Further Reading

There have been many general books written about the history of the Irish and their diaspora. A useful and argumentative text that presents the historical context of Irish migration is R.F. Foster’s Modern Ireland, 1600–1972 (Harmondsworth, U.K., 1988). A useful bridge between Foster’s presentation of the political, economic, and social conditions and American settlement is Kerby Miller, Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America (New York, 1985). Although Miller focuses primarily on the “creation” of Irish Americans, suggesting that Irish Catholics never ceased to consider themselves “exiles” from British oppression, the book is detailed with respect to the “push” factors that prompted migration. Miller’s hypothesis challenges Canadian scholars to explore the similarities and differences between the Irish Catholic migration experience on both sides of the 49th parallel and, in so doing, to avoid replicating American models too readily in the Canadian context.

The most up-to-date and comprehensive survey of the Irish diaspora in Canada before Confederation is Cecil Houston and William J. Smyth, Irish Emigration and Canadian Settlement: Patterns, Links and Letters (Toronto, 1990). A less scholarly, but well-written, account of the diaspora is provided by Donald MacKay, Flight from Famine: The Coming of the Irish to Canada (Toronto, 1990). Although its primary interest is narrowly regional, Robert J. Grace’s The Irish in Quebec: An Introduction to the Historiography (Quebec City, 1993) contains an excellent annotated bibliography of the Irish in Quebec and beyond, in addition to some useful and concise introductory essays to various facets of Irish life in Canada.

None of these general works focuses specifically on denominational concerns, but they do help place Irish Catholic migration to Canada in context. An historical synthesis of the Irish Catholics in Canada still awaits publication. In the interim, David A. Wilson’s booklet, The Irish in Canada (Ottawa, 1989), provides a welcome introduction to both Irish Catholics and Protestants. A much larger and less focused effort is the two-volume anthology of original and reprinted essays in Robert O’Driscoll and Lorna Reynolds, eds., The Untold Story: The Irish in Canada (Toronto, 1988). There are some regional studies in these volumes, and a few biographical gems, notably an entire section on the influence of Thomas D’Arcy McGee.

In the absence of a single national history of the Irish Catholics in Canada, regional histories are invaluable. An important study of the Irish in Newfoundland, the Miramichi valley, and Peterborough County is J.J. Mannion, Irish Settlements in Eastern Canada: A Study of Cultural Transfer and Adaptation (Toronto, 1974). Several recently published anthologies provide the best background for the history of Irish Catholics and Protestants in Atlantic Canada: Cyril J. Byrne and Margaret Harry, eds., Talamh An Eisc: Canadian and Irish Essays (Halifax, 1986); Peter Toner, ed., New Ireland Remembered: Historical Essays on the Irish in New Brunswick (Fredericton, 1988); and Thomas P. Power, The Irish in Atlantic Canada, 1780–1900 (Fredericton, 1991). Edward MacDonald’s New Ireland: The Irish on Prince Edward Island (Charlottetown, 1990) is a brief, but valuable, overview of Irish settlement in P.E.I., including several appendices containing passenger lists, lease information, and lists of gravestone inscriptions. Each of these books contains some essays germane to the development of Irish Catholics in nineteenth-century Canada. Unfortunately, as is the case in other regions, little has been written on the Irish Catholics in the twentieth century. Additional information on Irish Catholics in the Atlantic region can be gleaned from Terrence Punch, “The Irish Catholics, Halifax’s First Minority Group,” Nova Scotia Historical Quarterly, vol.10 (1980), 23–39, and Peter Toner, “The Origins of the Irish in New Brunswick,” Journal of Canadian Studies, vol.23 (1988), 104–19.

Aside from the aforementioned work of Robert Grace, the settlement of the Irish in Quebec has been handled in a variety of local studies, including Marianna O’Gallagher’s balanced essay, Grosse Île: Gateway to Canada, 1832–1937 (Ste-Foy, Que., 1984) and her St. Patrick’s, Quebec (Quebec City, 1981); and Suzanne D. Cross, “The Irish in Montreal, 1967–96, “ (M.A. thesis, McGill University, 1969).

