history

 Notable Irish canadians

Irish immigrants have played major role in Quebec and Canadian history, helping shape our culture, music, government and identity. Many of these historical figures were descendants of the surviving immigrants who fled to Canada during the Great Famine of 1847.

Mary Rose-Anne Bolduc, born Travers, (1894 – 1941), better known as La Bolduc, who was a star singer-songwriter in the early days of recording and a professional successful musician at a time when this vocation was not readily available to women.

Thomas D’Arcy McGee (1825 – 1868) who was an Irish-Canadian politician, Catholic spokesman, journalist, poet, and a Father of Canadian Confederation.  He moved to the Province of Canada in 1857 and worked hard to convince the Irish Catholics to cooperate with the Protestant British (members of the church) in forming a Confederation that would make for a self-governing Canada within the British Empire. 

Montreal Comes to the aid of Irish famine refugees with typhus

As tens of thousands of Irish famine immigrants infected with “ship fever” (typhus) flooded Montreal’s shores, the city’s residents came to their aide, often at the expense of their own lives. Le Typhus by Hamel, the only contemporary painting of the event, pictures the three religious feminine congregations who played the largest role in the rescue effort: “First came the Grey Nuns who gave themselves heart and soul to the fearful labors of the vast lazar-house…. Then the Sisters of Providence… took their places beside the coffin-like wooden beds of the fever patients in the sheds…, When these two large communities were found to be inadequate to take care of the ever- increasing multitude of the sick, a thing came to pass which struck the whole city with admiration. The cloistered Hospitallers of St. Joseph [or Hôtel Dieu nuns], whom the citizens of Montreal had never seen except behind the gratings of their chapel or parlor, or in their own hospital wards, petitioned the Bishop to dispense them their vows of long seclusion, that they might go to the aid of their dear sister communities in the pestilential atmosphere of the fever sheds”. Montreal Mayor John Mills also lost his life helping in the fever sheds of Point-Saint-Charles.