Migration

The immigration statistics cited above do not distinguish between Catholics and Protestants, but the unprecedented tide of humanity that arrived in British North America in the twenty years after 1815, notably in Upper Canada (Ontario) and New Brunswick, where the numbers were largest, was not only Irish but strongly Protestant. The earliest arrivals in Upper Canada were also drawn disproportionately from small Anglican colonies deep in what is now the Irish republic: people poor enough to be sure, but possessing the wherewithal to depart before their condition became desperate. Those fortunate enough to enjoy some security of tenure sold their crop and their leases; others departed leaving their rent unpaid.

The Protestant minority in northern Tipperary, for example, had been accommodated in the late eighteenth century by colonization of waste land and encroachment on commons, by the creation of new towns and villages, and in some instances by the promotion of Protestant colonies on the estates of reactionary landlords out of step with contemporary liberal thought and to the intentional detriment of Catholic tenants. These new internal colonies absorbed the surplus numbers of the rising Protestant generation. But by the early nineteenth century the limits of cultivation had been reached and the subdivision of farms into ever-smaller units was proceeding apace in many parishes. Ireland had little industry to absorb surplus population from the rural parts, and the cottage industries that existed, such as the

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Source: Census of Canada 1931, Tables 45, 46.

handloom weaving which had supported a large population on small holdings, especially in Ulster, were declining in the face of mechanization just as they were in the Scottish lowlands.

Political causes also underlay this great wave of Protestant emigration. The 1798 rebellion of Catholics in north Wexford and south Wicklow had quickly degenerated from republican ideals into a campaign of mutual atrocities. The heavy exodus to Upper Canada of Anglicans and Methodists from that region that began in 1809 and swelled after the War of 1812 reflected in part a desire to settle in a more peaceable colony with a secure Protestant majority. The relative prosperity of Protestants in that part of Ireland also enabled them to depart at a time when passages were still comparatively expensive.

The gradual easing of restrictions on the political activity of Catholics, the growing assertiveness of Catholic tenants and labourers, and the rising influence of the Catholic Church also fostered Protestant unease. Violent clashes lay in part behind the movement of Palatines from north Limerick (descendants of early-eighteenth-century German refugees who had been settled in County Limerick to bolster the Protestant population there), and the success in 1829 of the campaign for Catholic emancipation sparked great Protestant opposition and the largest emigration from Ireland before the famine years. Nearly 78,000 Irish went to British North America in 1831–32 alone.

While it is true that many American Irish Catholics felt themselves driven from Ireland by economic necessity and felt their exile from their homeland acutely, many Irish Protestants by the 1820s felt themselves to be exiles in their native land as their accustomed privileges and perquisites successively fell before growing Catholic power. In Canada, paradoxically, they came to feel much more at home, secure in their Ontario and New Brunswick heartlands among a Protestant majority and in a congenially British political climate. As friends and relatives followed earlier emigrants west to British America in growing numbers, many found that they had more relatives in Canadian communities than they had in the land of their birth.

The Catholics surely had even stronger economic cause to leave Ireland, but few were able to afford the fares in the early years before increasing competition drove them down to a more affordable level. As well, there was an assumption commonly held by all classes in Ireland that only loyal Protestants were welcome in the colonies. No official statement was made to this effect but the assumption accorded well with eighteenth-century practice; consequently, few Roman Catholics even bothered to inquire for information from the Colonial Office. This changed after the British government in 1825 funded the emigration of a largely Catholic group from north Cork to establish in Upper Canada the settlement of Peterborough, an effort intended to calm disturbances among the home population by holding out hope of improving its lot.

