CORCORAN: HAPPY ST. PATRICK’S DAY? NOT ALWAYS.
Another green-beer St. Patrick’s Day is upon us, to be followed, as is customary, by parades in which thousands of civic boosters in Montreal, Toronto and other cities will march in celebration of Irish culture, heritage and history. Mostly, though, people of all races and denominations will have a good time, even though they wouldn’t know a shamrock from a dandelion.
Beyond the fun, the celebrants and marchers this weekend are unlikely to hear anything about the sometimes vicious sectarian history of the Irish in Canada and North America. We are generally silent on the violence and terrorism. None of the pub- goers and paradewatchers will hear of the decades of petty and sometimes violent abuse and intolerance, the Irelandophobic slurs and name- calling, the demonstrations and shootings — events that are just a little too similar to the current outbreaks of religious and cultural intolerance that seem to be sweeping through the national culture today.
That polite silence on the history of the Irish in Canada has until now seemed entirely appropriate. In the 150 years since Confederation united the clashing provinces of British North America under a single constitution, Canada has emerged mostly as its founders anticipated, a nation open to all immigrants regardless of nationality, religion or culture.
In the words of Irish Catholic Thomas D’Arcy McGee, one of the Fathers of Confederation, spoken in November 1867 during the first session of Parliament on passage of the British North America Act, “This is the first Constitution ever given to a mixed people, in which the conscientious rights of the minority, are made a subject of formal guarantee … a guarantee by which we have carried the principle of equal and reciprocal toleration a step further in Canada than has been carried, in any other free government — American or European.”
Five months later, on April 4, 1868, McGee was shot in the back of the head outside his lodgings on Sparks Street in Ottawa in what today would be referred to as a terrorist assassination. He died just two blocks from where assorted Canadians of various nationalities will this weekend celebrate St. Patrick’s Day at a pub called D’Arcy McGee’s.
McGee’s assassins were members of t he Fenian Brotherhood, extreme Irish nationalists whose various hallucinatory aims included a military takeover of Canada, mounted via an invasion of Irish revolutionaries from the United States, which would somehow force Britain to liberate Ireland. An invasion force did attack Canada in 1866, where 32 people died near Fort Erie in a military event known as the Battle of Ridgeway. The Brotherhood, formed in the U. S., spread to Canada in the 1850s and peaked as a threat in the 1860s, but became the foundation for the Irish Republican Army, whose murderous activities terrorized Britain for much of the 20th century.
It would be incautious and even foolish to draw too many hard parallels between then and now, between the deep religious conflicts and violence in Canada 150 years ago and today’s stories of Canadian intolerance and killings motivated by religious animosities.
As University of Toronto historian David Wilson writes in Irish Nationalism in Canada, the Fenian Brotherhood “was manifestly not an early version of al- Qaida” or any other Islamist organization. “But the government during the 1860s was faced with a question that has returned in a different form: How can a revolutionary minority within an ethnoreligious out- group be isolated, contained, and defeated without alienating other members of that group?”
Thanks in part to McGee and the aggressive anti- Fenian strategies of Canada’s first prime minister, Canada did exactly that. John A. Macdonald, a Protestant Scot, set up a secret spy network and suspended habeas corpus to round up Fenians embedded within Canadian Irish- Catholic communities. McGee’s assassin was convicted and the Fenians were isolated, contained and ultimately defeated.
As the Fenian threat faded, Irish- Catholic radical nationalism, based on religious conflict and sectarian intolerance, also faded into the background, the stuff of end- less academic histories that seemed to have little current relevance.
Today seems different. Current displays of religious and cultural intolerance, bigotry, anger, violence and political posturing echo the harsh religious realities surrounding the Irish during the years immediately before, during, and after Confederation.
This weekend’s cheerful celebrants of St. Patrick’s Day will be unaware of the parade’s troubled history. In 1867, the year of Confederation, there was no parade in Toronto. For the second year in a row, the city’s Catholic bishop had banned the parade after warnings that the organizers had been taken over by the Hibernian Brotherhood, portrayed by McGee and others as a front for Fenian revolutionaries. The year before, amid rumours of a Fenian invasion from the south, McGee had warned of violence if the Toronto parade took place.
The risk of violence at a public event, as today, was real. The Catholic organizers of the Toronto parades deliberately aimed to provoke the city’s dominant Protestant power elites, led by members of the Orange Order. Protestants, in turn, mounted “No Popery” campaigns that were galvanized and animated by warring newspapers. In 1858, attempts by militant Protestants to disrupt the parade produced a violent confrontation that led to the death of an Irish- Catholic man.
Historian Michael Cottrell wrote that the 1858 parade murder produced much anxiety among Toronto’s Irish Catholics. “Prejudice, harassment and attacks on Catholic Priests and church property all contributed to the growth of a siege mentality.”
