New Book on Irish Global Migration and Memory with Chapters on the Famine Irish in Canada and Montreal

https://www.routledge.com/Irish-Global-Migration-and-Memory-Transatlantic-Perspectives-of-Irelands/Corporaal-King/p/book/9781138693388

About the Book

Irish Global Migration and Memory: Transnational Perspectives of Ireland’s Famine Exodus brings together leading scholars in the field who examine the experiences and recollections of Irish emigrants who fled from their famine-stricken homeland in the mid-nineteenth century. The book breaks new ground in its comparative, transnational approach and singular focus on the dynamics of cultural remembrance of one migrant group, the Famine Irish and their descendants, in multiple Atlantic and Pacific settings. Its authors comparatively examine the collective experiences of the Famine Irish in terms of their community and institution building; cultural, ethnic, and racial encounters with members of other groups; and especially their patterns of mass-migration, integration, and remembrance of their traumatic upheaval by their descendants and host societies. The disruptive impact of their mass-arrival had reverberations around the Atlantic world. As an early refugee movement, migrant community, and ethnic minority, Irish Famine emigrants experienced and were recollected to have faced many of the challenges that confronted later immigrant groups in their destinations of settlement. This book is especially topical and will be of interest not only to Irish, migration, and refugee scholars, but also the general public and all who seek to gain insight into one of Europe’s foundational moments of forced migration that prefigures its current refugee crisis.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Atlantic Studies: Global Currents.

Table of Contents

1. Irish global migration and memory: transnational perspectives of Ireland’s Famine exodus 2. Memory and John Mitchel?s appropriation of the slave narrative 3. Recrimination and reconciliation: Great Famine memory in Liverpool and Montreal at the turn of the twentieth century 4. Remembering Canada: the place of Canada in the memorializing of the Great Irish Famine 5. ‘‘Neither do these tenants or their children emigrate’’: famine and transatlantic emigration from Finland in the nineteenth century 6. Famine, home, and transatlantic politics in two late nineteenth-century Irish-American novels 7. Famine memory and the gathering of stones: genealogies of belonging.

Marguérite Corporaal is an Associate Professor of British Literature at Radboud University Nijmegen, Netherlands, and principal investigator of the research program Relocated Remembrance: The Great Famine in Irish (Diaspora) Fiction, 1847–1921. She is also director of the International Network of Irish Famine Studies that is funded by the Dutch Research Council (2014-2017) and based at Radboud University Nijmegen.

Jason King is an Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Researcher in the Moore Institute at the National University of Ireland, Galway. His publications include numerous articles in the field of Irish Studies, with a special focus on Irish–Canadian and Irish–American history and culture. In addition, he is the coordinator and lead researcher of the Digital Irish Famine Archive.

http://faminearchive.nuigalway.ie/

Michael Collins Pays Tribute to Grey Nuns and Famine Irish in Montreal on Celtic Trail of Tears

From the Irish Times:

http://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-style/generation-emigration/why-are-6-000-irish-buried-under-a-montreal-traffic-island-1.2696681

Why are 6,000 Irish buried under a Montreal traffic island?

Michael Collins finds an unusual Famine memorial during his 900km run

about 20 hours ago

Michael Collins in Canada

The second day’s run begins under dark skies for Michael Collins. Photograph: Anne Petersen

The Black Rock in Montreal marks the burial site of 6,000 Irish who died in 1848. Photograph: Kevin Wright/Bloomsday Montreal

 

The Irish Diaspora Run sees Michael Collins running almost 900km between June 10th and July 10th, from Grosse Île to Toronto, tracing the steps taken by thousands of Irish immigrants who fled the Famine in 1847. This is the second of his weekly updates for The Irish Times. 

The most striking fact that emerged from the research I conducted on the passage of some 100,000 who left Ireland aboard the infamous coffin ships in the spring of 1847 was how the municipal authorities, in tandem with the religious orders of Montreal, marshaled their collective resources to care and minister to the sick and dying Irish.

Simply put, the question was: What affinity did the native Québecois have toward this advance of typhus-stricken Irish?

The facts are sobering. Disease and death loomed with the advance of the Irish along the Saint Lawrence. By early June, a month after the official seasonal opening of the quarantine station at Grosse Île, forty ships, each carrying over 300 passengers, were lined back along the Saint Lawrence. The quarantine island medical facilities, which had been built to accommodate just 200 sick, was simply overrun. No true medical assessment of individual cases could be adequately determined.

Only the obviously dying were taken to the fever sheds. In effect, the île would become less a quarantine station and more a graveyard. In that season of death, upward of 5,000 souls would be hastily interred in trenched mass graves.

And so it went – as an apocalyptic, zombie-like advance of 75,000, typhus stricken Irish headed toward Montreal, then a city of 50,000. The heroics of those who met the advance of sickness bears testimony to one of the most harrowing stories of the Great Hunger.

Again, in assessing the massive influx of immigrants, one is left asking, what was the resolve of Montreal to bear and minister to such an alien-speaking flotsam of Irish?

In a slow advance toward Montreal, much that is asked in that question is becoming apparent. I chose Route 2 for the run, given that it languidly follows the meandering Saint Lawrence, but, in now running alongside this less-traveled road, I come upon religious shrines that harken to a penitent spectre of a more ancient, religious life. This is an ancient road of agrarian toil, a trail worn by a dutiful and faithful peasantry. Within two days of leaving Quebec City, I had run in the domain of a forgotten Catholicism in a rural foothold of former peasant lands.