During the second quarter of the nineteenth century the tide of Irish immigration to British North America became increasingly Catholic as fares became cheaper and as awareness of the possibility of emigration spread beyond eastern Ireland. The Protestants continued to come right through the famine years at mid-century, however, though they no longer constituted the largest proportion of Irish immigrants. This trend reversed again after mid-century, once the major influx had ended, and what little Irish immigration there was to Canada after the mid-1850s tended to be Protestant, although statistics to support this widespread perception are not available. Dominion immigrant agents active in Ireland were accused of recruiting fellow Orangemen, “working like beavers to get every man of their ‘brethren’ to go there and make a second Belfast of the whole province,” and the tendency was exacerbated by changes in the shipping lanes. The decline of squared-timber exports in the 1850s saw passenger traffic begin to reorient around regular steamer runs, and by the 1870s only Ulster had direct passenger connections with Canada. Allan Line steamers carrying the mails between Liverpool and Canada stopped en route at Londonderry and embarked a minority, largely Protestant, of the passengers leaving that Ulster port. Steamers sailing from England and Scotland for Canada via southern Irish ports tended already to be fully booked and, moreover, found few customers interested in immigrating to Canada. That the majority of Canada’s population of Irish ancestry remains Protestant reflects descent from early Protestant arrivals much more than it does the trickle of continuing immigration.

In general, the proportion of Protestants in the Irish population of Canada increases as one moves westward, with Catholics also being somewhat over-represented in most cities (see Table 3). In 1931, 12 percent of Canada’s population claimed paternal Irish descent, down from 24 percent at Confederation, and nearly 69 percent of these were Protestants. Eighty-six percent of Prince Edward Island’s Irish were Catholics, as were the vast majority of the Irish in Newfoundland, 64 percent of Quebec’s Irish, and 59 percent of those in Nova Scotia. The Irish population of New Brunswick was evenly split, but in Ontario nearly three-quarters of the Irish were Protestant (72.7 percent) and in the west over 80 percent were, ranging from nearly 79 percent in Alberta to 88 percent in Manitoba. These regional religious concentrations reflect the religious composition of the parts of Ireland from which the immigrants came, and they can be traced back to the earliest periods of settlement.

The decision to emigrate was normally an economic one. The timing of the move could be influenced by incidents of violence or political turmoil as well as by short-term economic fluctuations, but two factors accounted for the choice of destination prior to the twentieth century. One was chain migration: the relocation of people to places where they already knew someone. The other was the tendency, particularly in the early nineteenth century, when purely passenger vessels apart from charters were unknown, for passenger traffic to follow existing merchant shipping routes determined more by the trade in goods than by the needs of emigrants. These factors were not mutually exclusive, but they could operate independently. Chain migration could reinforce the easy path, but it also acted as a “wild card,” fostering settlement concentrations that are not predictable from a knowledge of major trade links.

British government emigration policy tended to sketch in the larger canvas of prohibition or encouragement rather than the finer brush-strokes of location or intensity. In the eighteenth century British emigration policy was predicated upon the philosophy of mercantilism, which viewed the removal of population overseas as a weakening of the mother country both economically and militarily. On the other hand, shifting populations between colonies was acceptable, as was enticing foreign Protestants to British territory. Under these policies Germans were settled in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, in the 1750s and New Englanders in the Annapolis valley a decade later. Emigration of Presbyterians from northern Ireland to the southern and seaboard colonies of what would soon become the United States had been going on apace since late in the seventeenth century in the face of government prohibitions, and the continuing exodus on the eve of the American Revolution prompted growing concern in England about the loss of the most productive and economically important segment of the Ulster population.

Eighteenth-century movement to the British colonies that are now Canada was small in numbers but important regionally. The first significant Irish Protestant settlement, formed in 1761 in the Truro area of Nova Scotia by Alexander MacNutt, who recruited in the hinterland of the port of Derry, was a northern outpost of the long-standing Ulster emigration that went mostly to the American southern and seaboard colonies of the old prerevolutionary empire. Much of this traffic had followed trade corridors between northern Ireland and Philadelphia, but there were some Irish colonies on the New England frontier and indeed Truro drew part of its population from earlier Irish Presbyterian settlements in New Hampshire. The eighteenth-century Irish populations of Newfoundland, Halifax, and Prince Edward Island drew upon a different trading network: the provisions trade out of Ireland’s southern ports that supplied the Newfoundland fishery with beef, butter, and labour. The seasonal traffic and eventual emigration that followed this path drew upon a largely Catholic part of Ireland, and so most of the migrants involved were of that persuasion.