David Wilson, in his McGee biography, recalls some of the clashes typical of the time. “In May 1864 an Orange crowd attacked the Corpus Christie procession in Toronto. On Guy Fawkes night, amid rumours that Orangemen were planning to burn effigies of the Pope … the Hibernians decided to take action. At midnight, four hundred men, many of them carrying guns and pikes, gathered at Queen’s Park.” No confrontation ensued, but the events established a general climate of fear and distrust among the city’s Catholics.
Over time, as the Fenian threat subsided and the movement weakened in Canada, Irish Catholics became more integrated into Toronto society. The St. Patrick’s Day parades seemed unnecessary, even counterproductive. Toronto’s last parade of the era, sparsely attended, took place in 1876, although religious violence persisted for several years. The city’s parade tradition was not revived until 1986.
In Montreal, the St. Patrick’s Day parade has taken place uninterrupted for 192 years — or so they say. They continued in Montreal in part because the city’s Irish Catholics felt better inte- grated into a French- Catholic city where Protestants were a minority.
Still, sectarian confrontations frequently broke out in Montreal, with Protestant Orange Order factions clashing with Irish Catholics. Lives were lost. A member of the Orange Order was shot in 1876. As many as 1,200 Protestants descended on Montreal in protest, creating new fears of violence that led to the cancellation of the July 12 Orange parade, an annual event that celebrated the 1690 Battle of the Boyne — seen as a great Irish-Protestant victory over the Catholics.
These parades, battles, skirmishes and demonstrations of religious conflict — as with today’s religious and racial frictions — took place in the context of much larger international events in Europe and America, from Papal decrees of infallibility in Rome to the Civil War in the United States and the 1845-52 Great Irish Famine that killed more than one million in Ireland and drove one million more to emigrate to Canada, Australia and America.
While there are limits to the comparisons that can be drawn between the religious clashes during Confederation and today’s race and religious animosities, such comparisons cannot be neglected. It might even be said that the Irish Catholics in Canada of the 1860s were the Muslims of their time.
This is not an attempt to claim equivalence. But consider the relative scale of activities. Montreal had a population of about 100,000 in the 1860s. When 1,200 show up to protest, that’s the same as a 20,000-person march today. In 1866, David Wilson estimates that as many as 1,000 young men were members of the secret Fenian revolutionary brotherhood in Montreal and Toronto, equal to about 5 per cent of the Irish- Catholic population in both cities.
These were all young men, part of the flood of Irish who, fleeing famine and British rule in Ireland, entered Canada as refugees in the years leading up to Confederation. They were rural immigrants in urban settings. Many if not most were unemployed, unskilled and struggling — exactly the demographic that today is lured into radical activities around the world.
What would McGee make of Canada this St. Patrick’s Day, almost 150 years since his death? Wilson, his biographer, says it is a reasonably safe bet that “he would have wanted a very hard line against Islamic terrorist/revolutionaries and their sympathizers in Canada.”
But on immigration, Wilson said in an interview, McGee would have wanted “a polity in which people from different cultures would accept their differences and have a mutually beneficial relationship.” It also seems safe to speculate that McGee would also be no fan of attempts to impose a single set of core values beyond some basic fundamentals of tolerance, freedom and internal economic coherence.
Such conclusions are certainly consistent with the views McGee expressed through the later years of his political career in Canada.
Some say McGee invented Confederation. His vision for a New Great Northern Nation stands as attainable if not quite yet fully achieved. He foresaw “A Canadian nationality, not French- Canadian, nor British- Canadian, nor Irish- Canadian — patriotism rejects the prefix — is, in my opinion, what we should look forward to. That is what we ought to labour for, that is what we ought to be prepared to defend to the death.”
Canada would have turned out differently had it not been for the ideas and spirit of the Fathers of Confederation, and the people who voted for them. None were saints, least of all Macdonald the Protestant Scot and McGee the Irish Catholic, two men who specialized in compromise and adaptation — and the consumption of alcohol.
McGee was apparently a mesmerizing speaker and performer when in full flight. A few years before Confederation, he toured the Maritime regions to promote his idea of a Canadian federal state. He apparently drank heavily on the tour, but according to a newspaper owned by another Father of Confederation, Charles Tupper, McGee “has done more to promote the social, commercial and political union of British North America than any other man.”
Not everybody agreed. Another observer, an enemy of McGee, dismissed the Maritime tour as “the Big Intercolonial Drink.”
If he were around this St. Patrick’s Day, one would like to think that McGee would be more than happy to lift a glass of green beer in a Great National Drink with people of all nationalities and beliefs to celebrate the Canada he promoted and helped create more than 150 years ago.
SECTARIAN CONFRONTATIONS FREQUENTLY BROKE OUT.