The Irish in Canada Podcast

Over the last three seasons, we've explored just how much Irish immigrants and their descendants have shaped Canada over the past 250 years, in so many ways.  In this concluding episode to the podcast, Jane looks back at some of her favourite moments from the show, wonders why certain bloodthirsty tales are eternally popular, takes a stand on cancel culture, and gives James FitzGibbon one las...

Ah, Emily Murphy... where do we begin?!  Maybe with the salient fact that this first female magistrate in the British Empire and driving force behind the Persons' Case of 1929 was also the grand-daughter of Ogle Gowan, the founder and Grand Master of the Orange Order in Canada.  In terms of having an Irish pedigree, she definitely had one, though how many of her fans knew that her great-grand...

Nellie McClung was a provocative woman, stirring up controversies and column inches in her own lifetime and in all the years since she died.  Arguably Canada’s most famous first-wave feminist, her efforts guaranteed that Manitoba’s women won the provincial vote in 1916, a first in Canada.  She was also one of The Famous Five, the group of activists who won the right for Canadian women to be consid...

Considering everything she did in her life – as a teacher, an author, a political activist, an archivist, private secretary to the premier of Alberta, and a journalist – we should be much more familiar with the name of Katherine Hughes.  Most people, however, are unaware of everything she achieved and helped to create in the first decades of the twentieth century, in part because of some of the co...

So far, we’ve talked about famous and infamous people in Irish Canadian history.  But, what about those who weren’t so extraordinary?  What was it like to be one of them?  Today, we’re following one Irish family from Co. Limerick to Canada as they lived through times of war, eviction, violence, and change.  Join us as we explore the history of the Dulmage family, Irish immigrants and their Canadia...

Who was the most important Irish person in Canadian history?  Or perhaps the most frustrating?  In today’s episode, Jane makes a case for Sir Guy Carleton as a serious contender for both titles.  Born to an Ulster Protestant military family, Carleton was perhaps an unlikely defender of Catholicism and French-Canadian civil rights, but his unyielding support for the Quebec Act of 1774 laid a bluepr...

In the summer of 1847, over 100,000 refugees from the Great Irish Famine poured into Canada, making their way up the St Lawrence River to Grosse Île, Québec, Montréal, and Toronto.  Others arrived at Partridge Island, the quarantine station just outside the harbour of Saint John, New Brunswick.  This is the story of two Irish Canadians — one in Toronto, and the other in Saint John — who tried to h...

When the Brock Monument exploded at Queenston Heights on 17 April 1840, the colonial authorities quickly decided upon the identity of the guilty culprit: the notorious Irishman, Benjamin Lett.  A follower of William Lyon Mackenzie, Ben Lett unleashed a campaign of terror and violence in the years following the failed 1837 Upper Canadian Rebellion.  To some, he was a Robin Hood figure, “the Rob Roy...

To end our second season, Jane is revealing some of her exclusive research from the Gender, Migration & Madness Project: the mystery surrounding the death of Mary Boyd.  Mary was an Irish Quebecer who found work as a young maid in a Toronto doctor’s household in 1868.  But the circumstances surrounding her suicide only a few months later caused a major scandal in the city about sex, virginity,...

Few people in Canadian history have created more division than Louis Riel.  At the time of his death in 1885, he had been found guilty of high treason, but even the jury who condemned him agreed that something else in Riel’s past was why he was killed: the execution of Thomas Scott.  Who was Thomas Scott?  Why was he executed in Winnipeg during the Red River Resistance, and why did Riel feel fifte...

Wild hogs eating corpses on a battlefield, women shot in the face, Irish soldiers strung up by their heels and mutilated, hangings, deportations, and ghosts… Does this sound like Canada to you?  Despite appearances of gentility in Upper Canada, the Battle of the Windmill was anything but – and for a Canadian battle, it was chock-full of Irishmen.  At the tiny hamlet of New Wexford in November 1838...

