Culture and Ethnic Commitment

Irish Catholic integration into the larger Canadian society took place a many levels – in the workplace, in the political forum, within families – and was facilitated by a large number of post-secondary educational institutions: St Mary’s (Halifax, 1838), St Francis Xavier (Antigonish, N.S., 1855), St Dunstan’s (Charlottetown, 1831), St Thomas (Fredericton, 1910), Loyola (Montreal, 1846), the University of Ottawa (1848), St Patrick’s (Ottawa, 1929–79), St Michael’s (Toronto, 1852), St Jerome’s (Waterloo, Ont., 1865), Christ the King (London, Ont., 1912), Assumption (Windsor, Ont., 1857), St Paul’s (Winnipeg, 1926), Campion (Regina, 1917), St Thomas More (Saskatoon, 1936), St Joseph’s (Edmonton, 1926), and St Mark’s (Vancouver, 1956). These institutions have offered Irish Catholic descendants the opportunity to improve their academic skills, frequently within a larger university environment, and have allowed many of them to make important contributions to the intellectual and cultural fabric of the country.

Perhaps because of their successful assimilation into the mainstream of anglophone society, however, Irish Catholics have not developed a strong and distinctive cultural presence in Canada. Although they have contributed greatly to the literary arts, music, folkloric traditions, popular culture, and intellectual life of Canada, their influence has not been as visible as that of the Irish Catholic community in the United States. In Canada, Irish Catholic culture has been cultivated in a more subtle, less public fashion. While there are certain regional exceptions – the prominence of Irish culture in the social fabric of Saint John, the folkloric culture of the Ottawa valley, or the music of Nova Scotia – there exists no discernible school of Canadian Irish Catholic letters, music, poetry, or scholarship.

Many of Canada’s Irish Catholic writers have earned international recognition, but, lamentably, few would be recognizable to the Canadian public. Also noteworthy is that few of these literati actually earned their reputations by producing anything that was distinctively Irish or Catholic. Morley Callaghan, perhaps Canada’s best-known Irish Catholic writer, made his name by addressing universal human themes in his novels and short stories; only rarely – for example, in Strange Fugitive (1928) – were hints offered of his Irish Catholic upbringing in Toronto, and precious few of his works deal with Irish Catholic themes. One critic has suggested, however, that perhaps the moral questions that permeate Callaghan’s novels of the 1930s were influenced by theologian Jacques Maritain, one of his professors at St Michael’s College.

The absence of a distinctive Irish Catholic flavour to Callaghan’s writing does not make him unique. The same lack of Irish motif is evident in the work of Mary Agnes (Early) Fleming (1840–80) of Saint John, the author of many exotic serialized novels, and poet Émile Nelligan of Montreal, whose creations reflect his maternal French-Canadian roots. Similarly, although Kathleen Hughes (1876–1925) of Prince Edward Island, one of the most prominent female correspondents of her day, was an advocate of Irish independence, her work was rarely identified as distinctively Irish or Catholic. Finally, the case of Marshall McLuhan – a former professor of English at St Michael’s College who garnered an international following for his provocative studies of the media in contemporary culture – provides yet another example of how Irish Catholics were able to become fully integrated within the Canadian milieu.

Two other writers whose work bore a distinctive Catholic stamp, and who acquired international reputations, are now practically forgotten in terms of their literary achievements. Thomas D’Arcy McGee is known best for his championing of the “new nationality” and his unwavering support of Confederation than for his poems and essays. The latter, usually dealing with Irish or Catholic themes, reflected his interest in inculcating Irish Canadians with a sense of their shared heritage – Irish, Catholic, and Canadian. Such poems as “The Indian’s Faith” and “Jacques Cartier” were printed in magazines and school texts long after his death. Thomas O’Hagan, raised in Bruce County, Ontario, attracted considerable attention in the United States for his literary and editorial contributions to the Detroit Daily Tribune, the Chicago New World, and the Catholic Register. His romantic lyric poetry and critical essays focused on such themes as Canadian history, Catholic culture, and his rural past. Upon his death in 1939, after an exhausting career of publishing and teaching in Canada and the United States, the Toronto Globe and Mail eulogized him as a man whose “contributions to the press on controversial subjects were marked by lucidity of expression and courteous moderation.”

