CLOSURE was achieved on the 4,466-km train journey from Toronto to Vancouver. Since student days it had been an ambition of this diarist to cross Canada by land. While not emulating William Francis Butler, the 19th-century Tipperary soldier and author – who traversed the continent twice by canoe, pony, snowshoe and dogsled – this four-day trip offers breathtaking scenery.
The serenity of the Muskoka Lakes, the vast expanse of prairie grasslands and cornfields, and the majestic Canadian Rockies provide an insight into the geographic diversity of the world’s second largest country. Winnipeg was the most interesting city where we paused heading west.
Before leaving Toronto I visited Ireland Park, a Great Famine memorial opened by President McAleese in 2007 (and still under construction). Research in the Catholic diocesan archives confirmed that immigrants were still living “in the Famine’s shadow” a generation later.
When mass emigration resumed in the early 1860s, the London Times compared Irish peasants to rats leaving an empty ship. The first Catholic archbishop of Toronto, John Joseph Lynch, was a patriarchal figure who cared deeply about the welfare of his people. He believed that, if obliged to denounce Fenianism, “we could not pass over the iniquity of the oppressors of the poor”.
Although the bishop disapproved of the Fenian organisation, he looked upon it as “the suppuration of great chronic wounds inflicted on Ireland”. It was a natural consequence of misrule: “A hungry and oppressed people will murmur and plot and conspire.” In February 1866 he wrote to “The O’Donoghue” – an Irish politician heralded at the time as the constitutional nationalist hope – deprecating “the evil that causes the horrid spectacle exhibited every day in the landing on the
American shores of hundreds of pauper families in rags and misery from Ireland, with tears in their eyes and imprecations on their lips against their former landlords and rulers”.
He witnessed daily the effects of oppression “in the poorhouses, jails, streets and back lanes of our city . . . In a recent report of Toronto lunatic asylum the superintendent gives as a reason for so many of inmates from Ireland, ‘distress and breaking up of families’.”
Bishop Lynch’s letter provides fascinating glimpses into the exploration of memory. “The wrongs of Ireland are the burden of the discourse around the firesides at night. Fathers narrate to their children born in this country scenes of horror and woe, of evictions, tearing down of houses, dying by the roadside, the shame, degradation and moral ruin of girls in the workhouses, the screams of the old and young at railroad stations and steamboat landings, the perils of the ocean and landing without a farthing in their pockets . . . Often do the children go to bed weeping for the wrongs of their fathers and their relations still in Ireland. Irish history, Irish songs, Irish newspapers, Irish speeches at school exhibitions, processions on St Patrick’s Day help to keep up the spirit of Irish nationality in this country.”
Poor Irish Catholics were despised and mistrusted in Ontario. With first-generation Irish Americans swelling the Fenian ranks, Lynch confided to Archbishop Paul Cullen of Dublin: “Should the Fenians come here in any force we are in a very critical position, between Fenians on the one side and bloodthirsty Orangemen on the other.”
After the American civil war, which started 150 years ago, a section of the Fenian Brotherhood hatched a plot to invade British North America. Those Irish Americans hoped to provoke a conflict between the US and Britain; they attempted to harness Irish disaffection to a US expansionist tendency going back to the war of 1812 (which the Canadian government is planning to commemorate next year). When faced with British resolve and Fenian incompetence, however, Washington ended its ambivalence and enforced the neutrality laws. Ironically, this Fenian threat did not advance the cause of Irish independence but influenced Canadian confederation (in 1867), while the constitutional status of Canada provided the framework of the Anglo-Irish Treaty in 1921.
THE Canadian Museum for Human Rights is scheduled to open in Winnipeg next year. Some groups object to the museum’s plan to establish a permanent space highlighting the Holocaust and a separate one for other atrocities, such as the 3.3 million Ukrainians who died of starvation under Stalin and the 1915 Armenian genocide. The caption beneath a Gandhi sculpture reads: “We must be the change we wish to see in the world.” We are summoned to be vibrant and compassionate signs of hope in our broken world.
The city retains a strong French cultural influence. Louis Riel, “the father of Manitoba”, led an insurrection of Métis (mixed race) and was hanged in 1885.
The focus of the trip was visiting my emigrant daughter, Emer, in Vancouver. This city of natural beauty and cultural diversity, set between the Pacific Coast and the North Shore mountains, has been rated one of the top 10 places to live in the world. In a sign of our recessionary times, the GAA is flourishing in North America, including Vancouver.
William Butler, author of Red Cloud/Néall Dearg, was among those appalled by the decimation of the First Nations. Before the arrival of Europeans at least 80,000 Indians lived in what is now British Columbia. By 1885 the indigenous population had been reduced to 28,000 by the effects of disease (mainly smallpox), firearms and alcohol. Today Canadian north-west coast Indian art is celebrated and preserved in the magnificent British Columbia Museum, Victoria.