The Irish arrived in Quebec Canada in 1846. The purpose of coming to Canada was to escape the famine that was happening in Ireland. Thirty two thousand Irish had already landed in Canada spreading themselves out between Southern Montreal and Toronto. They are poor and shabby and their obvious sores lay open like a book on the shelf. One Citizen wrote in the local paper “In a few short weeks Ireland will be jettisoning onto our shores their hungry and dying hordes. If these immigrants bring with them germs of contagious diseases, I ask you, what will be the fate of Quebec and Montreal?”* It was decided to safeguard Canadians that the Irish must stop first at the quarantine station at Grosse Ile, downriver from Quebec. They decided to line up the new immigrants and examined them first before being allowed to continue on. The sick would be separated from the healthy and the dead from the living. One doctor requested to recruit more doctors, he knew that the numbers would be greatest in July and August. They were not prepared for what happened next. Doctors, nurses, boatmen, and police officers went to the quarantine station on Grosse Ile. A priest named Father McGauran was also among them. There were 34 ships on route to Quebec,with over 10,000 Irish passengers in the holds. Only 200 beds were ready for the sick, and sheds were prepared for only 800 healthy passengers.
On May 14, the first ship landed. It had taken 46 days to cross and 9 of her passengers had died in the crossing, 52 had dysentery and ship fever. With in days the 200 beds were full and within weeks more than 800 were sick. There were no more beds for the sick nor sheds for the healthy. Chaos began. The dead and dying began spilling out of the buildings, lying on rocks or on the beach where they were left. Sheds for the healthy are now hospitals and the healthy are left on the boats at sea. Every day more ships arrived. At one point there were ships stretching two miles down river. Father McGauran worked continuously, he never slept. His faith was tested and his heart ached as he went from bed to bed hearing last confessions. With all their misery, McGauran was surprised how the Irish kept their good manners and gratitude. He begged the government for more help, but none came fast enough. The filth frightened McGauran. “Disease has a terrible stench” he wrote “their holds were sticky with muck and excrement, sometimes inches deep. There was no privacy or modesty. Chamber pots overflowed, bodies reeked from weeks without bathing, families huddled together on damp planks. Always, someone was holding on to someone else – mother's curling around cold babies, husbands weeping at the frozen gaze of dead wives, the abandoned children clinging to each other.”* One can not imagine.
No body counted on typhus. The dead littered the ocean and the Atlantic became known as “the largest Irish Graveyard.”* Death on board the ships was at least twice as much as on shore. Passengers and crew fell to the fever, because of this some crews refused to touch the bodies. Leaving them to pile up. On shore stood hundreds of tents. The rough winds and rain would pummel the tents and its residents floated in mud and sewage. One captain said “it was hopeless, it would be better to send a battery of artillery from Quebec to sink the ships to the bottom rather than to let all the poor people die in in such agony.
Father McGauran contracted typhus and was ordered to bed. He watched as wheelbarrows of bodies were carted past his window. “Corpses were buried loosely, 3 to a hole, with barely a foot of earth to cover them. The smell was unbearable." * After a few days he was taken by boat to hospital in Quebec where he was kept clean and fed milk and soup. A cure for typhus would not be discovered yet for another 50 years. Father McGauran survived, but 70% of the people who caught typhus were not so lucky.
Many children too were orphaned during this summer. People were eager to adopt these children. They did allowed these children to keep their last names for this was all they had left. Over generations their Irish names “stand out like orchids among the French ones, Kelly's, O'Brien, O'Connor's, Murphy's, and Ryan's. If ghosts could be grateful, they would surely be to the Quebecers.”
By the end of August the island became calmer, quarantine stations slowly became more orderly. That summer, The Summer of Sorrow, more than 100,000 emigrants sailed to Canada on over 400 ships. 6,000 were officially counted as dead that summer, but more then 20,000 could have died. It took years before the Irish were no longer feared and they rooted firmly in this country. They were mostly labourors. They helped to build bridges of Montreal and the Lachine Canal. They moved to the Ottawa Valley and west. Their children grew up Canadian and helped build a nation. They became writers, farmers, bosses and workers. One, Ned Hanlan, became the world's champion rower. Two others, John O'Donoghue and James Ryan helped forge the union movement. Father McGauran returned to Quebec City and helped to build an orphanage and a refuge for the Irish called St. Brigid's. He lived to see 2 Canada's unit into Confederation and to see the railways begin to move the Irish, his Irish, west across his expansive country.
There were two main waves of Irish Immigrants between 1815 and 1850. The most familiar and certainly well documented was the result of the Irish Potato Famine that drove thousands to Canada. The first wave of Irish immigrants arrived around 1815. The Irish belonged to two distinct Christian groups: Catholic and Protestant. There were significant differences in these two groups which resulted them residing in different parts of the new land. They each preserved parts of their Irish Culture. It was these Irish Immigrants that would shape the development of our country and lay the most meaningful foundation.
They are a minority group, but they were the 5th largest wave of immigrants to arrive in Canada. They were not farmers, but they supply a much needed labor force ready and willing to fill the growth in communication, commerce and industry. They provided the seasonal employment demands such as working on the canal system, lumber industry and the railway network in Canada. Today nearly 10% of our Canadian population today is made up of Irish descendants.
* Quotes taken from the book: A Scattering of Seeds- The Creation of Canada By Lindalee Tracy
Danny Boy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qcd26bbizgY
Words Borrowed From the Irish
Wee, smidgen, finagle, and shenanigans.
Prime Ministers are Immigrants Too
Brian Mulroney is Canada’s 18th Prime Minister, he is the son of Irish immigrant parents. Brian grew up in a minority Catholic Irish family. He was educated in a Roman Catholic boarding school speaking fluently both English and French. Mr. Mulroney is known to sing Irish songs.