Michael Collins at churches along the Saint Lawrence in Quebec. Photograph: Anne Petersen

The religious shrines are eerily reminiscent of those that still exist along the coastal crag of the West of Ireland; weathered figures of Christ’s passion on a cross facing the eternal scour of the Atlantic gales. You expect this of Ireland, but to come upon these roadside shrines in the rainy cold is a revelation.

Photograph: Anne Petersen

The agony of the cross proves to be the most enduring and arresting subjects out on the peninsula beyond Quebec City. Though peculiar to the French Canadians, the statuettes bear the mediaeval flourish of a golden painted adornment with the azure blue of Mary’s robes.

On the evening of the fifth day of the run – my fifth consecutive marathon – while fighting advancing dark, I came across a small acreage of a farm with a roadside glass enclosure of Joseph holding the infant Jesus. It might as well have been an apparition. We are so given to movement and flash, to the blare of sound, that coming upon this serenity, locking eyes on the paternal vigil of father and son, reawakened a religious supplication that I had not felt since being a boarder at Saint Munchin’s school in Limerick. Here was the quiet communion and intercession of a deep-felt religiosity made incarnate.

In the solitary pilgrimage of miles, I was connected with the beatitude of those saintly figures who heard God or Mary speak to them on hillsides. Nature and solitude are together a powerful elixir. In our apparent smallness, in apprehending the glory of the seasons, we instinctively submit to honouring a higher power.

Photograph: Anne Petersen

By a crude calculation of observation, I established that most of the shrines were some ten miles apart, and thus I had landed upon a measure of time and distance that was linked to an older mode of travel – walking. Here were shrines established at a natural respite between distances, shrines appointed along the protective bend in the river, altars recessed at an angle in a conjuring so they might refract light and divine some moment of revelation for the weary traveller.

Power of salvation

I ran over 300km in the first six days after leaving Grosse Île, and, in so doing, in taking this less traveled passage along the Saint Lawrence, I began to answer the question regarding why so many of Montreal’s secular and religious community felt the compunction to risk their lives to save the Irish.

The most arresting early reading I did on the passage to Canada in 1847 centered on the role of the Grey Nuns, who ministered to the newly arrived immigrants. By the hand of providence – and I do believe that some projects are guided by divine intervention – I uncovered that the first-of-its-kind exhibition of the Grey Nuns was about to end its run at Quinnipiac University in Connecticut.

The exhibition was curated by one of Ireland’s great Irish Famine historians, Dr Christine Kinealy. After making contact with Dr Kinealy, she graciously agreed to keep the exhibition up for an extra day so I could come visit.

Dr. Jason King, Professor Christine Kinealy, and Canadian Ambassador Kevin Vickers at launch of Digital Irish Famine Archive.

On a last-minute plane to Connecticut, I had read the annals of the Grey Nuns, collated by the esteemed scholar, Dr Jason King. The work is nothing short of genius, and, though I can’t attest to the power of the French text, the translation by Philip O’Gorman is one of those revelatory academic works that bridges facts with a tonal acuity that captures the essential psyche of the order:

http://faminearchive.nuigalway.ie/

Click to access TheTyphusof1847.pdf

Through the act of reading, I understood the motivation and sacrifice of the order of Grey Nuns. I was immediately and shamefully reminded of my own fallen state, of how I had a great-aunt, who, in the cloister of over 75 years as a nun, had served the poor and indigent as a member of the order of The Little Sisters of the Poor.

On the eve of St Patrick’s Day, and with the exodus of the student body for Spring Break, I arrived onto an eerily depopulated, bucolic campus. The encounter with Dr Kinealy figures as one of those deeply affecting preordained moments – firstly for the graciousness of Dr Kinealy in agreeing to host me, but also for the religious aura she captured in curating the exhibition. In a contained, single room, she brought the events of 1847 into a singular, spiritual experience. This was scholarship wedded to a deeply affecting understanding of the spirituality of the order of Grey Nuns.

The Grey Nuns, those so-called Martyrs of Charity, were the first to the hastily erected fever sheds on the outskirts of Montreal’s harbor at Pointe St Charles. In the translated texts there is a spirituality communicated that reveals, dare I say it, an ancient, seductive power of a sort of spiritual ecstasy that pits the temporality of earthly life against an eternal reward with Christ.

Maps of Montreal Fever Sheds.

In arriving at Quinnipiac University and then eventually standing outside the Grey Nuns’ Convent in Montreal, I better understood the redeeming power of salvation and the charged humanity of earthly acts performed while one’s heart is directed heavenward. This was the greater reality of life in the pre-enlightenment – harsh brutish and short.

There are descriptions of sickness and effluence referenced in the fever sheds that sickened veteran doctors, and yet the chronicles of the annals report that the Martyrs of Charity actively sought out the most distressing cases of disease. A seasoned doctor, a Protestant who worked in the fever sheds, reportedly converted to Catholicism on his deathbed, requesting that the sisters tend to him.

Theophile Hamel’s Le Typhus (1847-48) with Grey Nuns in the foreground.

In reading the annals, what is transmitted is an authenticity of reportage that is so deeply affecting that one feels as though one is bearing witness to a faith that was first eclipsed by an Enlightenment age of reason and science, which eventually gave way to jaded cynicism.