Currently, the historiography of the Irish in Quebec is not as extensive as that pertaining to Ontario. Perhaps the most controversial studies of Irish settlement in Ontario are two by Donald Harmon Akenson, The Irish in Ontario: A Study in Rural History (Montreal, 1984) and Being Had: Historians, Evidence and the Irish in North America (Port Credit, Ont., 1985). Akenson challenges the image of Irish Catholics as poor, unskilled city-dwellers; his studies of Leeds and Lansdowne townships illustrate the relative prosperity of Irish Catholic farmers when compared to their neighbours. Akenson’s work has come at a time of a flurry of demographic analysis on rural Ontario. Among the best studies that tend to modify, clarify, and adjust Akenson’s claims of “small differences” between Irish Catholics and Protestants are Julian Gwyn’s “The Irish in the Napanee Valley: Camden East Township, 1851–1881,” in Robert O’Driscoll and Lorna Reynolds, eds., The Untold Story: The Irish in Canada (Toronto, 1988), 355–77, and Glenn Lockwood, “Success and Doubtful Image of the Irish Immigrants in Upper Canada: The Case of Montague Township, 1820–1900,” in ibid, 319–41. Wendy Cameron’s “Selecting Peter Robinson’s Irish Emigrants,” Histoire sociale/Social History, vol.9 (1976), 29–46, is a fascinating profile of the Irish Catholic block settlement of Peterborough and Lanark counties in 1823 and 1825.

Unfortunately, little scholarly work has been done on Irish Catholic settlement west of Ontario, with the exception of preliminary studies such as Gerald Stortz, “Archbishop Lynch and the New Ireland: An Unfulfilled Dream for Canada’s Northwest,” Catholic Historical Review, vol.68 (1982), 612–24, and George Sheppard, “Starvation, Moral Ruin, A Frozen Grave,” The Beaver, vol.70 (1990), 6–14. A valuable glimpse of the fledgling Irish Catholic community in early twentieth-century Saskatchewan is provided by Michael Cottrell, “John Joseph Leddy and the Battle for the Soul of the Catholic Church in the West,” Canadian Catholic Historical Association (CCHA), Historical Studies, vol.61 (1995), 41–52. Also under-represented in the literature is the story of the settlement of Irish Catholic women. Although somewhat nationalistic in tone, Sheelagh Conway, The Faraway Hills are Green: Voices of Irish Women in Canada (Toronto, 1992), is the only publication to date dedicated exclusively to women’s migration experience.

Many scholarly accounts of the Irish Catholics have not tested the American models of Irish Catholic social and economic life sufficiently. In the past, Irish Catholics have been stigmatized as poor, drunken, and violent in works such as Michael Cross, “The Shiner’s War: Social Violence in the Ottawa Valley in the 1830s,” Canadian Historical Review, vol.54 (1973), 1–26; Kenneth Duncan, “Irish Famine Immigration and the Social Structure of Canada West,” Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology, vol.2 (1965), 19–40; Clare Pentland,Labour and Capital in Canada, 1650–1860 (Toronto, 1981); and Murray Nicolson “The Irish Experience in Ontario: Urban or Rural?” Urban History Review, vol.14 (1985), 37– 45. This image has been echoed implicitly in other regional contexts by such works as Judith Fingard’s The Dark Side of Life in Victorian Halifax (Porter’s Lake, N.S., 1989). Akenson’s challenge to this image in his studies on Ontario, the work of Houston and Smyth, and the statistical analysis in Gordon Darroch and Michael Ornstein, “Ethnicity and Occupational Structure in Canada in 1871,” Canadian Historical Review, vol.61 (1980), 305–33, have provided important correctives to the persistence of the American-style “paddy” image of Canada’s Irish Catholics. A twentieth-century attack on this image is provided in Mark G. McGowan, “‘We are all Canadians’: A Social, Religious and Cultural Portrait of Toronto’s English-speaking Catholics, 1890–1920” (Ph.D. thesis, University of Toronto, 1988).

