Politics and Identity

Inspired by Daniel O’Connell’s campaign for Catholic emancipation and repeal of the union, Irish Catholic émigrés engaged in reform-minded politics in British North America. Party loyalties were often contingent on the manner in which others responded to their nationalist ideals (which varied according to time and place), the growing loyalty of the Irish to the Catholic Church, and their quest for collective rights within Canadian society. On the other hand, the emergent political parties in each colony sought out Irish Catholic representatives who could act as political brokers and deliver the Irish vote upon request. Eventually, as they integrated more fully into Canadian society, Irish Catholics won elected offices on the merit of their intellectual skills and political acumen rather than as ethnic bosses who could marshall votes.

Prior to the Rebellions of 1837–38, Irish Catholics living in Upper and Lower Canada did not rally exclusively to one political banner. In the latter province, Irish Catholics of O’Connell’s ilk and those dissatisfied with British rule in Ireland initially found much in common with the constitutional reform program of the French-Canadian nationalists and radicals led by Louis-Joseph Papineau. Between 1828 and 1836 Drs Daniel Tracey and Edmund Bailey O’Callaghan, through the stirring prose of the Vindicator and Canadian Advertiser (Montreal, 1832–37), attempted to wed Irish and French Reformers in the fight for ministerial responsibility in government. In 1832 Tracey stood as a radical candidate in Montreal and won by a narrow margin on the strength of his obtaining 84 percent of the French vote and 71 percent of the Irish. Tracey died in the cholera epidemic before he could take his seat, and his successor, O’Callaghan, charted an even more radical course that eventually numbered him among the rebels of 1837. O’Callaghan, however, took few of his countrymen with him. Most Irish Catholics, in their deference to the Church, defected to the Tories when the Catholic clergy condemned Papineau’spatriotes and when they realized that French-Canadian nationalists had become increasingly anti-clerical. As recent immigrants who aspired to making a permanent home for themselves in Canada, Irish Catholics were also uncomfortable with the radicals’ increasing promotion of violence.

The Tories were able to capitalize on the growing Irish fear that Reform was being devoured by French ethnocentrism and extremism. In the general election of 1834, the Tories entreated the Irish Catholics of Quebec City’s Upper Town to vote along language lines and link the shamrock to the rose in a battle against disloyal patriotes. This appeal worked: most Irish Catholics, who constituted about 6 to 8.5 percent of the eligible voters, gave their support to the Conservatives. No doubt the ardent pro-Tory stance of Father Patrick McMahon of St Patrick’s parish helped influence the result. In the same election of 1834, the Irish support of the local Tories almost led to the defeat of Papineau himself in the same seat that Tracey had won only two years before.

Irish Catholic political loyalties were equally as fluid in Upper Canada. While many Catholics followed the lead of Bishop Macdonell, who was allied to the Tory “Family Compact,” there were many influential Reform-minded Irish Catholics in his diocese. William O’Grady, the pastor of St Paul’s parish in York, openly supported the radical Reformer William Lyon Mackenzie, eventually took over Mackenzie’s newspaper, the Correspondent, and perhaps co-authored the famous “Declaration of Reformers of the City of Toronto,” a prelude to the Rebellion of 1837. But O’Grady’s politics did not go unchallenged in the Irish community. Francis Collins, the editor of the reformist Canadian Freeman (Toronto, 1825–34), who himself had been jailed for libel, blasted O’Grady and defended his bishop. Another Irish Catholic, the youthful Frank Smith, a future senator, opposed Mackenzie and later served as a courier for the militia during the Rebellion.

The unpredictability of the Irish Catholic vote in Upper Canada continued for the next two decades; in the 1854 election, for instance, Irish Catholics in Uxbridge unanimously rejected a local Catholic Liberal candidate and cast their votes for the local Quaker, who was an independent Liberal. In fact, in the pre-Confederation period, Irish Catholics, faced with a situation in which Liberal politicians were often more anti-Catholic than the Tories, actually voted Conservative. In 1851 the journalistic voice of Reform, George Brown’s Globe, admitted that Irish Roman Catholics “had always been fickle and ready to depart on slight excuse.”