Click to access TheTyphusof1847.pdf

Arriving at the Black Rock

The first week is done now – the total distance is 300 kilometres, but, more significantly than the kilometres run, I have come across signaling markers and points of introspection that are leading me to a greater context of the relationship of the self to God.

The week ended with my arrival at the Black Rock, a memorial stone that sits in the middle of a traffic island in Montreal. Over 6,000 Irish are interred in a mass grave. All died in the fever sheds. The burial site was uncovered during construction in 1859 of the Victoria Bridge. The historical moment of the fever sheds and the associated burial of so many was almost lost. Stubbornly, the workers who unearthed the entombed erected, at their own cost, the stone that now commemorates those almost forgotten dead.

The Black Rock was my first point of historical significance after leaving Grosse Île. I took the memory of 6,000 souls with me. I linked their memory with those who eventually died further along the Saint Lawrence in the fever sheds at Montreal. This is our Celtic Trail of Tears.

As an Irish expatriate, I am removed from the day-to-day life of a modern Ireland, and yet at times it takes the voice of the pining diaspora to reckon with history. If we can be charged with an arrested sense of history, then so be it. What I can report to you is that in standing at the memorial service held on the occasion of my arrival into Montreal, I was cognizant that this was the end for so many Irish, but also the beginning of the Irish diaspora experience in Canada.

On the day of my arrival, we gathered to honour the dead, but also to celebrate the Canadian Irish experience. On hand were local and national media, as the distinguished parliamentarian Marc Miller, who graciously attended the ceremony, added his support to a plan to move the Black Rock to a proposed famine memorial park.

The memorial park is too long in the waiting. There are the cynics who will say to let the dead lie where they will. It is, of course, the easier of choices, but what I have experienced on this run is a cadre of historically minded, hard-headed citizens who believe remembrance is not connected with advancing animosities, but simply preserving the historical reality of a year so many would prefer to forget.

I cannot end without acknowledging the head of the Ancient Order of Hibernia, Victor Boyle, along with Donovan King, brother of Dr Jason King. Their eloquence and commitment to our history is exemplary. Last but not least, I would like to thank Fergus Keyes and Peggie Hopkins for first greeting me in Quebec City, accompanying me out to Grosse Île and then coordinating the event at the Black Rock.

What I have come to understand is that the preservation of our history does not simply happen. For every monument and statue we casually pass by, there’s a Fergus Keyes who has tirelessly advocated for its place in the competing histories of each city and nation.

How to join the Irish Diaspora Run

The route begins at Grosse Île quarantine island, on the St Lawrence river, and continues through Quebec City, Montreal and Kingston before reaching Ireland Park, in Toronto on July 10th.

The project is raising funds for Irish-Canadian organisations seeking to create parks and erect monuments and statues to commemorate 1847.

Others can participate by taking on runs where they live, and logging their distances on diasporarun.org, where they can also sponsor Collins.

This project is supported by the Global Irish Media Fund

Michael Collins visits Famine Irish historical sites associated with Grey Nuns and views paintings inspired by their annals

From Fergus Keyes:

Here are some more pictures of Michael Collins in Montreal yesterday. After visiting the Vernissage, Michael met up with Donovan King who in addition to being a Director of our group, also gives tours of Haunted Montreal. So Michael got so see more of Montreal at night….

 

Notre-Dame-de-Bonsecours Church at night, in which Theophile Hamel’s painting Le Typhus (1847-48) can be viewed:

Fergus Keyes: Michael Collins attended a Vernissage by a group of lady painters in Point St. Charles who call themselves, the Group of Sven.

Our group, The Montreal Irish Monument Park Foundation asked these ladies if they could paint their ideas of the Black Rock & the events of 1847.

Then we asked one of the group, Karen Birdgenaw, if she could take some specific stories about the event of Black 47 and translate these stories into paintings (which we plan to include in our Grey Nun’s Exhibition: “Saving the Famine Irish: The Grey Nuns and the Great Hunger”):

The original Grey Nuns’ accounts of the Famine Irish can be found at:

http://faminearchive.nuigalway.ie/

 

New Book on The Famine Irish: Emigration and the Great Hunger with chapters on the Famine Irish in Quebec

‘Une Voix d’Irlande’: Integration, Migration, and Travelling Nationalism between Famine Ireland and Quebec

Dr. Jason King (Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Research Fellow, National University of Ireland, Galway)

Languages of Memory: Jeremiah Gallagher and the Grosse Île Famine Monument

Michael Quigley (Editor, Canadian Association for Irish Studies Newsletter, former Action Grosse Île Historian)

 

2016 National Famine Commemoration to take place in September in Glasnevin, Dublin

Minister Humphreys announces date of National Famine Commemoration 2016

The Minister for Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht and Chair of the National Famine Commemoration Committee, Heather Humphreys TD, has today (Wednesday) announced that this year’s National Famine Commemoration will take place on Sunday, 11^th September at Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin.

The State commemoration at Glasnevin will be enriched by the participation of the local community and local schools. The ceremony will involve National flag and military honours before culminating in a solemn wreath-laying.

Speaking today, Minister Humphreys said:

“This will be the 9^th consecutive year in which the National Famine Commemoration has taken place and each commemoration has afforded us an excellent opportunity to pay tribute to the memory of those of our forebears who perished, emigrated and suffered during the Famine, which had such a profound impact on the island of Ireland.