Thus, from early on, there was a dual Irish settlement pattern: the plantation of northern Presbyterian families in the Fundy area, and a more transient and mostly Catholic population in the fishing and seafaring centres of Halifax, Cape Breton, and P.E.I. In 1767, 2,165 Irish accounted for a fifth of the non-Amerindian population of what are now Nova Scotia and P.E.I. and 5 percent of that of New Brunswick. Seventy percent of the 112 Irish people in P.E.I. that year appear to have been Catholics, as were at least 57 percent of those in Halifax, where nearly a third of the province’s population and half of its Irish lived. A quarter of the province’s Irish lived in Colchester County, around Truro, where all 531 were Protestant, and that county’s Ulster population had spread also into Cumberland (85), Hants (97), and Annapolis (48). This dual pattern would be reinforced during the great migrations of the early nineteenth century.

As well as these populations of Irish farmers, tradespeople, and day labourers, a portion of the colonial establishment was drawn from the anglo-Irish elite, for the colonies in North America were British rather than specifically English. Governors Thomas and Guy Carleton, Bishop Charles Inglis of Nova Scotia, and the Johnson family of colonial New York, Loyalist leaders at the time of the American Revolution, were only the most prominent members of the anglo-Irish gentry and military class who immigrated to the colonies. The Baldwins, famous in the quest for responsible government, were liberal-minded Protestants from Cork who immigrated to York (Toronto) in 1799 via a packet from Falmouth in England to New York and thence up the Hudson and Mohawk river system to Lake Ontario, an expensive and exhausting journey.

Warfare between Britain and France in the period 1793–1815 inhibited immigration to the colonies. Londonderry Presbyterians continued to arrive in the Minas Basin area of Nova Scotia through the 1790s, and a group of County Limerick Palatines, who had settled in the Camden valley of New York in the 1760s, came north to Upper Canada as Loyalists after the American Revolution. In general, however, shipping from the United Kingdom in these years brought only scattered individuals, few of them from Ireland. Most were merchants and government, church, and military officials. Comparatively few sailed from Irish ports. The lion’s share of disembarkations involved members of the armed forces arriving to garrison the colonies and some crews, mostly from Scotland and England, brought out to man merchant vessels constructed in Lower Canada. The very occasional vessel brought more than a handful of passengers in steerage, such as the Recovery, which arrived from Dublin carrying thirty-four men, women, and children in 1806, or the Terrebonne, which brought fourteen labourers and their families out from the same city the following year.

The great wave of Irish Protestant migration that was unleashed by the termination of the Napoleonic Wars and the War of 1812 was an essentially new phenomenon in that it drew upon areas of Ireland that had hitherto been little affected by emigration and diverted away from the United States a portion of the migration from traditional source areas in Ulster. Northern Presbyterians continued to emigrate in substantial numbers to the independent United States. Though the Protestant Irish population of Canada was disproportionately Anglican, substantial numbers of Ulster Presbyterians, including many small farmer-weavers, also came out to Britain’s remaining, sparsely populated northern colonies.

Merchant traffic to Canadian and Maritime ports increased after the wars as Britain began drawing upon the colonial forests for its naval and construction timber. This trade had been stimulated initially by Napoleon’s blockade of Britain’s traditional Baltic supplies in 1806, and it was continued by preferential tariffs that made the sometimes inferior Canadian product competitive on the British market. Vessels transporting Canadian and Maritime timber to the British Isles called at ports such as Londonderry and Belfast to take on a westward paying cargo of Irish before proceeding west across the Atlantic.

