Montreal City Weblog

Kate 15:33 on 2020-06-22 Permalink Reply  

• Kevin 15:39 on 2020-06-22 Permalink

  Considering the amount of graffiti on the Turcot as it’s being constructed, I predict that sign will not last long.

  Has anyone ever referred to that area by the name Plante uses?

• Kate 16:09 on 2020-06-22 Permalink

  I doubt it – it’s an innovation, supposedly to honour Landry for his support of the Cité du multimédia.

• DavidH 16:52 on 2020-06-22 Permalink

  Very few things sound as 1990s as the term “multimedia”.

• Kate 17:35 on 2020-06-22 Permalink

  Very true.

• Patrick 20:13 on 2020-06-22 Permalink

  There is no way a new metro station could be given an English name today. If there’s a campaign to drop Landry’s name, there would have to be a French substitute. I would like to be proved wrong, but for the same reason the proposal to rename Lionel-Groulx for Oscar Peterson won’t go anywhere. Unless it was also twinned with a non-anglo toponym. Rose-de-Lima, perhaps?

• mare 01:29 on 2020-06-23 Permalink

  In real life it will probably just be called Griffintown. Just like Square-Victoria-OACI and Longueuil-Université-de-Sherbrooke; the only one who uses the full name is the metro announcer.

• Kate 08:33 on 2020-06-23 Permalink

  mare, I’ve made the same point in angry discussions on Facebook. It will just be called Griffintown station normally. It’s not as if there’s a second Griffintown station that will have to be distinguished by adding a second name.

  Still, it’s a cock of the snoot to the remaining Irish community here.

• DeWolf 10:57 on 2020-06-23 Permalink

  What exactly defines the Irish community? There are quite a few francophones with Irish ancestry and yet they rarely seem to be included.

• ant6n 13:01 on 2020-06-23 Permalink

  Its really wierd to me what kind of stories around the REM generate controversy – here the naming of a station. Whats next, the color of the line on the map?

• Kate 18:54 on 2020-06-23 Permalink

  What exactly defines the Irish community?

  DeWolf, I find it difficult to define even if, in some sense, I could be considered part of it. But it’s not purely about ancestry. I’d venture a definition that the Irish community here identifies with speaking English, and mostly being descended from people who lived and worked around Griffintown and Point St Charles from 1850 to 1950. Most of us, I suspect, are three generations from Ireland and have long since lost touch with any connections there. But as a community we’ve been scattered by circumstance. So few were left in Griffintown by 1970 that St Ann’s, built in 1850, and once a keystone of the community, was torn down for lack of support. And then a lot of English-speaking people left Quebec after the Parti Québécois came into power in 1976, and not just Irish. (Please, no cries of what a lot of weenies they were: it was a hostile atmosphere, and many people knew they could have better lives elsewhere.)

  This is perhaps a start at explaining why having the Griffintown station named after a PQ honcho is felt to be a kind of mockery. No, there aren’t any Irish ironworkers left in the Griff and in some sense it doesn’t matter any more, but naming things has symbolic weight. On the whole I’ve supported Valérie Plante, but in this, I find her gesture a deliberate statement that part of my history is of no value to her, which makes me a little sad.

  ant6n, it’s basically too late for anyone to complain about the REM, except for the remaining details. Maybe my explanation above goes some way to clarifying why this is an issue.

• Ian 20:00 on 2020-06-23 Permalink

  Even the great and powerful D*novan K*ng pointed out that more people in today’s Quebec that identify as having Irish ancestry in QC are francophone than anglophone but you raise a very important point – historically, Griffintown was the ground zero of English speaking Irish and their community, and were systematically dismantled, on purpose – ignoring this specific neighbourhood history is just one more insult among many, and the worst part is that Plante probably doesn’t even understand how or why it is insulting.

• ant6n 06:00 on 2020-06-25 Permalink

  I understand the controversy. It`s still odd, because it is indeed about a detail, while the bigger issues weren´t much discussed, even when it wasn´t too late.

  Perhaps the controversy is constructed to make it apear politicians are even involved, when really they aren`t. It´s better to rile up people both ways, rather than admitting you`re powerless compared to some organization that calls all the shots and is accumulating power at the heart of Montreal.