In the absence of a scholarly synthesis of the history of the Catholic Church in Canada, those seeking an understanding of the religious dimension of Irish Catholic life must rely on periodical literature and several recent anthologies of high quality. The annual journal of the CCHA, called variously Report (1933–65), Study Sessions (1966–83), and Historical Studies (1984– ), contains dozens of articles on key Irish Catholic men and women, local and regional studies of Irish Catholic communities, and historical appraisals of controversies – social, religious, and political – that have engaged Irish Catholics since the ancien régime. The most up-to-date and scholarly appraisal of English-speaking Catholics in Canada is Terence Murphy and Gerald Stortz, eds., Creed and Culture: The Place of English-speaking Catholics in Canadian Society, 1750–1930 (Montreal, 1993). One of the few shortcomings of this volume, as is the case generally in the historiography, is a lack of treatment of Irish Catholics in the twentieth century and a brief treatment of English-speaking Catholic communities west of Ontario. Another very helpful, but regional, study with an eye to social history is Mark G. McGowan and Brian P. Clark, eds., Catholics at the Gathering Place: Historical Essays on the Archdiocese of Toronto, 1841–1991 (Toronto, 1993). For the Atlantic region, one of the best collections to date is Terence Murphy and Cyril Byrne, eds., Religion and Identity: The Experience of Irish Scottish Catholics in Atlantic Canada (St John’s, Nfld., 1987).

There have been a number of monographs and articles that have focused more on Irish Catholic religious life, popular piety, and religious leadership. One of the most insightful studies of lay initiative and Irish Catholic religious nationalism is Brian P. Clarke, Piety and Nationalism: Lay Voluntary Associations and the Creation of an Irish-Catholic Community in Toronto, 1850–1895 (Montreal, 1994). Mark G. McGowan’s, “The Catholic Restoration: Pope Pius X, Archbishop Denis O’Connor, and Popular Catholicism in Toronto, 1899–1908,” CCHA Historical Studies, vol.54 (1987), 69–91, helps to bring the study of Irish Catholic popular piety into the twentieth-century context. These studies are balanced by examinations of Irish Catholic institutions found in the works of Murray Nicolson, especially his “Ecclesiastical Metropolitanism and the Evolution of the Archdiocese of Toronto,” Histoire sociale/Social History, vol.15 (1982), and for Atlantic Canada in Terence Murphy, “The Emergence of Maritime Catholicism, 1781–1830,” Acadiensis, vol.13, no.2 (1984), 29–49. Valuable insights into the life of Irish Catholic women religious are found in Elizabeth Smyth, “Congregavit nos in unum Christi amor: The Congregation of the Sisters of St. Joseph, the Archdiocese of Toronto, 1851–1920,” Ontario History, vol.84 (1992), 224–40, and Marianna O’Gallagher, “The Sisters of Charity of Halifax – The Early and Middle Years,” CCHA Study Sessions, vol.47 (1980), 57–68.

The biographies of notable clergy and bishops are also a valuable resource for uncovering Irish Catholic life in Canada. Significant works include Fay Tromblay, Thomas Louis Connolly [1815–1876]: The Man and His Place in Secular and Ecclesiastical History (Leuven, Belgium, 1983); Robert Choquette, “John Thomas McNally et l’erection du diocèse de Calgary,” Revue de l’Université d’Ottawa, vol.45 (1975), 401–16; Gerald Stortz, “Archbishop John Joseph Lynch of Toronto: Twenty-Eight Years of Commitment,” CCHA Study Sessions, vol.49 (1982), 5–14; and Cyril Byrne, ed., Gentlemen Bishops and Faction Fighters: The Letters of Bishops O’Donel, Lambert, Scallen and Other Irish Missionaries (St John’s, Nfld., 1985).