“I am particularly pleased that the ceremony will take place in Glasnevin Cemetery, the resting place of so many of our national heroes, during this most important of centenary years. Glasnevin has been the location for a number of very respectful commemoration ceremonies throughout 2016, and I have no doubt it will serve as a fitting location for this year’s famine commemoration.

“I would like to thank the National Famine Commemoration Committee for their work and Glasnevin Trust for agreeing to stage the commemoration at the iconic Dublin cemetery.  My Department and I look forward to working with the Trust and the local community in the area, as well as with our colleagues in the Office of Public Works, to deliver a fitting commemoration of the Famine at this hallowed site.”

The decision to hold the National Famine Commemoration in Glasnevin was largely inspired by Michael Blanch, who had been campaigning for recognition of its historical significance as a mass burial site of famine victims.

https://echo.ie/tallaght/article/family-strive-to-get-memorial-to-all-the-irish-famine-victims  April 18, 2016

By Mary Dennehy

A TALLAGHT family is the driving force behind a campaign for a memorial to the victims of An Gorta Mor in Glasnevin Cemetery, which is the biggest mass grave of Irish Famine victims.

Lobbied for by the Committee for the Commemoration of Irish Famine Victims (CCIFV), the memorial will represent all of the unmarked Famine graves in Glasnevin Cemetery, across Ireland and overseas.

Raheen resident Micheal Blanch, who founded CCIFV with his family, and was instrumental in the development of a National Famine Commemoration Day, told The Echo: “Dublin was the epicentre of the Famine people flocking to the city for work, food, emigration and, sadly, dying when they got here.

“That’s how Glasnevin Cemetery holds the most victims of An Gorta Mor in the world, and it’s important the victims are remembered with a fitting memorial – after more than 170 years of national amnesia.

“The memorial will symbolise all the victims of the Great Hunger who lie in unmarked grass on the island of Ireland, at the bottom of the sea in a watery grave and those overseas in unmarked graves – they will all be remembered in our national cemetery in Glasnevin.”

Speaking to The Echo, Micheal expressed his frustration over the delay in getting approval for the memorial, which he has designed with the support of Tallaght business, Craft Monuments.

As part of the memorial, CCIFV has contacted county and city councils across the island of Ireland inviting them to donate a flagstone with the county’s name inscribed on it – with each local authority paying for their own flagstone.

CCIFV is also willing to pay for the memorial, so is not seeking funding.

“This memorial will cost the Government or Glasnevin very little, so there really is no excuse,” Micheal said.
“However, the memorial will only happen when the Government and Glasnevin are given a little hoosh by bringing it to the public’s attention, bringing it out for discussion.

“It is hard to defend the biggest mass graves of Famine victims in the world and no memorial to them, what sort of society are we to allow this to go on.

“The computer image of the memorial has been shown to many independent people and they have all said it is a fitting memorial, let the people decide.”

A spokesman for Glasnevin Trust told The Echo: “Glasnevin Trust has had correspondence with Michael Blanch in which it has expressed its view that any famine memorial placed in Glasnevin Cemetery must be at the behest of the Irish Government and has advised that any application for such a memorial should have the full approval of the relevant government department together with agreed funding for the monument and its future upkeep.”

 

Michael Collins Reaches Black Rock Famine Memorial in Montreal

Michael Collins interviewed  on CBC news: (8:50 — 11:00)

http://www.cbc.ca/player/play/707908675516

http://www.cbc.ca/i/caffeine/syndicate/?mediaId=707908675516

Michael Collins interviewed on CJAD radio about Famine Run:

Michael Collins arrives in Montreal

Author runs across Quebec & Ontario to honour Irish heritage

By Navneet Pall Global News

http://globalnews.ca/news/2770514/author-runs-across-quebec-ontario-to-honour-irish-heritage/?sf28977011=1

WATCH: Award-winning Irish author Michael Collins arrived at the Black Rock in Griffintown Friday, as part of his 900-kilometre marathon. Collins hopes to raise awareness of the many Irish immigrants who died in Canada trying to flee the famine in Ireland and raise funds for various Irish memorials.

The United Irish Societies of Montreal and the Montreal Irish Memorial Park Foundation, Inc. got a big boost Friday as they try to build a park to remember their ancestors who died of typhus.

Award-winning Irish author Michael Collins arrived at the Black Rock in Griffintown as part of his 900-kilometre marathon.

Collins is retracing the route of Irish immigrants who arrived in 1847 to escape the famine.

He began his journey at Grosse Isle, Que. and will finish at Ireland Park near Hamilton, Ont.

“We have a great shame about the famine that happened to us and we have been unable to process it,” Collins said. “Maybe it’s survivor’s guilt.”

“When I came to Canada to learn French, I learned this history myself – I didn’t know it. So I went around and told the Irish newspapers about this specific May-to-October passage of 100,000 immigrants.

“They were kind of flabbergasted that the story hadn’t been told.”

The Black Rock, located on Bridge Street, is the burial site of 6,000 Irish immigrants.

The Montreal Irish Memorial Park Foundation wants to build a commemorative site adjacent to the Black Rock.

The proposed site is currently owned by the federal government but efforts to build a park have gained traction in the past four years.

