Canada’s Irish Catholics, the Great War, and the Irish Question
By Prof. Mark McGowan
It is difficult to pin down a singular position by Irish Canadian Catholics in their response to events unfolding in Ireland between 1912 and1922. Irish Catholic Canadian views were often subject to their time of Irish migration (mostly pre-Famine), their obedience to clergy and bishops, and the region of Canada in which they were settled.
Moreover, in this period, Irish Catholic relations with their French-Canadian co-religionists often drove them more firmly into an “Imperial ethos”, as a way to demonstrate their respectability as citizens of Canada and the Empire and to deflect criticism from Canada’s Protestant majority.
In Canada, Irish Catholics overwhelmingly supported the war effort from the time Britain declared war until the hostilities in Europe ceased. Irish Catholics, both of Irish birth and descent, flocked to the “colours” encouraged by the enthusiastic support of their bishops, priests, politicians, religious newspapers, and fraternal benevolent societies.
The vast majority of Irish Catholic Canadians saw no contradiction in their support for the Empire and their constitutionally-framed desire for Irish Home Rule. As many Irish Catholic leaders proclaimed: Ireland needed what Canada already had—self-government within the British Empire. While there was a small minority of Irish Canadians who favoured physical force to achieve complete Irish independence, Irish Catholics and their leaders vocally supported a “Canadian model” as a solution to the Irish question.
While several distinctive Irish battalions were raised within the Canadian Expeditionary Force, these units accounted for only a miniscule number of Irish Canadian recruits. Most Irish Catholics were active in local militia units and were notable in regular battalions formed in Halifax, Saint John, Ottawa, and in the Prairie West. Irish Canadians were most likely to enlist in local and regional units, following the example of family members, colleagues from work and school, or neighbourhood friends. By the end of voluntary enlistment, in 1917, it is estimated that nearly 32,000 Irish Catholics joined the CEF and its Nursing Corps. The bishops, clergy, Irish Catholic politicians and lay leaders publicly supported CEF recruitment efforts.
Irish Catholic support for the war effort, however, created tension between themselves and the French Canadian majority in the Catholic Church in Canada. Within the CEF Irish Catholics competed with French Canadians for chaplaincy positions and, in the country at large both linguistic groups opposed each other on such issues as language education, the incorporation of immigrant groups into the Church, and the Federal Government’s imposition of Conscription in 1917. While the Irish were divided on the issue, the majority of clergy and lay leaders supported conscription, while French Canadian Catholics universally opposed it. Wounds within the Church were inflamed further when Bishop Michael Francis Fallon of London, Ontario, already unpopular among French Canadians and highly influential in the recruitment of Catholic chaplains, publicly endorsed the Union Government of Sir Robert Borden and its conscription policy before the divisive federal election of December 1917. While their participation in the war effort greatly enhanced the respectability of Irish Catholics in Canada, it left the Church itself bitterly divided.
The Easter Rising came as a shock to Canada’s Irish Catholics, many of whom regarded the IRB actions as a cowardly act, betraying the British Empire when it was faced in a death grip with Imperial Germany. If the Catholic newspapers in Canada are to be considered a rough sounding of community opinion, Canadian Irish Catholics condemned the Easter Rebellion and its leaders unequivocally. Toronto’s Catholic Register described the rising as “an unspeakable outrage and colossal folly,” perpetrated by a “small and unrepresentative element.” (4 May 1916) The Register’s provincial rival, London’s Catholic Record was equally strident, although like many Canadians they would blame mistakenly the Sinn Fein movement and “a handful of mischief makers” and not the IRB. (6 May 1916) The New Freeman in Saint John, New Brunswick, branded the Sinn Fein rebels as “anarchists,” (6 May 1916) while the Antigonish Casket described the rising as an act of “folly” and “stupidity.” (4 May 1916) Patrick Henry, the Irish nationalist editor of the Northwest Review in Winnipeg condemned the rising and the attempt to undermine John Redmond, (6 May 1916) while the Canadian Freeman of Kingston creatively compared rebel leadership to the extremist nationalist voices from Quebec. (27 April 1916)
The summary execution of the rebel leaders after the rising caused considerable consternation among Irish Catholic Canadians. The aforementioned weeklies and most Irish Catholic leaders retained their denunciation of the “rising” but were disgusted by the alleged British “justice” meted out by General John Maxwell. Most Irish Catholic leaders in Canada remained convinced that John Redmond and his constitutional means of achieving Home Rule was still the best policy. There was a sense of frustration, however, that the execution of IRB leaders appeared excessive given the knowledge that, in 1913 and 1914, Unionist leader Sir Edward Carson and his Ulster Volunteers, were prepared to battle the Crown while supplied by German rifles. Such inconsistency of British policy was clearly problematic for Irish Canadian editors, who supported winning the war on the principle that small nations might be free, but watched Imperial forces oppress a small nation that was both predominantly Catholic, and coincidentally the land of their ancestors.