In the Maritimes, Irish Catholic political activity was delayed until emancipation in 1830. Thereafter, the rate of Catholic participation varied from colony to colony. Irish Catholics in New Brunswick were virtually excluded from positions of power until the 1850s. In Nova Scotia, however, a special royal prerogative permitted James Kavanagh to become the first Irish Catholic member of the Legislative Assembly in 1823, six years before emancipation. This was followed, in 1827, by a repeal of the Test Oaths, which required that elected members denounce certain precepts of the Catholic faith before taking their seats in the assembly. Meanwhile, in Prince Edward Island, newly enfranchised Irish Catholics threw their support behind the movement that sought to abolish absentee landlordism.

A common thread running through pre-Confederation politics in the Atlantic colonies was the consistent Irish Catholic support for the Reform cause. In Newfoundland, P.E.I., and Nova Scotia, Irish Catholics, both as Reform politicians and as Reform supporters, played a key role in the attainment of responsible government. Afterwards, between 1847 and 1855, Irish Catholic politicians and voters generally remained in the Reform or Liberal fold. Sectarian troubles in P.E.I. and Newfoundland in the 1850s and 1860s reinforced the Catholic clergy and laity’s dependence on Liberal politicians as the principal voice of Catholics in the political forum. Conversely, Conservatives became identified with a number of anti-Catholic groups, including the Orange Lodge. In Nova Scotia, however, the sectarian bitterness engendered by the Joseph Howe– Crimean War scandal created a split among Reformers, with many Catholics switching their support to the Conservatives. Subsequently, the political sympathies of clergy and laity would depend on the issue and on the personality of the politician seeking election.

In the 1860s Irish Catholic politicians and clergy played a significant role in the Confederation movement. Archbishop Thomas Connolly of Halifax enthusiastically endorsed the federation, claiming that annexation to the United States was “suicidal madness” and that Irish Catholics had fared much better under British rule than they had in the United States. Connolly’s most significant contributions to Confederation were his refutation of Joseph Howe’s anti-Confederate position and his personal efforts to secure the educational rights of Catholic minorities in the new dominion. Connolly’s support for Confederation, and that of Bishop James Rogers of Chatham, was shared by several prominent Irish Catholic laymen who were present at the Quebec Conference in 1864: Ambrose Shea of Newfoundland, Edward Whelan of Prince Edward Island, and Thomas D’Arcy McGee of Montreal. McGee, a gifted orator and recent convert to Sir John A. Macdonald’s Conservatives, saw Confederation as a means of forging a “new nationality” wherein Irish, French, and British, whether Catholic or Protestant, could live together in harmony under the liberty provided by the British crown.

McGee’s innovative Canadian nationalism, however, did not sit well with many Irish Catholics, for whom memories of British mismanagement during the famine still festered and for whom Ireland remained the primary focus of national identity. One such politician, New Brunswick’s Timothy Warren Anglin, a Liberal, rejected McGee’s vision and initially opposed Confederation. So did a fellow Irish Catholic, leading Halifax merchant Patrick Power, who argued that Confederation would disrupt trade between Halifax and New England. Anglin’s argument, however, rose above Power’s focus on money to address matters of national feeling. Although he would profess his loyalty to Canada after Confederation was accomplished, Anglin was steadfast in his advocacy of the advancement of the Irish in Canada and freedom for Ireland. The Anglin-McGee dispute is further evidence of the fragmented nature of Irish Catholic politics before 1867.

Other Irish Catholics were willing to go much farther than Anglin in asserting their Irishness. It has been suggested that there may have been as many as 1,700 Irish Catholics in Ontario who were active in Fenian circles – clandestine groups of Irishmen intent upon achieving the independence of the homeland, by violent means if necessary. On the eve of Confederation anglo-Canadians feared that this fifth column might support an Irish invasion of Canada by the Fenian Brotherhood of the United States. By invading and conquering Canada, the Fenians hoped to obtain a bargaining chip which could be used in negotiating the end of British rule in Ireland.

