Canada And Ireland

Canadians have been involved in, intrigued by, and frustrated with Irish politics, from the Fenian Raids of the 1860s to the present day. Yet scholars have largely neglected Canadian–Irish relations since the consolidation of the Irish Free State in the 1920s. In Canada and Ireland, Philip J. Currie addresses this lacuna and examines political relations between the two countries, from partition to the Good Friday Agreement of 1998. This intriguing study sheds light on Ottawa’s responses to key developments such as Ireland’s neutrality in the Second World War, its unsettled relationship with the Commonwealth, and the always contentious issue of Irish unification.

Canadians have been involved in, intrigued by, and frustrated with Irish politics, from the Fenian Raids of the 1860s to the present day. Yet scholars have largely neglected Canadian–Irish relations since the consolidation of the Irish Free State in the 1920s. In Canada and Ireland, Philip J. Currie addresses this lacuna and examines political relations between the two countries, from partition to the Good Friday Agreement of 1998. This intriguing study sheds light on Ottawa’s responses to key developments such as Ireland’s neutrality in the Second World War, its unsettled relationship with the Commonwealth, and the always contentious issue of Irish unification.

Including a new preface by the author, Irish Migrants in the Canadas probes beyond the aggregate statistics of most studies of the migration process. Bruce Elliott traces the genealogies, movements, landholding strategies, and economic lives of 775 families of Irish immigrants who came to Canada between 1815 and 1855 from County Tipperary, Ireland. He follows his subjects not only from Ireland to Canada but in their subsequent movements within North America. His work has important implications for current discussions of nineteenth-century society in Ireland, Canada, and the United States.

"Christopher Klein's fresh telling of this story is an important landmark in both Irish and American history." —James M. McPherson Just over a year after Robert E. Lee relinquished his sword, a band of Union and Confederate veterans dusted off their guns. But these former foes had no intention of reigniting the Civil War. Instead, they fought side by side to undertake one of the most fantastical missions in military history: to seize the British province of Canada and to hold it hostage until the independence of Ireland was secured. By the time that these invasions--known collectively as the Fenian raids--began in 1866, Ireland had been Britain's unwilling colony for seven hundred years. Thousands of Civil War veterans who had fled to the United States rather than perish in the wake of the Great Hunger still considered themselves Irishmen first, Americans second. With the tacit support of the U.S. government and inspired by a previous generation of successful American revolutionaries, the group that carried out a series of five attacks on Canada--the Fenian Brotherhood--established a state in exile, planned prison breaks, weathered infighting, stockpiled weapons, and assassinated enemies. Defiantly, this motley group, including a one-armed war hero, an English spy infiltrating rebel forces, and a radical who staged his own funeral, managed to seize a piece of Canada--if only for three days. When the Irish Invaded Canada is the untold tale of a band of fiercely patriotic Irish Americans and their chapter in Ireland's centuries-long fight for independence. Inspiring, lively, and often undeniably comic, this is a story of fighting for what's right in the face of impossible odds.

Winner of the 1991 QSPELL Prize for Non-fiction One of Canada’s founding peoples, the Irish arrived in the Newfoundland fishing stations as early as the seventeenth century. By the eighteenth century they were establishing farms and settlements from Nova Scotia to the Great Lakes. Then, in the 1840s, came the failures of Ireland’s potato crop, which people in the west of Ireland had depended on for survival. "And that," wrote a Sligo countryman, "was the beginning of the great trouble and famine that destroyed Ireland." Flight from Famine is the moving account of a Victorian-era tragedy that has echoes in our own time but seems hardly credible in the light of Ireland’s modern prosperity. The famine survivors who helped build Canada in the years that followed Black ’47 provide a testament to courage, resilience, and perseverance. By the time of Confederation, the Irish population of Canada was second only to the French, and four million Canadians can claim proud Irish descent.