idea. Within days of bouncing emails between various places, the enthusiastic and willing response of the prospective contributors launched what was for all a labour of both love and discovery. Sage advice and expert inputs flowed from David Wilson, Michele Holmgren, Elizabeth Smyth, and others.

The collective wisdom from early on was that we had to confine the candidates to Irish born to avoid being overwhelmed. Being deceased was also accepted as a useful parameter. We realized quickly that we should strive to embrace not just those whose achievements gave them prominence, but those whose ‘ordinary’ lives were emblematic of the immigrant experience.

There is of course a notable predominance of men. Society at the time and in recorded history rendered half the population invisible: lack of respect, education, and encouragement denied women opportunity in life and a place in the record books. Between this launch and eventual publication, there is much work to be done to recover women and their contribution, whether quotidian or prominent.

We intend on publication to include an essay on gender and diversity. We also plan to include a response from Indigenous communities so that we can share the perspective on the Irish in Canada, who came from one colony to help found another one, whether their coming was willing or unwilling, knowing or unknowing about the impact on the pre-European natives of the land that we call Canada but to them was Turtle Island.

As the project gathered pace, we quickly grasped that not only was the story fascinating, it was also complex. In fact, we soon adopted the motto “it’s complicated.” Over three centuries, we see unfold in Canada the story of a complicated symbiotic relationship with the colony of Ireland, England’s first imperial adventure.

Traditionally seen as a story of immigration, the Irish in Canada must be understood as a story of colonialism. Only that can explain why so many varieties of Irish identity and background turned up in Canada: from the émigré Tadgh O’Brennan in the 17th century to the Anglo-Irish colonists of the 18th; from the fishermen of the 17th and 18th centuries; from Protestant farmers and Orangemen to Catholic labourers and the Fenians in the 19th; from the soldiers in Wellington’s British Army who settled in Canada in the 1820s and 1830s to the forced relocation of Irish tenants during and after the Great Famine.

The rich parade of Irish identity and perspectives revealed even in this small sampling testifies to the complicated history of Ireland itself and the key role many Irish played in the British Empire, whether unwilling or, as in many cases, willingly. Canada loomed large in the imagination of moderate Irish nationalists at home who strived for the re-establishment of an Irish parliament. History took Ireland in a different direction in a quickening of events between 1916 and 1922. Canada became the future that Ireland never had.

Tensions back in Ireland played out in Canada, notably between Catholic nationalists and Orange loyalists. Yet Canada provided a society that ultimately allowed such divergent loyalties to find common cause in building a stable and prosperous society.

No figure perhaps encapsulates this complexity more starkly than Nicholas Flood Davin. A supporter of Home Rule for Ireland, a supporter too of votes for women, Flood Davin was similarly inspired to write in 1877 a history of the Irish in Canada to correct a record that suggested Canada was the product of the Scotch, English, French and Mennonite Germans. He had harsh words for those Irish who denigrated their identity: “you may as well seek to fly from your shadow as to escape your nationality.” Yet, it was this proud Irish nationalist who undertook the commission of Prime Minister John A. Macdonald to report on Indigenous issues. He recommended the establishment of the Indian residential school system. From that conjuration of colonized and colonizer much tragedy flowed.

Yet the Indigenous and the Irish found a common humanity too that transcended the forces of history shaping their lives. As we will reveal, the suffering of the Indigenous inspired them to respond to the suffering of the Irish as news of the Great Famine spread and desperate Irish refugees arrived in the traditional lands of the Indigenous.

The project is now open to all submissions, each of which will be part of our online bank of Irish Lives in Canada. Now is the time to submit your favourites. Pick your person, keep the profile to one thousand words and your submission will be eligible for inclusion. We are keen to welcome entries that reflect the rich diversity of the Irish in Canada.

I want to thank all those who have been involved in this project, particularly the contributors and Mark McGowan who has written an overview essay of the patterns of Irish migration to British North America, capturing its duration and complexity with eloquence and clarity.

Following the advice of the RIA, we have adhered to the limitation of 1000 words. That is no easy task and I hope that you agree that we have collectively have achieved it without compromise of thoroughness or eloquence.

Eamonn

Eamonn McKee

Ambassador of Ireland

Ottawa, 1 March 2023

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Filed under Irish Heritage of Canada

Tagged as Ireland Canada Colonialism, Irish emigration to Canada, Irish immigration to Canada, Irish in Canada, Irish story in Canada

December 17, 2022 · 1:38 pm

Frank Ahearn: Businessman, MP, and Sports Mogul

(Bytown-Ottawa Heritage Trail: The Fabulous Ahearns cont’d)

Thomas Franklin Ahearn, known as Frank, was in Ottawa in 1886. By then his father Thomas had embarked on a career that would see him successfully establish a business empire with Warren Soper and a reputation as Canada’s leading inventor and moderniser of the city of Ottawa (see blog). Frank showed similar drive and ambition to his father, embracing with gusto a varied career as a military officer, businessman, parliamentarian and sporting mogul.

In his young days, Frank played ice hockey with his pals, using an old street car from his father’s company as a dressing room. Ice hockey indeed would be a life-long devotion and mark one of his significant contributions to Ottawa and Canada.

In the meantime, World War I intervened and like so many other Irish Canadians, Frank joined the army as a lieutenant with the First Canadian Supply Division, Mechanical Transport in January 1914. He served with the Canadian Expeditionary Force in France, saw action, was promoted to captain and was wounded. He returned home in 1916 and later became orderly officer to the Minister of the Militia, Sir Sam Hughes.[1]

Frank rekindled his love for hockey, managing amateur junior and senior hockey. “He became interested in professional Hockey because he felt that was the best way to get the city a badly needed new facility. Besides, he’d grown tired of the huge gray area represented by the term amateur during this period.”[2] Frank became a part-owner of the Ottawa Senators in 1920 and was a key figure in the evolution of the sport from amateur to professional.

