On Sunday evening, 5 April 1998, just four days before the 9 April deadline of the ongoing Northern Ireland peace process, the independent chairman of the peace talks (and former United States senator from Maine) George Mitchell, and his colleagues faced yet another dilemma regarding the proposed agreement. British and Irish officials had just delivered the first draft of the crucially important but highly controversial Strand Two portion of the negotiations dealing with North/South joint governing councils. Mitchell and his colleagues – the former Finnish prime minister Harri Holkeri and General John de Chastelain of Canada – quickly examined the document and...

In 1911, more than one million Canadians identified themselves as being of Irish heritage.¹ Across eastern Canada, the place names of Irish towns and counties testify to the influence of Irish settlement during the nineteenth century. Throughout Ontario and New Brunswick in particular, townships with names like Cork, Carlow, Dublin, Dundalk, Dunboyne, Duntroon, Dungannon, Donegal, Erin, Fingal, Killarney, New Dundee, Newry, Maynooth, Enniskillen, Tyrone, Tyrconnell, and Shannon dot the provincial countryside. Those nineteenth-century Irish immigrants brought with them not only the names of the places they left but also the culture, traditions, and institutions of those places. One such institution...

Having fallen relatively dormant for almost two decades after the fractious split among Irish nationalist politicians over the Charles Stewart Parnell affair, and the subsequent defeat of the second Home Rule Bill in 1893, Irish nationalist impulses in Canada slowly began to resuscitate after the third Irish Home Rule Bill was introduced in the British House of Commons on 11 April 1912. Irish-Canadian nationalists, who were overwhelmingly Catholic, began to enliven themselves at the prospect of their ancestral homeland becoming ‘a nation once again.’¹ With the introduction of the bill, theCatholic Register, a Catholic weekly in Toronto, proudly but...

As war’s darkening clouds began to gather over Europe, the Buckingham Palace negotiations to resolve the Ulster Crisis collapsed in stalemate. On 24 July 1914, after the Irish conferees left Buckingham Palace, while British cabinet ministers discussed the various arguments presented during the conference, Foreign Minister Sir Edward Grey entered and read aloud a message stating Austria’s final demands with regard to Serbia. Winston Churchill, initially only half-listening to Sir Edward’s words, slowly began to comprehend the implications of the Foreign Office memo. Later, he would write of the Irish question: ‘The parishes of Tyrone and Fermanagh faded back into...

Sinn Féin’s landslide victory in the 1918 British general election swept the constitutionalist Irish Parliamentary Party from the political map; it also, at least for a few years, recast Ireland’s political contours in a republican separatist mould. Even though most Sinn Féin candidates were sitting in British jails on trumped-up charges of aiding a ‘German plot,’ Sinn Féin won 73 of the 105 Irish seats in the British Parliament; in the twenty-six counties that later became the Irish Free State, the party garnered 65 per cent of the votes cast by the recently expanded Irish electorate.¹ After the election, those...

After the First World War ended, and after the euphoria over the British and Allied victory, Orange-Canadian unionists’ jubilation quickly turned to concern over the political fate of Ulster. In 1914 the third Irish Home Rule Bill had passed the House of Commons and received Royal Assent, which meant that it still resided on the statute books. Although the Asquith government attached an amending bill that prohibited the implementation of Home Rule until Ulster’s frantic misgivings had been addressed, Ulster’s political future continued along decidedly ambiguous lines. Orange-Canadian unionists feared that their Protestant brethren might yet be placed under the...

After the Anglo-Irish Treaty was signed on 6 December 1921, its terms and conditions remained static until approved by both the British Parliament and the Irish Dáil Éireann. To describe the ensuing treaty debates in the Dáil as acrimonious would be a wild understatement. So divisive was the issue of whether to accept a treaty that offered less than complete independence – not to mention a partitioned and separate Northern Ireland – that the Irish republican movement split into two factions, which led to the Irish Civil War of 1922–3. As historian Patrick O’Farrell has noted: ‘To the extent that Sinn...

On 3 December 1920, at St Dunstan’s Hall in Fredericton, Lindsay Crawford, a former editor ofThe Globe(Toronto) and President of the Self-Determination for Ireland League of Canada, was expected to speak at a rally in support of Irish independence. As he ascended the podium, a few disorderly men shouted, sang, and generally prevented Crawford from speaking. The rally plummeted into chaos. Obviously frustrated, Crawford descended the podium and shouted: ‘If this is British fair play, no wonder there is an Irish question.’¹ During the 1910s and early 1920s the issue of Irish independence aroused hostility and passions not...