Canada and the Great Irish Famine: Response, Impact, Memory

Lecturer: WILLIAM JENKINS, Associate Professor, Department of History, York University

William Jenkins is a graduate of University College Dublin and the University of Toronto. He is the author of Between Raid and Rebellion: The Irish in Buffalo and Toronto, 1867-1916, and currently serves as president of the Canadian Association for Irish Studies.

In the summer of 1847, over four hundred ships arrived in the Gulf of St Lawrence, carrying Irish men, women and children who were fleeing the starvation and misery of the Great Hunger (1845-1851). During the first part of the year, Canadians had organized aid and collected donations to help Ireland’s sufferers from afar. Now, a great many of those sufferers were arriving in cities such as Quebec, Saint John, Montreal, Kingston, and Toronto, prompting public debates about how they were to be accommodated and what their impact was likely to be. Despite facing local anxieties about the dangers of disease and chronic poverty, tens of thousands of famine refugees rebuilt their lives in different parts of Canada, in places urban and rural, Anglophone and Francophone. The worst demographic catastrophe in nineteenth-century Europe inspired subsequent artistic and literary endeavours and commemorative practices and was woven into narratives of Irish nationalism in Canada. Join us to celebrate the launch of Canada and the Great Irish Famine, the first volume of its kind that provides new perspectives on how people confronted, experienced and remembered the famine migration.

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