The end of the Napoleonic Wars also saw a reversal of the British policy that had opposed mass emigration. The old mercantilist idea that emigration weakened the mother country gave way before the urging of a number of political economists and emigration advocates who argued that emigration could help to strengthen the colonies and increase their production of raw materials for the mother country while also relieving poverty and unemployment at home. Irish soldiers, both Protestant and Catholic, were prominent among the members of several regiments that were disbanded in the colonies after the War of 1812, both to reinforce the loyal British population and to reduce the number of soldiers being repatriated home to face unemployment.

A number of government programs of assisted emigration were put in place between 1815 and 1825 in order to promote settlement. The most extensive of these involved migrations of unemployed Scottish weavers from the Glasgow area and farmers from the improving parts of the Highlands, but a few Irish projects also took place. In 1818 one of four groups to emigrate under the “£10 deposit plan” consisted of Irish Protestants from counties Tipperary and Offaly who settled in Upper Canada under the leadership of Richard Talbot, a member of the minor gentry. The group divided after arrival and settled both in the Ottawa valley and in London Township, 640 kilometres to the west, with a few moving to Montreal. Word sent home in letters soon stimulated further migration from this region, which carried on through the famine years of the late 1840s before coming to a halt in the middle 1850s with the closing of Upper Canada’s agricultural frontier. By then nearly 800 Protestant families had emigrated, mostly to these two areas of Upper Canada, from a home region measuring some fifty by sixty-five kilometres.

The emigrants brought out to the Perth area and to Peterborough in 1823 and 1825 respectively under the leadership of Peter Robinson, brother of the Upper Canadian attorney general, were mostly poor Catholics from disturbed areas of north Cork, but a few Protestants successfully petitioned for inclusion. Among them were several families of Palatines from County Limerick who were fleeing both landholdings diminished through subdivision and violent attacks by Catholic vigilantes jealous of their privileged status with the landlords. A half-dozen Protestants were killed by these “whiteboys” in the Rathkeale area in 1821–22.

Traditionally, the historiography of Irish immigration and settlement has centred upon these assisted parties, largely because they left paper trails in archives. In fact, however, such projects were atypical of the overall movement, which was overwhelmingly voluntary and unassisted. The real significance of the early sponsored parties lay in the fact that they stimulated voluntary chain migration from particular regions of Ireland and awakened interest in emigration more generally. As this interest grew, unassisted emigration rapidly outpaced the government programs and demonstrated that large numbers of Irish people were prepared to emigrate on their own account. Nonetheless, the Talbot party of 1818 was representative of the unassisted migration that it helped initiate: it was disproportionately Protestant, drawn from a southern area of Ireland in which Protestants were a minority, and derived from specific ranks of rural society, the small and middling farmers and tradesmen.

The regional patterns that have been traced for the eighteenth century were strengthened by the needs of mercantile trade in the nineteenth. Shipping into the Gulf of St Lawrence continued to have strong ties with ports on the south coast of Ireland, and these ties coloured green and Catholic the Irish population of Newfoundland, P.E.I., the Miramichi region of New Brunswick, Cape Breton, and Halifax. Despite the eighteenth-century Ulster settlements around Minas basin, the Protestant Irish largely bypassed Nova Scotia during the nineteenth century. Fragmentary records of passenger arrivals suggest that most Irish immigrants at Halifax disembarked from vessels out of Waterford and Cork. Though substantial numbers landed from northern Irish ports between 1815 and 1820, all recorded ships from Londonderry landing passengers thereafter did so as a consequence of encountering difficulties at sea while bound for Quebec or Saint John. A more comprehensive analysis of emigrant origins based on Catholic church records in Halifax confirms a south-coast origin for that city’s Irish, though of course the data omits Protestants. Substantial numbers of “two-boaters” are also recorded arriving from Newfoundland in quest of work, and their Irish origins would have been similar. Haligonians claiming Irish descent in 1931 were 79 percent Catholic, a figure that made the city’s Irish community second only to that of Quebec City in its Catholicity. Outside Halifax and Cape Breton, where the Irish again were mostly Catholic, the numbers of new Irish immigrants were few.