The 1837 Lower Canadian Rebellion was as close as the Canadian colonies ever came to revolution.  Edmund Bailey O’Callaghan – doctor, politician, and notable newspaper editor in Montreal – was Louis-Joseph Papineau’s right-hand man in the tense years leading to the battles between les patriotes and the British Army.  As the editor of The Vindicator , O’Callaghan became the most powerful Irishman i...

Ellen Cashman was born during the era of the Great Irish Famine in Co. Cork.  As a young woman, she left with her family for Boston and then the Wild West.  A businesswoman, prospector, philanthropist, and literal trailblazer, “Irish Nellie” was a notable female figure in an extremely masculine world.  Join us as we explore the exploits of this singular Irish woman who found fame (if not fortune)...

The Franklin Expedition looms large in Canadian myths and legends, in large part because of what happened to the doomed crews of the HMS Erebus and Terror … or what we think happened.  But at the heart of this story of the Canadian north is an Irishman from Co. Down who lived through the worst that the unforgiving winters had to offer, and then led the survivors as they abandoned the ships and wan...

We're back on March 2nd with The Irish in Canada Podcast , Season 2!

Our final episode this season recounts the tale of Mary Gallagher, Montreal’s ‘Ghost of Griffintown,’ and the gory murder that has had her ghost searching for her lost head for the nearly 150 years.  Well known to Irish Montrealers but not to many who live outside of the city, the story of Mary Gallagher and Susan Kennedy Myers – the woman who allegedly murdered her – brings together themes of Iri...

The Gender, Migration & Madness Project ( www.gendermigrationandmadness.ca ) is our focus this week: a multi-year investigation Jane has been leading that explores how the Irish were treated in Canadian colonial lunatic asylums in the mid-nineteenth century.  Did negative stereotypes about the Irish affect the ways in which they were treated once they were institutionalised?  And what led to t...

In another country, the dark legends about The Shiners might never have been forgotten.  But in Canada?  How many people today are aware that one of the most dangerous cities in North America used to be…Ottawa?  Not many – and yet, it was.  The Shiners – violent, intimidating, criminal Irish lumberjacks living along the Ottawa River in the 1830s – fly in the face of every image of Canada as ‘the p...

Jane gets a bit carried away this week, but we can see why.  James FitzGibbon was one of the best known Irishmen in pre-Famine Canada as a hero of the War of 1812, the defender of Toronto, and a one-man riot-squad brought in to stop sectarian violence.  He was beloved, trusted, and a friend to all Irish immigrants and the colonial establishment.  So, why has he now become one of the more forgotten...

Ogle Gowan was an Orangeman, a politician, a journalist, a rabble-rouser, and the illegitimate son of one of Co. Wexford’s most notorious anti-Catholics.  His use of violence to achieve political ends in Upper Canada made him a hero to some, and a villain to others – even members of his own family.  This episode explores Ogle Gowan’s life and career, and also investigates some very passionate love...

The Orange Order – an Irish Protestant fraternal association founded in the 1790s – was hugely popular in English-speaking Canada in the nineteenth century, although it’s mostly forgotten today.  How did Orangemen become so successful, both politically and culturally?  Why did they take root so firmly in parts of Upper Canada?  And what did this success in Canada have to do with the 1798 Irish Ris...

Epidemic, pandemic, quarantine – these are words we’re very used to now, in a way that we arguably haven’t been in nearly 200 years.  In 1832, Irish immigrants flooded into the Canadas, fleeing for their lives as cholera, a highly contagious and deadly disease, ravaged Europe, Britain, and Ireland.  They didn’t receive the warmest of welcomes.

In late July 1843, the colony of Upper Canada was stunned with the news of a bloody double-murder.  Thomas Kinnear had been shot and Nancy Montgomery – his housekeeper and pregnant mistress – had been strangled and dismembered.  The two people accused of the murders were Kinnear’s Irish servants: James McDermott and the teenager, Grace Marks.  Grace’s story has since become one of the most famous...

Jane offers a brief overview of who we are, what we hope to achieve with this podcast, and a few of her inspirations for the first season of the show.