The Ottawa Senators were a storied team since their foundation in 1883, the first club in Ontario and a founding member of the National Hockey League. They won the first Stanley Cup challenge in 1893 and kept it until 1906. They returned to winning form in 1920 when Frank became a part owner of the team, along with the founder and majority owner Edwin ‘Ted’ Dey.[3]

Tommy Gorman was another part-owner, one of the greatest managers and talent spotters in ice hockey history, winning seven Stanley Cups during his career. First generation Irish, Tommy was born in Ottawa of an Irish father, Thomas Patrick Gorman who was born in Kilmanagan, Co Kilkenny in 1849. Thomas Patrick was a newspaper editor so it was not surprising that his son Tommy became a writer with the Ottawa Citizen in the years up to 1921, writing about his great passion, sports.[4]

The Senators won the Cup again in 1922 again in 1923. It was then that Frank bought the Senators from Dey who was retiring. The Senators won the Stanley Cup again in 1924, with Frank demonstrating “his prowess as a handler of player personnel.”[5] Tommy sold his share to Frank in 1925 and went to New York to establish professional hockey there. The Senators were champions again in 1927, the (possibly) eleventh and final time they won the Championship.[6] The team for the 1926-27 season included some of the greats of ice hockey, Irish Canadians like King Clancy, Alec Connell, Cy Denneny, and the ‘Shawville Express’ Frank Finnigan (so called because he got the train to Ottawa but I’m sure it had something to do with his style of play!)[7]

Frank’s biography in the Hockey Hall of Fame:

“Ahearn was not one to shy away from significant transactions. After winning the Stanley Cup he sent Hooley Smith to the Montreal Maroons for $22, 500 and the immensely talented Punch Broadbent. A few years later sold King Clancy to the Toronto Maple Leafs for two players and $35,000. The latter move was one of desperation as the Depression took its toll on the once proud franchise. Ahearn fought hard and lost a great deal of money trying to keep the Senators afloat. He successfully lobbied for the team to be excused from the 1931-32 season. The next year the club finished last and was forced to relocate to St. Louis, Missouri were it ended for good after one season. Despite the ending, Ottawans enjoyed many years of outstanding hockey as a result of Ahearn’s commitment.”[8]

Along with Gorman and Dey, Frank was part of the consortium that built the Ottawa Auditorium, home to the Senators from 1923, capable of hosting 10,000 spectators. It was located beside what is today the Canadian Museum of Nature on the site of what is now a YMCA. The Auditorium’s fortunes waned along with the team’s decline from greatness. It went into receivership in 1936, with Gorman returning to take ownership in 1945.

Throughout these years, Frank was a leading businessman, following in the footsteps of his famous father, taking over the Ottawa Electric Railway Company in 1938 when Thomas Ahearn died. Two years later he headed the Ottawa Electric Company and had many business interests in realty, car manufacture and investments.

Frank was certainly a chip off the old block and in addition to his interests in business and hockey, he was elected to Parliament where he served for almost a decade between 1930 and 1940, a Liberal MP first for Ottawa City and then Ottawa West.

Frank’s family home was at 7 Rideau Gate, a fine detached residence, where he lived with his wife Norah, son Thomas and daughters Joan and Lilias. Frank died in 1962. That year he was inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame. Four years later he was inducted into the Ottawa Sports Hall of Fame.

Frank, his wife and children were the last private family to live at 7 Rideau Hall before it became the official guest accommodation of the Canadian Government. And that is part of Lilias’ story.

Eamonn McKee

Ottawa

17 December 2022

[1] Parliamentary Profile, https://lop.parl.ca/sites/ParlInfo/default/en_CA/People/Profile?personId=507 and his biographical entry in the Hockey Hall of Fame, https://www.hhof.com/HonouredMembers/MemberDetails.html?type=Builder&mem=B196201&list=ByName

[2] https://hockeygods.com/images/14791-Frank_Ahearn_Ottawa_Senators_President_and_Owner

[3] Wikipedia entry, Edwin Dey. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Dey

[4] Thanks to Michael McBane for establishing the Irish birth of Tommy’s father.

[5] Hall of Fame biography: https://www.hhof.com/HonouredMembers/MemberDetails.html?type=Builder&mem=B196201&list=ByName

[6] It is a matter of some dispute whether in fact they won it 9, 10 or 11 times.

[7] Finnigan won the Stanley Cup again, playing for the Toronto Maple Leafs. After his sporting career ended in 1937, Finnigan had a problem with alcohol and Frank Ahearn got him a job. Finnigan overcame his drinking problem and managed hotels in the area. His daughter Joan became a writer and collected many stories of the Irish in the Ottawa Valley. She wrote the screenplay for the 1968 docudrama, The Best Damn Fiddler Player from Calabogie to Kaladar which won the Canadian Film Award, as did the film itself. Margot Kidder, famously playing Lois Lane in the Superman movie, made her film debut in the movie.

[8] Op cit.

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Filed under Canada, Irish Heritage of Canada

Tagged as Bytown-Ottawa Heritage Trail, Frank Ahearn, Irish in Canada, Ottawa Auditorium, Ottawa Senators, Tommy Gorman

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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Filed under Canada, Ireland, Irish Heritage of Canada

Tagged as Ahearn and Soper, Bytown, Bytown-Ottawa, Irish in Canada, John Ahearn Bytown, The Fabulous Ahearns, Thomas Ahearn

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