In Prince Edward Island a small settlement of northern Protestants was established in the eighteenth century in lots 31 and 33 by the proprietor, Lieutenant Governor Thomas Desbrisay, an Irish officer of Huguenot background. Desbrisay dispatched over 200 individuals on two ships in 1771–72, and some fifty families recruited by Ulster emigrant William Rogers followed in 1773. Disheartened by the island’s short growing season, however, few remained in the colony. Between 1817 and 1840 at least 1,850 Irish landed in P.E.I. from southern Irish ports, the majority sailing from Waterford. As in Halifax and Cape Breton, others arrived from the same region via Newfoundland. The vast majority of these southern immigrants were Roman Catholics. Between 1830 and 1850 about 4,000 northern Irish arrived in P.E.I. Despite their Ulster origins, the emigrants were primarily Catholics from County Monaghan. The year 1846 marked the effective end of any substantial Irish migration to P.E.I., and, with the exception of one or two vessels, the famine emigration of the late 1840s bypassed the island. The island’s Irish population, though heavily Catholic, was therefore pre-famine, and the Irish-descended population of the province in the 1930s remained less than 14 percent Protestant.

As in most of British North America, many of the Protestant families appear to have come to the island early. A small chain migration, partly but not exclusively Protestant, seems to have been prompted by the accidental arrival in Prince Edward Island of a County Laois Protestant, John Large, in 1817. Large had embarked from Dublin for Quebec, but, following disturbances on board triggered by an outbreak of fever and shortage of provisions, the ship was driven ashore near New London. Large became enthusiastic about the island and sent home letters that encouraged others to settle there; he also became local agent to Sir E.H. Walsh, proprietor of lot 11. Other County Laois Protestants arrived in 1819–24 but even those related to Large did not all settle near him. Mount Mellick in lot 49 takes its name from the County Laois birthplace of 1819 emigrant John Lane, and a number settled in lot 67. Large is credited with having recruited several families who came out together to Foxley River in 1823, but most appear to have been Catholics. The most renowned County Laois emigrant was one of Walsh’s later agents, James Warburton, who, besides opposing P.E.I.’s entry into Confederation in 1873, played an important role in the protracted controversy over absentee land ownership on the island and in the quest for responsible government. He arrived in 1834.

There were probably other little colonies in P.E.I., though in most areas one finds evidence only of scattered individuals. As in Halifax, there appears to have been a moderate influx of Irish Protestants, whether northern or southern, immediately after the Napoleonic Wars. Thereafter, the Protestants headed mostly for agricultural opportunities in New Brunswick or Upper Canada, with Ulster families embarking upon the Londonderry and Belfast ships that sailed mostly to Saint John and Quebec respectively.

The Ulster settlement at Truro in the 1760s and 1770s, though a forerunner of a continuing Protestant majority among the Irish of Nova Scotia’s Fundy region in later years, really stands apart from it and represents an instance of the “wild card” factor of group and chain migration operating at some distance from customary shipping lanes. Many of the Truro Irish landed at Halifax and made their way overland to the Fundy shore or re-embarked on coasting vessels. Far more important in shaping the later Protestant presence in the Fundy region were Saint John’s nineteenth-century shipping links that developed out of the Saint John valley timber trade. The New Brunswick city’s major connections were with Cork and Londonderry. The hinterland of the former contributed a substantial Catholic population to the city of Saint John in particular, but Derry shipping helped make the Saint John valley a hotbed of west Ulster Protestantism. In 1931 the population of Irish descent in the Fundy region was 64 percent Protestant.