 

 

 

Michael Collins interviewed about Famine Run in Globe and Mail

From Globe and Mail:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/toronto/ultrarunner-michael-collins-retraces-irish-diasporas-past-in-900-km-run/article30508708/?cmpid=rss1&click=sf_globe

Ultrarunner’ Michael Collins retraces Irish Diaspora’s past in 900-km run

MAHNOOR YAWAR

Published Friday, Jun. 17, 2016 4:25PM EDT; Last updated Friday, Jun. 17, 2016 4:28PM EDT

Author and ultrarunner Michael Collins is no stranger to hardship. A former captain of the Irish National 100k Team and a runner at the University of Notre Dame, the Irish emigrant has run (and won) marathons in the Antarctic, the North Pole, the Sahara and even on Mount Everest. His latest endeavour is the Irish Diaspora Run, from Quebec’s Grosse-Île to Toronto’s Ireland Park and Kingston – a distance spanning about 900 kilometres along the historic Route 132 – retracing the arduous journey of Irish emigrants after the Great Famine of 1847.

What moved you most about the history of the Great Famine, especially in the context of Canada’s role after the famine?

In the year of 1847, over 100,000 Irish people were evicted from their farms or their landlords’ property. They were starving on the roads in Ireland and most of them were trying to seek passage to America, but given the state of the people, most of the ports were closed. The English parliament passed acts to allow retrofitted lumber-bearing ships to load human cargo on board and ship them to Canada. People just crammed into the hull of these ships with no sanitation, no provisions or food for 40 days of passage. They’re called coffin ships because almost a fifth of the people died just on crossing between Ireland and St. Lawrence River, and when they arrived at the quarantine station, typhus was rampant aboard the ships. To put it in modern terms, it was all like a zombie apocalypse, boat after boat. People did what they could and were decimated in the service of caring for the sick. There’s no real connection between the Irish and French Canadians other than religion, and these people ran into the arms of death for charity. Canada’s acts of generosity are numerous , but they don’t go out of their way to make it known.

Why was raising awareness of this story important to you, especially now?

It’s all the rage in Ireland this year to commemorate 100 years of the Easter Rising. We seem a little fixated on date; it becomes the sole talking point. I thought there’s a greater story still untold that needs to be told. In 1997, which would’ve been the 150th anniversary of the famine, the Irish were sort of reticent to speak about the famine because there was war raging up in Northern Ireland. The famine itself spanned a couple of years so it was just a fluid date. It’s only been in the last 20 years that people are now able to give a more accurate history of what happened, without the fear of inciting violence.

As an experienced runner, this is hardly the most challenging of routes for you. What’s different this time?

On Route 132, it’s so reminiscent of Ireland. There are all these iconic religious statues by the road, and they’re all inspired by French Catholicism. That’s helped to see. I’m a runner, but it’s still difficult to run in a straight line from one place to another. There’s a lot of doubling back to the nearest hotel, which adds on the miles. Because this is specifically for a cause, there are many obligations, even including maintaining a Facebook page. The physical aspect of this would be unmanageable on its own, but the psychological aspect of obligations and expectations has added another dimension to it.

What will the money raised go toward?

Six thousand of those killed in passage to Canada were put into a mass burial grave near Pointe-Saint-Charles. It’s commemorated with the Black Rock, placed by construction workers who came across this mass grave and stubbornly refused to not honour the people. It’s been a source of consternation for Montreal in terms of trying to manage traffic around this giant rock. So one of the projects is to get this stone moved to a famine memorial park. Toronto has Ireland Park, but in this particular instance you do have an actual mass grave of 6,000 people and it wasn’t commemorated in the city. Of every penny that people donate, half will go to Montreal and half to Ireland Park in Toronto to endow historians to continue looking for burial sites and records, [and] other projects.

Mr. Collins arrives in Toronto around July 10, after a month of running. You can follow the journey through his own eyes on Facebook, and donate to the cause.

Michael Collins runs in the footsteps of the Canadian Famine Irish from Grosse Isle to Montreal

From the Irish Times:

Irish Diaspora Run: ‘All journeys begin with a single step’

Michael Collins begins his 900km run tracing steps of Irish Famine immigrants in Canada

Thu, Jun 16, 2016, 15:00 Updated: Thu, Jun 16, 2016, 16:08

Michael Collins in Canada

The Irish Diaspora Run sees Michael Collins running almost 900km between June 10th and July 10th, from Grosse Île to Toronto, tracing the steps taken by thousands of Irish immigrants who fled the Famine in 1847. This is the first of his weekly updates for The Irish Times.

The saying goes that all journeys begin with a single step, and at the start of this 900km run the stark simplicity of the saying resonates. I am an ultra-runner, so distance alone should not be daunting, but this Diaspora Run holds a deep personal and historical significance. In the past I ran for my country chasing medals. Now I am running for a greater historical context – to raise awareness of the tragic year of Black ‘47.

In that year, the convergence of British government policies dispossessed more Irish than in any other year of the Great Hunger. Under the directive of a newly elected prime minister, Lord Russell, the British parliament voted to end famine relief, mandating relief be carried out by absentee landlords. To shirk responsibility, landlords began a universal campaign of eviction, thus removing the obligation to feed their tenants.

Suddenly, the Irish hinterland, especially in the provinces of Munster and Connaught, swarmed with a starving army of skeletons. To make matters worse, in America, under the maritime Passenger Act, typhus stricken vessels and ships not adhering to the stricter sanitary rules were barred from entering America.