Undoubtedly one of the most famous Irish Catholic poets in Canada was Father James B. Dollard. Born in County Kilkenny, Ireland, in 1872, Dollard immigrated to Canada in the 1890s and served as a priest in the Archdiocese of Toronto until his death in 1945. It was his poetry – imbued with Irish themes and Catholic devotionalism and preoccupied with the history of the Church in Canada – that won him fame locally and nationally. His poems appeared in Catholic newspapers, periodicals, and in at least four special collections. Of Dollard, the Globe wrote: “His poems are distinguished by their high literary quality, spontaneity and Celtic insight. To the scholarly touch of the Classicist he adds the magic and the vision of the true Celt.” Similarly, John Redmond, leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party, referred to Dollard as “a credit to his race and a leader of verse in the British Empire.”

Dollard realized that many Catholics were removed from the traditions of Ireland. He prefaced his Father Dollard’s Poems (1910) with the comment that the “Irish ballads, though I consider them the most meritorious part of the volume, may not be as well appreciated and understood here in America as they are in the old land ... But if in the heart of Erin’s exiles an olden chord is now and again thrilled, these ballads shall not have been written in vain.” Conscious of his place within a community that was not only Irish but Canadian, and loyal to his new home, Dollard began to develop Canadian themes in his verse. Fusing his Irish Catholic piety to his fascination with the history and geography of Canada, Dollard created poems commensurate with the distinct vision of Canada being developed by his parishioners. In The Bells of Old Quebec (1920), Dollard wrote about Jesuit missionaries, intrepid explorers, and the spired villages of the St Lawrence, all the while reminding readers that Canada, from its inception, had been nurtured by the Catholic Church.

Perhaps the academy, more so than individual artists, has made the most concerted effort to preserve Canada’s Irish Catholic culture. In 1933 James F. Kenney, a descendant of pre-famine immigrants who settled near Marysville, Ontario, founded the Canadian Catholic Historical Association (CCHA). Motivated by a love of his Canadian and Irish roots, a deep devotion to the Catholic faith, and a dedication to the study of early Irish history, Kenney hoped that the association would “bring to light the silent and neglected records of her [the Canadian Catholic Church’s] adventurous and spacious past.” From its beginnings, the CCHA’s English-language section has drawn its hundreds of members (in 1995 there were 320) from a wide spectrum: clergy and laity, professional historians and amateurs, genealogists and archivists, and, recently, adherents of non-Catholic denominations. Over the last six decades, the CCHA has been one of the primary agencies for the researching and publication of Irish Catholic Canadian history through its journal Historical Studies (Toronto, 1984– ). Another body, the Canadian Association of Irish Studies (CAIS), founded in the late 1960s, has broad interests encompassing Irish literature, drama, music, folklore, history, religion, and society. By means of conferences in both Ireland and Canada, and through a journal, the Canadian Journal of Irish Studies (Vancouver, 1975– ), as well as frequent anthologies, the CAIS has explored Irish culture at home and in the diaspora and in so doing has demonstrated the links between the two.

Individual academic institutions have also become hubs of Irish studies. In the mid-1980s St Mary’s University in Halifax established the Thomas D’Arcy McGee Chair in Irish Studies and endowed the Patrick Power Library, now one of the principal resource centres in the Maritimes for the study of the Irish. Earlier, in 1982, the Basilian father and former university president John Michael Kelly had created a chair of Celtic studies at St Michael’s College, University of Toronto. Although courses and cultural events in St Michael’s academic program have explored all of the Celtic peoples, the college, given its own rich history as an educational centre for Ontario’s Irish Catholics, has paid special attention to Irish and Catholic issues. Conferences, the publications of its professors, theatrical presentations, Gaelic-language workshops, and a student-run journal, Garm Lu (Toronto, 1986– ), have collectively made valuable contributions to nourishing and preserving Irish culture in Canada and in no small way has kept alive an appreciation of the Catholic dimension of that culture. Closely associated with St Michael’s is Celtic Arts of Canada, an association founded in 1978 with the intention of promoting Celtic culture in Canada. One of its most ambitious efforts came when its founder, Dr Robert O’Driscoll, edited and published The Untold Story: The Irish in Canada (1988), a two-volume anthology on topics pertaining to the Irish experience in Canada.