In 1866 the Fenians did invade, albeit unsuccessfully, at Ridgeway on the Niagara peninsula in Ontario, at Eccles Hill in Quebec, and at Campobello Island in New Brunswick. There was no massive support by Canada’s Irish Catholic community for these invasions; in fact, they administered a death blow to Anglin’s anti-Confederation movement by convincing many in New Brunswick that the province could be secure only by entering a British North American union. Irish Catholics, although sympathetic to the Fenian aim of self-rule for Ireland, disapproved of the Fenians’ violent means of attaining it. Moreover, although such nationalist societies as the Hibernian Benevolent Society in Ontario were sympathetic to the Fenian cause, being a Hibernian was not the same as being a Fenian. Hibernians had been created out of local circumstances: to defend Irish Catholics against the Orange Lodge, to foster fraternity among Irish Catholic men, and to inculcate a sense of Catholic piety among Irish males. By 1866 the Irish Canadian (Toronto, 1863–92), an Hibernian organ, had disavowed the Irish Catholic invaders from the south, and it was not long before Canadian Fenianism soon evaporated like the will-o’-the-wisp.

What could not be denied in the realm of federal politics after Confederation was that Irish Catholic representation in the cabinet might ensure Irish Catholic support in constituencies where their numbers held the balance of power. The second political reality was that aspiring politicians would require some support from the Irish Catholic hierarchy and clergy if they wished to procure a share of the Catholic vote. Accordingly, Conservative prime minister Sir John A. Macdonald, at various times, recruited as Irish Catholic lieutenants the likes of John Costigan of New Brunswick, McGee in Quebec, and John O’Donohoe, John O’Connor, Frank Smith, and James G. Moylan in Ontario, all of whom were charged with the responsibility of securing the loyalty of their ethnic group. In the early twentieth century Conservative Prime Minister Robert Borden would employ Montreal lawyer Charles J. Doherty as his Irish Catholic representative. Similarly, in the three decades preceding World War I, the federal Conservatives also tried to court the support of the Catholic Church. Macdonald secured informal agreements with Archbishop John Lynch of Toronto, Thomas Connolly of Halifax, and John Walsh of London. In like manner, these prelates demanded favours in return for their support: patronage for Irish Catholics, resistance to “Orange assertiveness,” and the safeguarding of separate schools. The problem that ensued was that clergy and laity jostled for leadership of the Irish Catholic community. Lynch’s claim to be “the presumptive leader of Catholics” and “advisor to the minority” in matters political was frequently challenged by some of his own flock. Nevertheless, Prime Minister Macdonald and Oliver Mowat, the Liberal premier of Ontario, sought his endorsement.

As the case of Mowat demonstrates, Liberals were as eager as the Conservatives to win clerical and lay support among Irish Catholics. In Newfoundland, for instance, it has been argued that Bishop John Thomas Mullock was by 1860 the most influential politician in the colony because of his support of the Liberals. On the mainland, successive Liberal leaders utilized the services of Irish Catholic ethnic lieutenants. Alexander Mackenzie, soon to become prime minister, retained the support of Patrick Power of Halifax and the young John O’Donohoe of Toronto in the hope of winning the Irish vote. Edward Blake, leader of the Liberal Party from 1880 to 1887, could count on the likes of P.E.I. Senator George W. Howlan. Later, Laurier relied on such representatives as Charles Fitzpatrick from Quebec, Frank Anglin, John Ryan, and Charles Murphy from Ontario, and William F. Carroll from Nova Scotia. The tradition continued under Prime Minister Mackenzie King, who employed C.G. “Chubby” Power of Quebec as his Irish Catholic lieutenant. With significant Irish Catholic populations in the Maritimes, urban Quebec, and many Ontario ridings, prime ministers could not ignore the Irish Catholic fact.

If a government was discovered to have been negligent in honouring the rights of Irish Catholics, it was soon reminded of its duty by a robust and vociferous Irish Catholic press. In central Canada, Catholic weekly newspapers, operated by both clergy and laity and espousing both Church-sanctioned and independent positions, routinely offered political and social commentary. In the early nineteenth century Irish Catholic critiques of Ontario society and politics were furnished by Francis Collins’s Canadian Freeman (Toronto, 1825–34), the Mirror (Toronto, 1837–63), and the Catholic Citizen (Toronto, 1854–58), all of which were privately owned weeklies, published in Toronto, and openly sympathetic to Irish Catholic interests.

