Migration

Irish Protestants are often described in general histories of Canada as “Scotch-Irish,” but this term is misleading. In 1871 fewer than one-quarter of the Irish Protestants of Ontario (the only province for which the data is readily available) were Presbyterian, a rough surrogate for descent from seventeenth-century Scots settlers in Ulster. The majority of Canada’s Protestant Irish descend from Ulster’s English planters and from English planters who once settled in reasonable numbers in various locations deep in what is now the Republic of Ireland. The minority position of the latter among much larger numbers of Catholics served increasingly as an incentive to depart, and the smaller Protestant colonies left behind have been further reduced by intermarriage.

“Scotch-Irish” is essentially an American term, first applied at the end of the seventeenth century to refer to Ulster immigrants in the American seaboard colonies. Most eighteenth-century emigration from Ireland to the United States was Presbyterian, and so the term in that context had considerable validity. The comparable Irish term is “Ulster Scot,” but the significance of the distinction diminished in Ireland in the early nineteenth century as Presbyterians ceased to suffer political disabilities because of their religion and made common cause with Anglicanism in the face of rising Catholic strength. The operative distinction now is simply one between Protestants and Catholics.

Statistical material on Irish Protestants in Canada is difficult to assemble because the cross-tabulation of ethnicity and religion has rarely been made; indeed, the published volumes of the Canada census make cross-tabulation possible only in 1931 and 1941. Twentieth-century emigrants from Northern Ireland were by no means all Protestant, and before the 1951 census one does not even have the “Northern Ireland” label to assist in identification. The lives of Irish Protestants were shaped by the experiences of their ancestors in all parts of Ireland over generations, and, for many of them, their identification with Ireland was all the stronger because of the privileged position they long enjoyed in that country’s economy and political structures. Irish Protestants who emigrated before the twentieth century, therefore, almost universally identified themselves simply as “Irish” and are so recorded in census enumerations.