The trading links of Quebec City, the port of entry for the great St Lawrence route into the interior, were more varied and the volume of trade was much greater. The Irish who reached North America through Quebec sorted themselves out regionally after arriving and made in many instances for settlements where predecessors from their home areas had established a foothold. Protestant Irish tended to bypass rural Quebec, for the existing French-Canadian population in the counties along the St Lawrence differed from them in both language and religion and the prospect of renting land from seigneurs appealed less than the prospect of freehold in Upper Canada. The Eastern Townships were difficult to reach and were heavily populated by American immigrants whose politics the Irish Protestants found as objectionable as that of the French Canadians. Though some scattered Protestant Irish clusters may be identified in these areas, most immigrants journeyed onward to Montreal where some set up in business or trade and where many others spent a few years at work assembling the cash to make a down payment on land in Upper Canada.

Today, the Protestant Irish presence is heavy in western Quebec, especially in the river-front townships in the Ottawa and lower Gatineau valleys. In many cases this represents a second-generation movement in the middle of the nineteenth century from early settlements on the Ontario side of the Ottawa River. The vast majority of immigrants carried on into Upper Canada, the largest of the colonies and the one with the greatest extent of potential arable land.

The lands along the St Lawrence River and the lakefront had largely been occupied by Loyalists and other American settlers during the years between the American Revolution and the growing wave of Irish immigration that began in 1815. Coming at first in greater numbers than the English, the Irish came to dominate eastern Upper Canada and were proportionally thinner on the ground as one moved west. The greatest concentrations were in the Ottawa and Rideau valleys, the Peterborough area, and the townships to the rear of Toronto, all areas opened for settlement during the late 1810s and 1820s.

It is clear that chain migration led to the consolidation of group settlements in some parts of Ontario. Protestant emigrants from north Wexford and south Wicklow began arriving in Elizabethtown and Leeds and Lansdowne Township as early as 1809, and in the rear of Elizabethtown and Augusta the Irish population was largely of this origin. A second front of occupation by this group was commenced soon after the Napoleonic Wars in the military settlements of Lanark and Carleton counties. In the military settlements the Irish civilians were drawn not only from Wexford and Wicklow but also from Carlow and northern Kilkenny; in many cases these were families that had migrated to the farming and mining town of Castlecomer or onto hill farms in adjoining Mothell late in the eighteenth century. The Irish of Beckwith and adjoining Montague townships were largely from the Castlecomer area as well as from Wexford and Wicklow. In neighbouring Carleton County solid blocks of families sharing a common geographical origin tended not to arise, because immigration spanning a couple of generations forestalled the creation of settlements immediately adjacent to those of earlier compatriots. Within the county’s Carp valley several groups intermingled, most notably south Leinster families from Wexford through to Kilkenny; north Tipperary and west Offaly families who, persuaded to migrate by some members of Talbot’s government-sponsored party of 1818, settled near the later village of Hazeldean; a largely Methodist group from north Cavan; and Presbyterian settlers from County Down who located near the intersection of Huntley and Fitzroy townships.

Detailed studies of Irish settlement outside eastern Ontario are rare. Analysis of counties of origin stated in land petitions of the mid-1820s reveals, however, that Irish settlement in the Toronto and Peterborough areas drew heavily upon the Protestants of south-central Ulster. Eastern Ontario was home to a higher proportion of southern Protestants because the emigrants from Tipperary and Wexford and Wicklow were among the earliest to come and settled nearest to the port of entry at Quebec. Amherst Island, long owned by non-resident Irish landlords, was home to 105 families, mostly Presbyterian, from farming and fishing communities in a highly localized area of the Ards Peninsula in eastern Down. Movement to the St Lawrence island near Kingston began in the 1820s in Ballyhalbert and Inishargy, peaked in 1832, and spread southwards down the Ards in the 1840s and 1850s. Palatine Irish families, mostly from north Limerick but also from Wexford and Kerry, followed one another to Canada in classic chain manner, but, despite forming some small clusters in Brock and Blanshard townships as well as in the Ottawa valley, they were scattered widely by 1871. In Ireland, as Protestants of Germanic origin settled on estates in heavily Catholic areas, they had clustered in villages and adjoining farming townlands, whereas in Canada, having lost their German language and converted in many cases to Methodism before emigrating, they found themselves part of the linguistic and religious mainstream.