By the mid-nineteenth century, Irish Catholics in Ontario could choose from among several weeklies, each one supporting Liberal, Conservative, or independent political views. In an effort to foster the cause of Irish rights and representation, Patrick Boyle’s Irish Canadian (Toronto, 1863–92) moved its loyalty from party to party frequently. Boyle’s political commentary often put him a loggerheads with Canada’s political chiefs and his own bishops. To offset his views, several weeklies with a more Conservative political flavour and more sympathetic to the Church appeared: the Canadian Freeman (Toronto, Kingston, Ont., 1858–1941), the Tribune (Toronto, 1876–79), and the Catholic Weekly Review (Toronto, 1887–92). By 1892 Archbishop John Walsh had his fill of the internecine warfare between the Irish Canadian and its competitors; all of them were amalgamated into the Catholic Register, under direct clerical influence. Irish Catholic views on religion and politics were aired in the Catholic Record (London, Ont., 1887–1952), which had strong ties to the Liberal Party. Ontario’s Irish Catholic press underscored not only the high degree of its community’s involvement in politics but also its political diversity.

The Irish Catholic press outside Ontario was neither widespread nor long-lived in many locales. There were and continue to be, however, several weeklies of note. Timothy Anglin founded and edited the Morning Freeman (Saint John, N.B., 1850–78). The Casket (Antigonish, N.S., 1852– ) has served Irish and Scottish Catholics of Nova Scotia since 1852. Counting among its editors both Irish and Scots, it has usually been recognized as the voice more of Catholicism than of either ethnic group. Although independently owned, it was officially authorized to speak for the Church by Archbishop Connolly of Halifax in 1861; later, in 1919, the majority of its stock was formally purchased by Bishop James Morrison of Antigonish. Quebec’s Irish Catholics were served by the New Era (Montreal, 1857–58), the Irish Sentinel (Quebec City, 1872), and the True Witness and Catholic Chronicle (Montreal, 1850–1910), edited by George Edward Clerk, an articulate defender of Catholicism during the “Papal Aggression” controversy. In Manitoba, the Northwest Review, although founded as a non-Irish organ, supported home rule for Ireland in 1914 and, by 1920, complete Irish independence.

In general, small Irish Catholic newspapers in remote parts of Ontario and elsewhere in Canada and Newfoundland found it difficult to survive with such a small and exclusive readership. Moreover, they faced considerable competition from large Ontario papers such as the Register and the Record, which sought a national readership and were distributed throughout Canada. Small papers such as the Beacon (Montreal), the Northern Catholic (North Bay, Ont.), and the Prospector (Nelson, B.C.) amalgamated with the Register and Freeman to form the Canadian Register (Kingston, 1942–72). The new creation, subject to the scrutiny of the clergy, was devoid of any Irish character and reflected the integration of the Irish into Canadian society, where their principal badge of identity was their Catholicism.

By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, newspapers that had begun as Irish Catholic organs were sounding less and less Irish. Irish news slowly disappeared from the front and editorial pages; it was replaced by news of Canadian, Catholic, or international import depending on the newspaper. Some editors, particularly those of the Register, Record, and Casket, articulated an allegiance to Canada, the crown, and the empire. Furthermore, by the first decade of the twentieth century, there was a greater recognition of Canada’s place in the empire, not as a subordinate but as an equal partner of Britain and the other dominions.

Interest in Irish politics declined rapidly from the late 1880s on. The arrival in 1887 of William O’Brien of the Land League served to divide a community that was beginning to retreat from its former activism, and the fall of Charles Parnell in 1890–91 marked another step in the growing distance between Irish Catholics in Canada and the homeland. That distance became still more marked when Canadian delegates at the Irish Race Convention in 1896 were confronted squarely with the bitter and near-hopeless divisions among Irish nationalist politicians. Canadian donations to the Irish Parliamentary Party fell off dramatically in the 1890s. After 1897, not even the wealthy Irish Catholic philanthropists of central Canada, who had been the mainstay of the Irish nationalist cause, were willing to open their cheque-books for the Home Rule movement. Similarly, Patrick Boyle’s attempt to revive his defunct Irish Canadian (Toronto, 1900–01) failed miserably. Irish Catholic attention was now resolutely focused on Canadian issues.

Interest in Irish affairs was temporarily rekindled between 1914 and 1922, during the Rebellion and civil war, but the Irish Catholic response to the crisis was rather detached. Irish independence was seen in the light of President Woodrow Wilson’s support of national self-determination, as well as in terms of Britain living up to the principles for which the whole empire fought in 1914–18. Here was a case, it was said, for the self-determination of a Catholic people. When in 1920 readers of the London Catholic Record were polled, most said that Irish issues did not interest them much; it was more important for them to engage in issues germane to Canada.

