Migration, Arrival, and Settlement before the Great Famine

The earliest Catholic migrants to Nova Scotia sojourned and settled in Cape Breton and in Halifax County. Many Irish Catholic immigrants to Cape Breton Island were actually “two boaters,” Irish Catholics who settled initially in Newfoundland but then left for Nova Scotia to improve their economic and social standing. Cape Breton was increasingly attractive to such people after 1815, when Newfoundland was mired in a post-war economic depression made even worse by reduced fish stocks. Cape Breton also attracted those interested in farming, mining, and the merchant trade in the port of Sydney. By the mid-nineteenth century Irish Catholic migrants, both “two boaters” and those directly from southeastern Ireland, had settled in the Sydney area, along the north shore of Cape Breton between Margaree and Port Hood, and in the southeast near St Peter’s and Arichat. By mid-century, however, the heavy migration of Acadians and Scottish Highland Catholics to eastern Nova Scotia ensured that the Irish Catholic population constituted a small minority on Cape Breton Island.

In sharp contrast to Cape Breton, the Irish Catholic population in Halifax was a numerically large minority from the middle of the eighteenth century. Founded in 1749 as a counterweight to France’s Louisbourg on Île-Royale (Cape Breton), Halifax attracted many Irish Catholics in search of employment, particularly on construction projects. Though they were not encouraged to come, because of their religion and ethnicity, by 1767 there may have been 467 Irish Catholics in the area, constituting perhaps as much as 16 percent of the population. Not surprisingly, given the commercial ties between Halifax and Waterford, many of these Irish Catholic migrants hailed from Kilkenny, Waterford, south Tipperary, and east Cork. Irish Catholics continued to constitute about one-sixth of Halifax’s population until the significant increase in migration after the end of the Napoleonic Wars. From 1815 to 1838 nearly 11,000 Irish, mostly Catholics, arrived in Halifax, creating an invigorated minority that, by 1837, constituted more than one-third (35 percent) of the town’s population. The mere trickle of Irish Catholic migrants after 1838 was only briefly interrupted by the arrival of 1,200 famine refugees in 1847. By 1851 the Catholic population of Halifax stood at 8,800, or 42 percent of the total population. Representing 85 percent of the Catholic population as a whole, Irish Catholics were clearly the dominant minority group in the colonial capital. Province-wide, the Irish made up approximately one-third of Nova Scotia’s population by 1838. The vast majority of these Nova Scotia Irish were Catholic, with the notable exception of settlers in the Cumberland County–Truro area and the Anglo-Irish elite in Halifax.

Employment opportunities made Halifax an attractive home for Irish Catholic merchants and labourers, and so the city quickly emerged as the focus of Irish Catholic activity in Nova Scotia. This population firmly rooted itself in the colony by means of ecclesiastical structures and voluntary associations. In 1783 a group of middle-class Irish Catholics succeeded in having the penal laws relieved and then promptly built St Peter’s, Halifax’s first Catholic church (1784). This single parish heralded the spread of a Catholic parish grid across the province, the founding of a seminary, and the arrival of new educational and service-oriented religious orders. In 1786, demonstrating a similar interest in establishing community institutions, the Irish Catholic elite, in collaboration with the small Protestant Irish minority in Halifax, formed the Charitable Irish Society (CIS). This non-sectarian voluntary association endeavoured to demonstrate Irish loyalty to the crown and administered charitable assistance to the needy of Halifax. Many of those served by the CIS were Irish Catholic immigrants who arrived after 1800 in great need. Despite its nonsectarian beginnings, the CIS became more and more Catholic as Irish Catholic migration increased after 1815; Catholics formed 78 percent of its members by 1838 and 93 percent a decade later.

There has been considerable debate over the occupational composition and social behaviour of the Irish Catholic community in Halifax. Disembarking Irish Catholic migrants often appeared squalid and poor after their four- to six-week voyage as ballast aboard timber ships returning to North America and, in the years that followed, the equation of Irish Catholics with poverty was reinforced when fluctuations in the local labour market reduced employment. The result was that, in the early nineteenth century, Halifax’s Protestants tended to view Irish Catholics as poor, lazy, unprogressive, and potentially violent. The reality of Irish Catholic life, however, may have been much different. Police statistics suggest that Irish Catholic rates of drunkenness, assault, and vagrancy were proportional to their numbers in the city. Nevertheless, even though the facts did not support the stereotypes, the sheer size of the local Catholic population made Protestants uneasy.