Under the growing crisis of the dispossessed, the eventual choice was to ship them to Canada, then under British control. In a cruel and desperate measure, emptied lumber-carrying ships returning to Canada were commissioned and hastily retrofitted to carry human ballasts. No regard was given to sanitary conditions or to feeding those who would make the 40-day transatlantic voyage to the eventual entry port at Grosse Île quarantine station, some 30km north of Quebec City.

I am beginning my run from this sobering quarantine station, or more specifically from a parking lot in sight of the island.

The evening before the run I was given a grand tour of Quebec by James Donovan of the Ancient Order of Hibernia, Joe Lonergan of the Irish Heritage Society of Quebec, Fergus Keyes of the Montreal Irish Monument Park Foundation, and Peggie Hopkins, Fergus’s partner. Reminiscent of Irish weather, it rained cats and dogs as we shuttled from one site to another.

What I took from the tour was a history of Quebec, but perhaps more so, in quietly observing my hosts, an appreciation of the custodial mantle those associated with history bear in preserving our collective past. A beautiful Celtic cross is situated within the old walls of Quebec across from Saint Patrick’s church. We gathered and had photographs taken by it. The funds for the cross were raised through the dogged determination of those accompanying me that day. James Donovan also coordinates the Saint Patrick’s Day parade and the essence of all things Irish emanates from himself and the quietly dignified Joe Lonergan.

Quebec City Celtic Cross. Gift from Irish National Famine Museum in Strokestown, County Roscommon.

The intersection of varying histories continued. We left the Celtic cross for a tour of the Plains of Abraham. On this site in 1759, the British claimed victory over the French in a battle that took a mere 20 minutes. Here again was the darkening influence and encroachment of British imperialism, but this time the advance of British forces on what was then New France.

I claim no extensive knowledge of the history, but what I gathered in questioning my hosts was that despite the imposition of British rule, somehow Quebec maintained its religion and language. From an Irish perspective, I thought this intriguing. I wanted to understand the political realities and rationale for how the conquest and life after continued without bloodshed. The history has obviously been covered, but it is an anomaly I would like to further explore at some point. The short answer given was that neither the French nor the English wanted control of a region so far north, so the victory and conquest by the British was more a psychological victory than an actual conquest.

I remained dutifully attentive to what I was being shown, but simultaneously my mind was on the visit to Grosse Île but so, too, to the ill-conceived plan to actually begin the first marathon after visiting the island. Sometimes misery and ill-planning have their own merits. I felt, in quietly submitting to a day walking and then socially drinking for much of the night before leaving at the crack of dawn to visit Grosse Île, that I was behaving like an amiable soul mindful of what this committee had so carefully planned in my honour.

So, to the isle of Grosse Île. How strange it was to come upon a Celtic cross looming over the Saint Lawrence against the shimmer of the river. It grew in proportion, occupying the highest point on the island. I had anticipated it, but the starkness and grandeur of the cross harkened to an ancient Celtic spirit. This was home, but re-appropriated in a foreign land. I was mindful that, though we are modern Irish, we are descendants of a Christian and pagan Celtic past. Somehow both histories converged in this cross and I felt it better represented the nativism of a Gaelic peasant experience that was then steeped in both traditions.

When we arrived and climbed to the cross, we then followed a narrow path that served as a gateway to the mass interment of over 5,000 Irish who died of typhus and the results of starvation due to a 40-day passage aboard coffin ships between May and October of 1847.

The glass memorial wall of names figures as one of those indelible moments that brought the stark reality of political policy and systematic tyranny into a roll call of the dead. Here were the victims of whatever history will eventually decide to call the policies of the British during the famine.

Each in our party found a family name and so went the reach of our heart across a span of years to those who were our forebears. If there was reproach and anger in my heart at the catalog of injustices perpetrated on those unfortunates, in standing on Grosse Île, the anger left me. After all the historical research done, nothing prepared me for the actual witnessing of the memorial and the acreage of land that held 5,000 Irish. At that moment, I felt a prayer to the departed was the most dignified and necessary of acts.

Our guide told us that there were no crosses set on the graves until the late 20th century. The history was not forgotten, but lost. Grosse Île is not simply an Irish memorial site, but was the quarantine station and point of entry for all emigrants to Canada. The municipal authorities were mandated to simply care for the sick and the dying, not to memorialize them.

Again, in walking with the associated members of the Irish party accompanying me, I realised how the Celtic Cross and graveyard crosses were erected through the dogged persistence of so many Irish who would not allow their history to go undocumented.

I also saw in observing my hosts, that they shared a psychological point of origin, and perhaps this is what differentiates the diaspora from those who stayed at home. They are more sentimental and fierce in remembering the history of how they ended up in Canada. They cannot recall the past, without contextualizing a history that, again, may seem too far removed for a modern Irish person.

What I can vouch for is their sincerity and perseverance in maintaining their history, not out of a collective anger, but in recognition that this history preceded them and defines their remove from Ireland. They are more exiles than immigrants. This is the tragic sadness and legacy of the Irish immigrant experience. Who can blame them, really? Not I.