World War I was a formidable test of Irish Catholic solidarity with Canada and the British Empire. The Catholic press, English-speaking Catholic hierarchy, and the laity not only expressed enthusiasm for the defence of the empire at the outbreak of hostilities but sustained their support for the remainder of the war. In more concrete terms, the numbers of volunteers among Canadian-born Catholics of Irish descent were particularly high between 1915 and 1917. During the three phases of voluntary recruitment, some 36,512 English-speaking Catholics volunteered for the Canadian Expeditionary Force, constituting about 7 to 10 percent of regional recruitment. The strong support for conscription in 1917 given by bishops Michael Francis Fallon (London), John T. McNally (Calgary), Timothy Casey (Vancouver), Alfred Sinnott (Winnipeg), Neil McNeil (Toronto), and James Morrison (Antigonish), and the ongoing war services of the Knights of Columbus and the Catholic chaplaincy, composed largely of priests of Irish and Scottish descent, won recognition from the Protestant community in Canada. The Canadian branches of the U.S.-based Ancient Order of Hibernians were so concerned that their loyalty would be doubted that they openly disassociated themselves from the anti-British sentiment of the AOH and threatened to separate from their parent organization. In addition, the Canadian Hibernians demanded that the American body’s official organ, the National Hibernian, be seized at the border as seditious literature. The conflict was soothed only when, in July 1916, Father C.J. McLaughlin of Saint John made a stirring public profession of Irish-Canadian loyalty to the British Empire at the AOH convention in Boston, condemning both German aggression and American innuendoes that he and other Irish Canadians were less than “true Hibernians.” McLaughlin won applause from a somewhat embarrassed American audience, and Canadian councils of the AOH opted to halt separation proceedings in the wake of the Easter Rebellion of 1916.

While the war experience strained relations between Irish Catholic men in Canada and the United States, the international crisis placed more devastating strains on relations between Canada’s English- and French-speaking Catholics. For French-Canadian Catholics, who supported the war initially but opposed the enactment of conscription in 1917, the events of 1914–18 confirmed what they had learned during the crisis over Regulation 17 in Ontario – their Irish brethren had cast their lot with the rest of English Canada. Thus, though World War I tended to draw Irish Catholics into the mainstream of English-speaking Canada, it also severely fractured the Catholic community along linguistic lines and helped amplify the long-standing ill will between its two charter groups.

The assimilation of Irish Catholics into Canadian society continued after 1918 and became particularly apparent during and after World War II. Bishops and clergy supported the war effort of 1939–45 wholeheartedly, and the extensive honour rolls that still adorn anglophone Catholic churches from British Columbia to Nova Scotia attest to the popular support for the war among the English-speaking Catholic rank and file. During the Cold War that followed, vociferous opposition to communism by Catholic associations and such prominent community leaders as P.E.I. native Cardinal James McGuigan of Toronto further enhanced the Church’s image among Canadian political leaders.

Politically, the growing Canadianism of the Irish Catholic community was reflected in the decline of the ethnic lieutenants, particularly at the federal level. Irish Catholic descendants in politics increasingly advanced primarily on the basis not of their ethnic status but of their political and intellectual skills. This change had first become apparent in many provinces and in municipalities such as Halifax, where Irish Catholics were sufficiently numerous that they could constitute a dominant presence in the legislative assemblies or on city councils. Since 1945, the careers of such politicians as Paul Martin, Eugene Whelan, Brian Mulroney, Gerald Reagan, Mary Clancy, Joe Clarke, Frank McKenna, Mickey Hennessey, James McGrath – to list only a few – have provided evidence of the same trend.

The transformation of Irish Catholic politics was conditioned by several factors: the increased social and economic integration of Irish Catholics into the Canadian mainstream; an acceptance by Canada’s Protestants of the loyalty of English-speaking Catholics during two world wars; a higher level of Irish Catholic literacy and post-secondary education; and a maturing sense of Canadian identity on the part of Irish Catholic descendants. The latter was facilitated, although not necessarily caused, by a fading interest in Ireland on the part of second- and third-generation Irish Canadians. The only real badge of distinction that remained for Irish Catholics in the twentieth century was their Catholicity, yet this too became problematic in the wake of the reforms generated by the Second Vatican Council.