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Remembering the Irish of Quebec 

By Karen Herland

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While travel always offers the opportunity to experience unfamiliar sights, sounds and experiences, The Concordia Centre for Irish Studies offered about five dozen people the chance to travel through time as well as geographically.

The centre organized a day-long ferry trip to Grosse Île. Quebec’s equivalent of Ellis Island served as a checkpoint for new immigrants arriving in Quebec until 1932. Although all immigrants passed through Grosse Île, the Great Potato Famine in Ireland and a typhus epidemic meant that 5,000 Irish immigrants were buried on the island in 1847. Several memorials have been erected on the island since then, and the location has come to resonate as a symbol of immigration history.

“It is important to us to develop events that link the Irish and Quebec histories,” explained Megan Findlay, a Master’s student in Creative Writing at Concordia who helped coordinate the field trip to the island. The centre invited Marianna O’Gallagher, an historian of the island who has written several monographs about its history and importance.

“Rather than just going alone, it was wonderful to be part of a group and to have her there,” said Cynthia Hedrich, of enrolment services, who participated in the trip. “She kept referring to ‘these precious people’ when referring to those who had died.” Hedrich is not Irish but first heard about Grosse Île when she was a member of the Black Rock theatre group in Verdun.

“I’ve always been interested in Irish history and am on the centre’s listserv,” Hedrich said. This summer she took her first course with the centre, Irish Ethnomusicology offered by musician Gearóid Ó hAllmhuráin.

Ó hAllmhuráin also participated in this summer’s tour, “When we arrived at the Celtic Cross [a memorial erected on the island in 1909] he played The Lament to the Spailín [landless],” explained anthropology student Dimitri Koulis. “He’d played it for us in class, but I felt blessed to hear the piece in that context.”

Koulis, like Hedrich, appreciated the opportunity to have history brought alive by seeing the buildings where the new arrivals had been cared for, and the graves of those ‘precious people’ who did not survive.

Grosse Île operated as a site for developing bacteriological weapons (including anthrax) by the Department of National Defence during World War II and was used as a quarantine site for animals after the war. It was officially declared a historical site in 1983, and a national park a decade later.