We ended our tour of the island at the lazaretto fever sheds where so many of those who had survived the initial passage died from typhus. At the height of emigration in 1947, some 40 ships, carrying over 300 people in each, overwhelmed the medical resources at Grosse Île. The British were aware of the advancing disaster and despite the appeal of administrators on the Canadian side to stave the tide of approaching disease which threatened Quebec and Montreal, the ships kept sailing.

Stark and unpainted, the sheds seemed to capture an 18th century primitivism. One asks – how did anybody survive the Atlantic Crossing, or even these lazaretto fever sheds?

We happened to be shadowing a group of Canadian school children throughout the day on the island, either arriving before or after them at various points of historical interest. They were not Irish. The trip was more related to the history of Grosse Île as a quarantine that processed all immigrants for close to a century.

At the end of the trip we converged with the children. The guide was speaking in French and I approached to listen. The children’s attention was given to a single historical artifact that seemed to capture the tragic loss of life. It was the small shoe of a four-year-old child. The child almost certainly perished, and in scavenging to survive, all clothes on a dead person were taken and worn by survivors. Such was the extremity of poverty and necessity.

The guide conveyed that experts had examined the shoe and determined that it had been re-cobbled and worn by at least three generations of children.

It is strange how a single artifact can somehow endow a greater understanding of a life and time. In the riot of noise that accompanied the Canadian school children, there was a sudden and deferential silence and I understood that our history had been channelled and preserved.

Not long after, I laced up my own running shoes and left unceremoniously from a parking lot in sight of the island. I had the gift of new friends to see me off, and so began the run under threat of advancing rain and gathering clouds. It was how I envisioned it. It was an Irish leave-taking with the urgency of miles ahead and the quiet trepidation of what the journey would hold!

How to join the Irish Diaspora Run

The route begins at Grosse Île quarantine island, on the St Lawrence river, and continues through Quebec City, Montreal and Kingston before reaching Ireland Park, in Toronto.

The project is raising funds for Irish-Canadian organisations seeking to create parks and erect monuments and statues to commemorate 1847.

Others can participate by taking on runs where they live, and logging their distances on diasporarun.org, where they can also sponsor Collins.

This project is supported by the Global Irish Media Fund

In the Footsteps of the Canadian Famine Irish

From Irish Times:

http://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-style/generation-emigration/michael-collins-my-marathon-a-day-for-a-month-to-honour-irish-emigrants-1.2663269

Michael Collins: my marathon a day, for a month, to honour Irish emigrants

The Irish author, emigrant and ultrarunner is running in memory of the 100,000 Irish immigrants who fled to Canada in the Great Famine

Fri, May 27, 2016, 15:15

Michael Collins

Pole star: ultrarunner Michael Collins in the Arctic

Famine memorial: Toronto from Ireland Park. Photograph: David Cooper/Toronto Star via Getty

My name is Michael Collins. I am an Irish emigrant, writer and ultrarunner. In 2000 my novel The Keepers of Truth was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. A decade later I captained the Irish team at the 100km World Championships. Although one might not connect writing with running, I have tapped the loneliness of the long-distance runner: psychological and physical dislocation inform my writing process.

I first experienced this dislocation as a young runner, leaving under cover of dark for early Sunday-morning runs into the remote Limerick hills. In so doing I ran to an observation point from which to view my town and its people.

My running earned me an athletic scholarship to the United States. To negotiate my daily training runs, which averaged 25km, I ran beyond a bucolic campus to a ghettoised landscape of abandoned factories in the rust-belt city of South Bend, Indiana. In the act of running, in crossing boundaries, I found that a preoccupation with all things political emerged.

I abandoned running after college, earned a doctorate, and ended up working at Microsoft in Redmond, in Washington state. In my subterranean cubicle I felt a deepening loss of the physical self against an advancing virtual age. In a conscious act of moral reorienting I returned to running. During 130km weekend runs, running to and from work, programming by day and writing by night, I tapped a voice within and captured the essence of the United States’ industrial past in writing The Keepers of Truth.

I became the keeper of certain truths that I accessed through running. Against the imminent loss of the physical world I read about Ernest Shackleton’s heroic journey of survival in the Antarctic, then entered and won the Last Marathon in Antarctica. A year later I stood atop the world, winning the Mount Everest Marathon. Dislocation became my way of processing life.

Recognising the service of returning military veterans of the post-9/11 campaigns, I left Microsoft and took a job at a community college. There I encountered soldiers coming to terms with psychological dislocation. I created task-oriented academic exercises that demanded a combination of physical activities and classroom analytics. The prevailing metaphor was combat readiness in anticipating, meeting and succeeding in civilian life.

Yet, for the bluster of coping strategies, there was a personal loss I had never fully reckoned with: my leaving Ireland. I was of the generation that left amid the economic doldrums of the early 1980s. In the years to come I would use running and a preoccupation with hunger, exhaustion and journey to inform a personal and cultural identity that connected to the Great Famine.

While I was at a literary festival in Canada an organiser asked if I had seen Toronto’s famine memorial. I hadn’t. Ireland Park is tucked away on a dockland pier. It is a lost history, fittingly out of place against the Toronto skyline. The human scale of the gathered sculptures, representing Irish migrants escaping the Great Famine, reconfigured my relationship with Irish history.

In the years since then I have returned on quiet pilgrimages to correspond with that immemorial gathering of souls. Their story begs telling.

