Plan still continues for Irish memorial
The Gazette tells us sadly that there’s hardly any Irish community left here, but that a memorial including the Black Rock will be constructed after Bridge Street is moved. The annual Walk to the Stone happens Sunday, not from St Gabriel’s, which is falling down, but from St Charles next door. (Is Centre Street the only spot in town where there are two adjoining Roman Catholic churches, one English and one French?)
DeWolf 13:20 on 2022-05-27 Permalink
I still don’t get the outrage over naming the REM station after Bernard Landry. I get it, the self-appointed leaders of the Irish community are militantly federalist and anglophone, but there are a ton of francophones with Irish ancestry too – a lot of whom no doubt voted for the PQ and for independence.
According to the census, “Irish” is the third most declared ethnic origin in Quebec after “Canadian” and “French,” and there are 446,215 people in this province who consider themselves ethnically Irish. There are only 601,115 native English speakers. So either 75% of anglos in Quebec are Irish (pretty unlikely!) or the so-called leaders of the Irish community are doing some serious gatekeeping.
Kate 14:11 on 2022-05-27 Permalink
I don’t feel outrage, I just feel fatalistically discouraged. If even DeWolf can’t see why naming that station after Bernard Landry is at least culture-blind, there’s little point in discussing it.
Kevin 15:30 on 2022-05-27 Permalink
Everyone always forgets the 120,000 Quebecers who say they have English and another language as a mother tongue, and the overlapping Venn diagrams of ancestry.
Ian 12:51 on 2022-05-29 Permalink
…but to Kate’s point there’s lots of different Irish. There’s the Irish regiments that fought for the French and came over with the early colonists – by the late 1600s Quebec’s population was 5% Irish. The massive emigration in the mid 1800s from the famine raised that to 10% – but again, these are different waves with different relationships to Quebec. Then there are the Irish “neighbourhoods” like the Point and Griffintown. Then of course there’s all the intermarrying of the Irish with French Catholics. Then there’s all the Irish orphans from the Irish Famine that got adopted into French families here and Quebec City but were “allowed” to keep their Irish names.
All this to say, after a presence in Quebec as long as the French themselves it’s hardly any surprise that nobody’s exactly sure how much of Quebec is Irish, but it’s a signigficant amount…
All that aside, very simply I think having someone famously chauvinistic like Landry’s name associated with a station plonk in the middle of what was once ground zero for refugees and immigrants is in poor taste at the very least.