Most of the heavily Irish areas of the late nineteenth century perpetuated, through natural increase and chain immigration, concentrations that had received an initial impetus from some form of sponsored group settlement before 1825. In eastern Ontario the lands allocated to the Irish “old 100th” regiment of the British army, Richard Talbot’s party of 1818, and some of Peter Robinson’s 1823 party (the latter mostly Catholic) were in townships where the population remained more than 80 percent Irish by descent in the 1870s. Robinson’s 1825 party gave rise to a notable Catholic Irish concentration in the Peterborough area, but the county also became home to large numbers of Protestants, some following emigrants from the counties of Cavan and Monaghan who were sent north from New York City by the British consul soon after the War of 1812. The townships of Cavan and Monaghan for decades were hotbeds of Orangeism. A mid-Tipperary Protestant settlement, distinct from the north Tipperary concentrations, grew up around Streetsville near Toronto, drawn by a single Tipperary man in a party of Irish Methodists, mostly from Tyrone, sent north by Buchanan in 1818. Biddulph, north of London, was the only township in western Ontario more than 60 percent Irish; it was home to later north Tipperary residents who came in the wake of Talbot’s party in 1818. Most of the Tipperary Protestants in Biddulph arrived between 1835 and 1842, giving rise to a remarkably concentrated population of families sharing a common background.

The concentrations of Irish in the interior counties of Ontario that were occupied in the 1840s and 1850s owe much to internal migration out of earlier settlements established in the 1820s and 1830s. Grey County drew much of its population from people leaving York and Peel counties in search of land for their children as they reached adulthood. Renfrew and Russell counties in eastern Ontario attracted their populations from earlier-settled areas in Carleton and Lanark counties, which also contributed heavily to settlements on the Quebec side of the Ottawa River. In all of these locations one finds by 1870 scions of earlier Carp valley families, drawn from the various immigrant groups that had populated that area after the Napoleonic Wars. While chain migration gave rise to many concentrated settlements, either intermixed with other groups or standing in comparatively solid blocks, it is unclear whether chain migration was the most common experience. Isolated immigrants may indeed be that, but they may equally be members of groups that have not yet been studied and identified. Settlement patterns, in terms of concentration and admixture, varied remarkably from one area to another.

In terms of regional concentrations at the national level, however, the following conclusions may be offered. The Gulf of St Lawrence and Atlantic coastal region (Newfoundland, P.E.I., the Miramichi, Cape Breton, and Halifax) was predominantly Catholic, drawn from the counties of Ireland’s south coast in the pre-famine period by trade links that have evolved out of the Atlantic fishery and provisions trade. The Irish populations of central Canada and the Saint John valley, on the other hand, were predominantly Protestant, deriving their populations from Ulster and from Protestant enclaves in the south via timber ships trading with Quebec and Saint John. It is possible to isolate “wild card” settlements in which chain migration perpetuated concentrations formed in isolation from dominant trading patterns, such as the Monaghan settlement in P.E.I. or the eighteenth-century Ulster colony in Colchester County, Nova Scotia, but on the whole they contributed to the overall patterns traced by commercial shipping.

Few emigrants from Ireland went directly to the Canadian west. The fur-trade companies recruited mostly in Scotland and for much of the late nineteenth century, after Canada acquired Manitoba in 1870, the country was a net exporter rather than an importer of population. In the twentieth century the much-reduced number of Irish immigrants has tended to locate in the cities. Most western Canadians of Irish Protestant origin are descendants of Irish Ontarians who joined the trek west. Like their parents or grandparents who had arrived from Ireland earlier, most were members of large rural families who were unable to secure sufficiently large landholdings to farm commercially or who were merely renting. In some instances, where families had remained in contact by letter with Irish relatives, the move to the west stimulated renewed emigration from Ireland, as it did in the case of the Nelson family of the Ottawa valley and the Carberry area of Manitoba. Many of the Nelsons’ Irish kin arrived without sufficient resources to secure land, however, and so worked as section hands on the railway.