Amy Froehler, Trevor Hamilton

Approximately 470,000 Irish came to Canada in 1815, because of dire poverty and starvation in their homeland. This starvation was called The Great Potato Famine. The Irish hoped to make a better life for themselves. Emigrants were mostly from Irelands northern countries. Most people who came were middle class. The Irish economy had been declining while the population was exploding. Most Irish Immigrants settled in Ontario in small groups, then they were joined by more, later on. In 1847 the Great Potato Famine occurred and approximately 2 million Irish fled and about 1 million died trying. The potato famine lasted 6 years and after the famine, the number of Irish immigrants in Canada decreased drastically.

The Irish have been coming to Canada since the 17 th century, not only as economic refugees, but as soldiers and servants of the British Empire. This was once the oppressor of their home land and their way to the world. At confederation, people of Irish origin were the second largest group of people, behind the French-Canadians. They had been leaders in the struggles for religious toleration and responsible government, prominent in journalism, in politics, in the churches. The vision of a new nation in North America had been given most powerful expression in the oratory of Thomas D'Arcy McGee. It is fair to say that without that vision, which caught the imagination of colonists scattered from the Atlantic to the Pacific, it would have been possible to see confederation as a mere business arrangement, a matter of railway dividends, freight rate and tariffs.

In the 19 th Century, 30,000 immigrants arrived in Canada. Approximately two thirds were Irish people coming into Canada were welcome, but they were quarantined at Grosse Ile until they were believed to be free of diseases. Grosse Ile was located at the St. Lawrence River downstream from the city of Quebec.

The Irish were at the bottom of the social ladder when they immigrated there. Bad morale affected some of the humbler Irish much as it has affected African-Americans and Canadian native people in our own time. Thinking they were worthless, many turned to crime and drunkenness.

Of all the groups of immigrants who came to Quebec in the 19th century, the Irish Catholics were the most assimilable. Lingusitic differences aside, they had much more in common with French Canadians than American, Scottish, Welsh or English immigrants. The Irish and French Canadians shared the same religion; thus one major impediment to intermarriage and biological assimilation did not exist. Both groups were rural oriented, moulded and directed by the clergy. They had little experience of urban living and neither group had been swept up in the industrial revolution. Their rural economies were similar, based on wheat production for export to the British market. Agricultural technology in both countries was poor, if not backward. The population of Ireland and Quebec had exploded in the second half of the 18th century so that the agricultural resources were overburdened. The threat of famine was eventually realized in Ireland in the 1820's and Quebec during the 1830's. When the wheat harvest failed in 1838, many French Canadian farmers adopted potatoes as the major staple crop. The two societies were linked closer than ever by the disaster of The fungus which destroyed so much of the potato crop in western Europe and created the Great Famine in Ireland originated in the Lower St. Lawrence Valley, where it wrecked similar havoc. Finally, both groups shared a common feeling of anitpathy towards Britain, the colonial overlord, who dominated so much of their political and economic life.

Intermarriage between the Irish and the French- Canadians After a while of these intermarriages, the Irish were hard to distinguish from the French because the Irish accepted their language and customs

Small commercial farmers

* 19th-century emigration from Ireland is usually broken down into three distinct phases: , when 1 million left; , when 2.5 million left; and when 4 million departed. * There are more than 3,800,000 Canadians who have Irish heritage

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