Origins

In the 1991 census, 3.78 million Canadians claimed to be of Irish descent. That fewer than one-fifth (725,660) asserted wholly Irish origins, whereas more than 3 million claimed only partial Irish ancestry, reflects the fact that Irish immigration to Canada was heaviest in the early nineteenth century, and that Canada’s Irish since then have intermingled to a great extent with peoples of other origins. What these statistics do not show is that Irish immigration to Canada has been predominantly Protestant, quite the reverse of the situation in the United States and Australia and contrary to popular and, until recently, scholarly perceptions. These two factors taken together help explain why Irish Canadians are seldom regarded as an identifiable group in present-day Canada.

For the most part, Ireland’s Protestant population derives from immigrants to the island in earlier generations. Ireland came under nominal English control with the Norman invasion from England in 1169, but English power did not extend much beyond the “Pale” surrounding Dublin (See IRISH CATHOLICS.)

English plantation schemes during the Tudor era were less significant in planting a population of Protestants than were early-seventeenth-century settlements of Scots Presbyterians and English in Ulster, the northern province. The native Irish took advantage of the struggle between King and Parliament to rebel in 1641, and this led to the invasion and subjugation of Ireland by Cromwell. The land was parcelled out to military officers and to merchant-adventurers who had financed Cromwell’s army. More English and Scottish settlers arrived in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.

As the recurring civil strife in Northern Ireland demonstrates, there are significant cultural, political, and economic differences between the descendants of the ancient Celtic inhabitants of Ireland and the descendants of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century planters. The earlier Anglo-Norman invaders of the twelfth century had been absorbed into the much larger Celtic population, and names such as Butler and Fitzgerald, though French in origin, are now widely accepted as Irish. The Scots and English planters, however, mostly arrived after the Reformation and they differed from the existing population in adhering to various branches of Protestantism. It is religion that since has served as the primary ethnic identifier in Ireland. Some Roman Catholics converted to Protestantism through intermarriage or to secure political or economic advantage, and some Irish Protestants trace their roots to migrants from other countries, most notably Germany (the so-called Irish Palatine refugees of 1709–10) and Wales.

Legal constraints against Roman Catholics implemented early in the eighteenth century were gradually eased, but the political “nation” of the late eighteenth century was essentially Protestant. The 1798 rebellions, a mostly Protestant one against the Anglican establishment in the north, and a Catholic one in Wexford, led to the suppression of the Irish Parliament in 1801. Through the nineteenth century, Protestant interests merged in the face of an increasingly restive Catholic population and the growing power of the Roman Catholic Church, both within Ireland and internationally. Catholic emancipation (1829), the disestablishment of the Church or Ireland (Anglican, 1869), and the prospect of Home Rule exacerbated the Protestant minority’s long-standing sense of being under siege, as did the association of “Irish” with “Celtic” and “Catholic” that emerged from the increasingly politicized Celtic revival at the end of the century. It was this discomfort, as well as their financial ability to escape a deteriorating economy, that underlay much Irish Protestant emigration.

Ireland was partitioned at independence in 1921, with six counties of Ulster that had a Protestant majority remaining part of the United Kingdom. Since 1969, revolutionary activity by largely Catholic republic organizations such as the Irish Republican Army (IRA) has further exacerbated the Protestant sense of insecurity. Northern Ireland’s Protestant-dominated regional legislature was abolished by the British government in 1972, and the Thatcher’s government 1985 Anglo-Irish agreement heightened Protestant fears of an eventual settlement between Britain and Ireland that would “sell them out” to a Catholic republic. The same fears afflict the peace talks that began in 1997 following ceasefires by Northern Ireland’s various paramilitary factions.