Relations between Irish Catholics and Protestants are generally well covered in the historical literature. Sources that highlight “confrontation” in these relations include J.R. Miller, “Anti-Catholic Thought in Victorian Canada,” Canadian Historical Review, vol.66 (1985), 474– 94; Murray Nicolson, “Irish Tridentine Catholicism in Victorian Toronto: Vessel for Ethno-religious Persistence,” in Mark G. McGowan and David Marshall, eds., Prophets, Priests and Prodigals: Reading in Canadian Religious History, 1608 to Present (Toronto, 1992), 117–34; J. Martin Galvin, “The Jubilee Riots in Toronto, 1875,” CCHA Report, vol.26 (1959), 93–107; Scott See, Riots in New Brunswick: Orange Nativism and Social Violence in the 1840s (Toronto, 1993); and A.J.B. Johnston, “Popery and Progress: Anti-Catholicism in a Mid-Nineteenth Century British Colony,” Dalhousie Review, vol.64 (1984), 146–63. A far more ironic view of Catholic-Protestant relations in labour organizations and on the shop floor can be gleaned from Gregory S. Kealey and Bryan Palmer, Dreaming of What Might Be: The Knights of Labour in Ontario, 1880–1900 (Toronto, 1987). A substantial rethinking of the layers of Protestant-Catholic interaction is explored in John S. Moir, “Toronto’s Protestants and Their Perceptions of Their Roman Catholic Neighbours,” in Mark G. McGowan and Brian P. Clarke, eds., Catholics at the Gathering Place: Historical Essays on the Archdiocese of Toronto, 1841–1991 (Toronto, 1993), 313–27.

Denominational relations between the Orange and the Green inevitably spilled over into Canadian politics. The best source for the emergence of Irish-Catholic politicians from all regions are the current fourteen volumes of the Dictionary of Canadian Biography (Toronto, 1996– ). Irish Catholic political activity is noted particularly in Michael Cottrell, “Irish Catholic Political Leadership in Toronto, 1855–1882” (Ph.D. thesis, University of Saskatchewan, 1988); Robin Burns, “Thomas D’Arcy McGee and the Economic Aspects of the New Nationality,” Canadian Historical Association, Historical Papers (1967), 95–104; William Baker, Timothy Warren Anglin 1822– 1896: Irish Catholic Canadian (Toronto, 1977); and Ian Ross Robertson, “Party Politics and Religious Controversialism in Prince Edward Island from 1860 to 1863,” Acadiensis, vol.7 (1978), 29–59. In a more general fashion Irish Catholic clergy and politicians can be seen at work in Paul Crunican, Priests and Politicians: Manitoba Schools and the Election of 1896 (Toronto, 1974), and Franklin Walker’s three-volume history of separate schools in Ontario, Catholic Education and Politics in Ontario (Toronto, 1955, 1964, 1986). While much of the history of Irish Catholic political activity in the nineteenth century focuses on elements of Irish nationalism an its relationship to the Canadian political scene, one study emphasizes how the Irish Catholics withdrew their focus on Irish affairs and redirected their attention and primary loyalty to Canada: Mark G. McGowan, “The De-greening of the Irish: Toronto’s Irish-Catholic Press, Imperialism and the Forging of a New Identity, 1887– 1914,” Canadian Historical Association, Historical Papers (1989).

The exploration of other aspects of Irish Catholic culture in Canada has been limited. Sections on folklore and culture in O’Driscoll and Reynolds, eds., The Untold Story, provide an interesting introduction to music, literature, and language among the Irish of Canada. The best resource for Irish cultural life in Canada is found in many essays published in the periodic anthologies published by the Canadian Association of Irish Studies and in the Canadian Journal of Irish Studies. One such example of a scholarly regional profile can be found in A. Feder and B. Schrank, eds., Literature and Folk Culture: Ireland and Newfoundland (St John’s, 1977).

The richest unpublished material on the history of Irish Catholics in Canada can be found in the major archdiocesan and diocesan archives in Canada. Particularly useful are the Archives of the Archdiocese of Toronto, the Archives of the Archdiocese of Quebec, and the Archives of the Archdiocese of St John’s, Newfoundland. Much of the correspondence from the Archives of the Archdiocese of Halifax is on microfilm at the Provincial Archives of Nova Scotia. The National Archives of Canada in Ottawa houses the papers of many Irish Catholic politicians and correspondence between government departments and Irish Catholic leaders. The same may be said of most provincial archives.

Collections of Irish Catholic newspapers are rare, although the Archives of the Archdiocese of Kingston contains an excellent collection of originals of twentieth-century journals, as does St Paul’s College (University of Manitoba) and St Michael’s College (University of Toronto). Both Memorial University in St John’s and St Mary’s University in Halifax contain excellent research centres for the study of Irish culture and folklore. Overseas, Irish Catholic materials for Canada can be found in the Secret Vatican Archives and the Archives of the Propaganda Fide (Rome), the Public Record Office (London), and the Archives of the Archdiocese of Dublin.