This thesis explores the ways in which the Irish-Catholic population of Canada was perceived and described by the newspapers of mid-Victorian Toronto and Montreal. A study of the leading political and religious journals at mid-century demonstrates the prolonged existence in Canada of hostile feelings towards the immigrant community, based both on Protestant aversion to Catholicism and on stereotypes of Irish character in general. The thesis argues that these antagonisms and unfavourable images were identified by the Irish community as contributing to its lack of economic, social and political progress. In defence against the hostility which they detected at all levels of society, and which was especially apparent in the vocabulary of disparagement and abuse with which Irish affairs were reported in Canadian newspapers, Irish-Catholics maintained a distinct and self-conscious sense of national community. This sense of group identity was clearly expressed in the emergence of an Irish ethnic press. The thesis presents the reactions of five Irish-Catholic newspapers, in Toronto and Montreal, to the inferior status of the immigrants in Canadian society. While showing the sensitivity of Irish-Catholics to the social, political and economic exclusion produced by their unfavourable reputation, it also argues that the Irish press simultaneously encouraged a coherent Irish group feeling in a conscious attempt to disarm anti-Irish prejudice. Irish-Catholic editors reminded their readers that in Canada the immigrants might prove that Irish nationality, given the equal opportunity and responsible government which they demanded for Ireland, could develop in loyalty, wealth and social respectability. The thesis concludes that it was this concern with social mobility which made the Irish press so sensitive to the ways in which the Canadian image of Irish-Catholics reflected and reinforced their social, economic and political retardation. / Arts, Faculty of / History, Department of / Graduate

Thesis (M.A.) - Carleton University, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 134-143). Also available in electronic format on the Internet.

This work focuses on the efforts of Montreal's Irish Catholics to maintain a cohesive ethnic community throughout the nineteenth century, and on the vital role that the national parish played in this process. The early community directed its attention towards institution building centred around Saint Patrick's church, which had been built for the use of Irish Catholics in the 1840s. Following the dismemberment of the extensive parish of Notre-Dame and the erection of smaller Irish national parishes in the early 1870s, greater emphasis was placed on the creation of a wide variety of parish societies. By discouraging participation in Irish national societies that refused to submit to clerical authority, and by effectively fusing religious and national identification, the clergy ensured the success of parish-based organisation. Broader associations embracing the various Irish-Catholic parish societies were established, and participation in the Saint Patrick's day procession inscribed these affiliations in space. It will be demonstrated that the territorial and social evolution of parishes were intimately connected.

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Using the social sciences, demography and cultural history, this thesis examines the Irish Protestants of Montreal between 1834 and 1860. Its main focus is the communal identity that had both an Irish and British basis. Using national and political societies such as the Saint Patrick Society, Irish Protestant Benevolent Society as well as the Orange Order, the thesis demonstrates how the identity of the Irish Protestant was forged from relationships with other cultural groups of the city. Central to the development of a Protestant Irish communal identity separate from that of Irish Catholics was the increasing presence of Ultramontanism in the Saint Patrick Society, which Protestants were originally a part of. This prompted the Irish Protestants to form their own national society, (the Irish Protestant Benevolent Society) and to expand common interests based on Protestantism.

The present study proposes a detailed examination of the Irish migration to Montreal between 1847 and 1867, that is to say between the Famine and Confederation. For vast numbers of Irish, Quebec and Montreal were of course merely staging-points in a weary journey whose end lay in Upper Canada or, more often, in the United States of America. [...]

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