Poor Laws

The spectre of Irish emigration to Canada figured in the endgame years of the Great Famine. In 1847 the British parliament, in cutting off all famine aid, enacted the Irish Poor Laws, requiring absentee landlords to cover the cost of relief to their tenants.

With those laws came the great emigration of 1847. Facing the United States’ stiffening emigration regulations – the Passenger Act barred diseased ships from arriving in American ports – unscrupulous landlords looked farther north. Commissioning timber ships that would otherwise return empty to Canada, they loaded an emigrant ballast into hastily retrofitted hulls. These were the coffin ships.

The journey into the freezing reaches of the Canadian north and down the St Lawrence river would cause the most harrowing suffering. Immigrants arrived with a pestilence of typhus at a makeshift quarantine station at Grosse Île, 50km downriver from Quebec City, that was equipped with just 150 beds. By the summer of 1847, 40 vessels, carrying 14,000 immigrants, clogged the St Lawrence. Catastrophe ensued.

Michael Collins in Lazaretto on Gross Isle. Fergus Keyes Photograph.

Michael Collins on Grosse Isle. Fergus Keyes Photograph.

Those with fever were summarily quarantined on the island. Families were wrested apart. For years afterwards provincial newspapers would carry classifieds from immigrants seeking the whereabouts of relatives. Of the 100,000 Irish who sailed to Canada in 1847, 20,000 died.

Surviving Irish immigrants, continuing their journey by land, ventured first through the francophone province of Quebec and then down into the neo-English province of Ontario.

An estimated 75,000 Irish descended on Montreal, then a city of some 50,000 people. The francophone hubs of Quebec City and Montreal met a bereft, alien-speaking population of Irish with extraordinary religious ardour.

The story of the Grey Nuns, who erected fever sheds and brokered the adoption of thousands of Irish orphans in the cities, was all but lost to French texts that, until recently, had never been translated into English:

http://faminearchive.nuigalway.ie/

So, too, some 6,000 Irish souls were lost to history until workers building a bridge in Montreal unearthed a mass grave. Such was the amnesia of a city so traumatised. The union whose workers had uncovered the grave erected a monument, the Black Rock. Montreal’s Irish community would like to relocate the Black Rock to a permanent memorial park.

Those who survived Grosse Île and Montreal headed southwest, and the anglophone city of Toronto braced as 38,000 emigrants descended on a population of 20,000.

Ireland Park’s historical committee has researched Toronto’s response to 1847. In establishing an emigrant hospital, a convalescent hospital, and a widows’ and orphans’ refuge, Toronto’s medical community set a gold standard for the containment of disease.

The heroic efforts of the hospital’s lead surgeon, Dr George Grasett, who was of Protestant-Irish lineage, and the staff who died in the service of the Irish are being recognised with the construction of Dr George Robert Grasett Park:

http://grasettpark.com

on Adelaide and Widmer Streets, as distinct from Ireland Park, on Toronto’s waterfront. To be unveiled in 2017, it includes a glass installation etched with billowing sheets, to represent fever sheds.

Between Grosse Île and the cities of Quebec City, Montreal and Toronto lies an emptiness of almost 1,000km that I will trace one step at a time. Into that limitless horizon I will run some 65km a day, starting at Grosse Île. This is what I seek as a runner: acts of dislocation in kilometres run that facilitate a collapse of time, to vicariously access distant histories.

The run will end at the Ireland Park famine memorial in Toronto. My goal is to foster historical awareness while raising money to memorialise that fateful year: 1847.

Along the way I will meet Irish societies who have uncovered the historical records of 1847. The death toll is sobering. Interred in a mixture of mass and individual graves are 5,000 souls at Grosse Île; 6,000 at Pointe St Charles, in Montreal; 1,400 in Kingston, on the north shore of Lake Ontario; and a further 1,200 in Toronto. Canada is home to the greatest group of mass burials of Irish immigrants in the world. All died in 1847.

How to join in

People can participate in the month-long event by walking or running within their own communities. (Registration for this is at diasporarun.org.)

Individual names, with distances completed, will be displayed on the site, along with the combined distance run by all of the participants. An associated blog will facilitate a virtual cultural experience. Everyone who registers and participates will receive a commemorative medal.

In the centenary year of the Easter Rising my experience as an emigrant is less Irish than it once was, although what I have learned from the scholars I have visited in preparation for the run is how dynamic our history is.

If this project started as a personal run, it is now dedicated to highlighting the efforts of the custodians of our history who continue to uncover the voices of the past that encompass the totality of the Irish diaspora.

If I can add to that narrative it is perhaps fitting that I do so in tapping the legacy of our indomitable Irish endurance, in committing to an act of journey and distances covered. It is, after all, how we populated North America, one step at a time. I invite you to join me.

Get your gear on: what is the Irish Diaspora Run?

Scheduled to begin on June 10th and end on July 10th, it will see Michael Collins cover almost 900km.

The route begins at Grosse Île quarantine island, on the St Lawrence river, and continues through Quebec City, Montreal and Kingston before reaching Ireland Park, in Toronto.

The project will raise funds for Irish-Canadian organisations seeking to create parks and erect monuments and statues to commemorate 1847.

Others can participate by taking on runs where they live, and logging their distances on diasporarun.org, where they can also sponsor Collins.

Collins will chronicle his project in a blog, giving updates and historical background, on irishtimes.com and on diasporarun.org.

This project is supported by the Global Irish Media Fund