While Canadian scholars and their supporters have contributed much to our understanding of the Irish Catholic presence in the Canadian mosaic, much of the day-to-day Irish Catholic cultural life has been sustained by popular grass-roots associations and clubs. Many of these popular organizations have been founded and run by recent immigrants from Ireland who feel a sense of urgency about preserving their culture and who are shocked by the cultural differences between Ireland and Canada, and, more particularly, between themselves and Canadians of Irish descent. In 1975 such concerns prompted one migrant, Dorothy Taylor, to establish the Toronto Irish Players, a group dedicated to high-quality productions of Irish drama. In other Canadian centres, notably Winnipeg and Ottawa, local Irish expatriates and Irish-Canadian descendants have formed groups called the Tara Players which are dedicated to amateur theatre with an Irish flavour. Similarly, traditional Irish music, dance, and song are being preserved by Canadian branches of the Comhaltas Ceoltoiri Eireann (est. 1951). Individual Irish dance companies and small instructional groups, in part promoted by the Irish Dance Teachers Association of Canada (est. 1969), can be found in most of Canada’s large urban centres.

Although the 1991 census identified only about 4,000 Gaelic speakers in Canada (Scots and Irish Gaelic are not differentiated in the census), Canadian branches of Conradh na Gaeilge, an association dedicated to the preservation of Irish Gaelic, have been established. Canadian-born writers, in an effort to preserve Irish folklore, have been instrumental in bringing together scattered Irish immigrants across Canada. Largely by means of oral interviews, Joan Finnigan has recorded the tall tales of Irish lumbermen in the Ottawa valley and has preserved the eerie and ghostly yarns of Irish Catholics and Protestants who settled along western Quebec’s Eardley Road (Pontiac County) in the nineteenth century. Likewise, Edith Fowke’s monumental work in folklore has included a rudimentary demonstration of the Irish influence on Canadian folk music, including the famous Newfoundland song “The Squidjiggin’ Ground.”

In the popular Irish clubs, musical ensembles, and cultural societies, a sense of Irish Catholicity plays second fiddle to a sense of maintaining Irish culture in general. Such is the feeling within many of the county associations established by recent migrants. Here Irish persons – Catholic, Protestant, and those of no religious affiliation – play down their religious ties and stress their common interests as natives of particular Irish counties. This de-emphasis of religious affiliation reflects the increasing secularization of Ireland and a willingness to set aside the religious bigotry and strife that has torn Ireland apart. Even the revived St Patrick’s Day parades in such cities as Toronto and Ottawa, while celebrating a traditional Catholic feast and featuring overtly religious symbols and floats, are more an expression of shared Irish heritage than of the Catholic triumphalism that such demonstrations represented in the nineteenth century.

As for the “Troubles,” the Irish Freedom Society attempts to jog the consciences of Irish Canadians about British rule in Northern Ireland, but Irish-Canadian descendants pay little attention to the issue and many recent expatriates are satisfied to leave the old conflict at home. One Irish Catholic immigrant, referring to the reluctance of the Irish in Canada to discuss the Ulster issue, observes that this tendency reflects the “don’t rock the boat” mentality: “We’re okay, now leave us alone. Don’t talk about the British occupation of Ireland. That’s over there. . . They’re forgetting their roots.”

Today, Irish Catholics and their descendants form part of what is popularly referred to as “English Canada.” Religious toleration, political accommodation, economic integration, and intermarriage with Protestants have been significant agents of Irish Catholic assimilation into Canadian life. While the place names of the “old sod” dot the countryside – Dublin, Onslow, Mount St Patrick, Navan – few descendants would readily make the Irish connection with these names. St Patrick’s Day, with its special Masses and parades, primarily provides an opportunity to engage in secular merrymaking.

For most Irish Catholic descendants, their Irish heritage is shrouded in mystery, a mystery that has deepened with time since each new generation is decades farther away from the migratory experience. Whether they realize it or not, Irish Catholic descendants have given life to Thomas D’Arcy McGee’s idea of the “new nationality.” They are imbued with a sense of being Canadian, North American, and English-speaking. Their focus is entirely on Canada and the challenges it faces at the dawn of the twenty-first century. In the 1990s Canadians of Irish Catholic ancestry wholeheartedly accept, whether consciously or not, the truth of McGee’s final words to the House of Commons before his assassination in 1868: “The single aim from the beginning has been to consolidate the extent of British North America with the utmost regard to the independent power and privileges of each Province and I, Sirs, who have been and still am its warmest advocate, speak here not as a representative of any race or any province but as thoroughly and emphatically a Canadian, ready and bound to recognize the claim of my fellow Canadian subjects from the farthest east to the farthest west.”