Bitterness and hope at Irish famine march
Hydro-Québec plans have put ‘neglected’ memorial in spotlight
There was bitterness and hope at the 152nd annual Walk to the Stone on Sunday, as hundreds of Montrealers remembered the 6,000 Irish famine victims buried near the Victoria Bridge.
Bitterness because 170 years after the Irish immigrants died of typhus and were buried in mass graves, there is still no proper memorial for them.
The current one — a massive engraved boulder installed in 1859 in the median of Bridge St. — is in a sorry state, and now the preferred location for a commemorative park is being sold to make way for a Hydro-Québec substation.
“We have the first memorial in the world and it’s neglected,” Fergus Keyes, a director of the Montreal Irish Monument Park Foundation, said outside St-Gabriel’s Church before the two-kilometre march to the rock.
“Look at the area around the rock that’s supposed to be upkept by the city of Montreal — the fence is all rusted, the plaque is cracked. Nobody seems to care.”
But Keyes also expressed hope. “At least now, thanks mainly to the attention the media have given to (the need for an appropriate memorial), I think something may happen,” Keyes said. “Maybe it’s a blessing in disguise. Maybe Hydro and other people involved on a political level realize that this is an important issue.”
On Friday, Hydro- Québec said it and the city of Montreal will “establish a partnership with Montreal’s Irish community” to create a commemorative park.
The utility has agreed to conduct archeological digs on the land, and will try to determine whether bodies were buried in the area where it plans to build, Keyes said.
The utility also “didn’t seem to object to maybe some sort of interpretation centre” adjacent to the substation, he added.
Scheduled for completion in 2023, the facility is to power the planned Réseau électrique métropolitain light rail project.
Keyes’s group has been lobbying for a commemorative park since 2012.
Standing in front of the rock, Mayor Denis Coderre told the reporters that the city is committed to creating a memorial. He rejected suggestions his administration has done little to help the project.
“When we say that nothing was done before, that’s not accurate,” Coderre said. “I met people, people know exactly what I was doing. It’s not a matter of ‘You did nothing.’ I think everybody now understands the importance of everybody working together.”
Asked about the state of the current memorial, Coderre said: “I’m not going to reinvent the past, I’m looking ahead to make things work.”
Politicians with Irish heritage also took part in the event, including Quebec Native Affairs Minister Geoffrey Kelley, whose greatgreat-grandfather, a doctor, helped tend to the sick Irish immigrants.
Kelley said he has spoken to Pierre Arcand, the minister responsible for Hydro-Quebec, and “there’s a willingness among everyone concerned to find an appropriate solution, an appropriate way to commemorate the people who died there.”
Another politician of Irish descent, Thomas Mulcair, leader of the federal New Democratic Party, said Prime Minister Justin Trudeau should step in and stop the sale of the land so that graves are not desecrated.
Hydro-Québec is buying the land where a park had been envisaged — at Bridge and Des Irlandais Sts., adjacent to the black-rock memorial site — from Canada Lands Company, a federal agency. “We were all pleased to see Mr. Trudeau in the St. Patrick’s Day parade this year,” Mulcair said. “That heightens our disappointment that Mr. Trudeau’s government would allow this to go through.”
Mulcair noted that Irish Montrealers will show the same “patience and determination” that helped stop a federal government plan to turn Grosse Île, another Irish-famine burial site, into a theme park in the 1990s.
Irish Canadians from as far as Quebec City and Toronto took part in the march.
Among them was James Donovan, an organizer of Quebec City’s St. Patrick’s Parade whose ancestors arrived in Quebec from Ireland in the 1850s.
“It’s our duty to remember our forefathers,” Donovan said.
“It’s unfair that there’s no real memorial. We’re one of Quebec’s founding groups. Six thousand people are buried there in common graves and there’s nothing besides the rock in the middle of a busy street.”
In 1847, Montreal experienced a massive influx of Irish immigrants seeking to escape the Great Famine, only to die of typhus in Montreal.
In speeches at the black rock on Sunday, Irish community leaders thanked Montrealers — Catholic and protestant, anglophone and francophone — as well as Mohawks from nearby Kahnawake who tried to help those suffering from typhus.
Among those who gave aid to the poor immigrants was Montreal’s mayor, John Mills, who contracted typhus and died.
Outside of Ireland, the Montreal site is the largest burial ground of Irish famine victims in the world.
Sunday’s march began at St. Gabriel’s Church on Centre St., after a remembrance mass attended by several hundred people. They were asked to pray that a fitting memorial finally be built.