In Canada’s largest Irish Catholic fraternal association, the Ancient Order of Hibernians (AOH), there was a growing rift between the radicalism of the AOH in the United States and the Canadian AOH which, although sentimentally attached to Ireland, was ever loyal to the Crown and the Empire. Early in the war Canadian AOH branches had threatened to secede from the American AOH because of the latter’s pro-German and anti-British views. Canadian AOH leaders demanded that the official organ of the Order, the American Hibernian be seized at the border as seditious literature. The threat of Canadian separation loomed. In July 1916, the North American branches held their convention in Boston and a New Brunswick priest, Father C.J. McLaughlin, drew a line in the sand with the Americans on the issue of Canadian Irish Catholic loyalty. In a stirring address to the convention, as reported by the New Freeman, he instructed the Americans:
‘… may I inform you that the fires of patriotism burn not the less bright within the bosoms of the Canadian Hibernians for the British flag than it does within the breast of the American citizens for the Star Spangled Banner … Hibernian that I am I am also a British subject. Britain’s flag is our Talisman. … Let me, sir, assure you today that the Canadian delegates here assembled glory in the proud title of Canadian-British citizenship, and, sirs, I would indeed be unworthy of the race and the land from which I came if I were to sit here this morning and offer no protest to some of the remarks that I have heard made here …. If the Dublin people followed John E Redmond and his Nationalists we would not today be mourning the loss of life in that unfortunate affair. …Let me answer it here by telling you that the hearts of the Canadian Irish beat true and that Canadians of all classes, Irish included, are prepared to stand by Britain in this crisis to the last man and the last dollar.’ (29 July 1916)
McLaughlin’s speech was reprinted favourably in other parts of Canada, and came roughly at the same time as bishops Neil McNeil of Toronto and James T. McNally of Calgary issued strong public reassurances of Catholic patriotism and loyalty to the Empire’s cause. In March 1917, outraged by the British Prime Minister’s foot dragging and equivocation on the Home Rule Act, Bishop Fallon wrote to leading Irish Catholic politicians to meet with him in Ottawa to discuss a Canadian strategy to move the Home Rule issue by applying Dominion pressure on Lloyd George. In the months that followed, Irish Catholic laymen and politicians from coast-to-coast did meet, expressed their concern, sometimes heatedly, that Ireland deserved what other Dominions enjoyed.
To this end, Father John J. O’Gorman, a popular Ottawa priest and a chaplain, who had been seriously wounded in action, provided a clearly articulated perspective that resonated nationally among clergy and laity. Irish Canadian Catholics, he wrote, offered themselves as an example of double duty: “To answer the question [no recruiting unless there is Home Rule in Ireland] we should consider the double duty of the Irish Canadian—the duty he owes to Ireland, and the duty he owes to Canada. For there certainly exists this double duty. …Canada is indeed our native land, but Ireland is our fatherland, all the dearer and nearer and we will be second to none … the duty we owe to Ireland, coincides with the duty we owe to Canada ... The interests of Canada, as a nation, as a part of the British Empire, and as a member of the world’s family of nations, demanded that we enter this war against the Turco-Teutons, and that having entered it, we should prosecute it till we finish it or it finishes us. The few voices that are raised here and there, asking that we should halt till Ireland gets Home Rule, have rightly been disregarded by the vast majority of Irish Canadians. We do not intend to do wrong that good may come. ... No matter how unjust be the policy of England towards Ireland, we shall not change.” (Ottawa Citizen, 23 March 1917).
Irish Canadian Catholics continued to meet in parish halls, public theatres, and private clubs to hear speeches and placed their voices in support of Irish Home Rule. The Catholic press kept a careful eye on the Irish situation, knowing full well that negative developments in Ireland might call into question the loyalty of Irish Catholic Canadians in the eyes of their non-Catholic neighbours. Two issues were of importance to readers: the sacrifice being made by the men and women of Canada under the Union Jack, and the fight for Irish Home Rule which was clearly, in their minds, an application of the principles for which they were fighting in Europe. In July 1917, editors at the Catholic Record could write accordingly: “Self-government as we have it in Canada would be such a solution and the only one which would remove the far reaching effects … of centuries of oppression and misgovernment.”
When the Great War ended, bishops, clergy, and most of the Catholic weeklies clung to their support of the constitutional option offered by Redmond’s successors. Such hopes faded with the massive Sinn Fein electoral victory in late 1918, and the deployment of the brutal paramilitary “Black & Tans” to keep the peace in Ireland, although Irish Catholic Canadians became more vocal in their demands that Ireland enjoy the constitutional rights that Canadians already possessed. In this issue the Great War played a key role in Irish Catholic thinking; if Irish Catholics fought the Empire’s war that small nations might be free, it only stood to reason that this principle be applied in Ireland. As a matter of justice, sentiment towards the birthplace of their ancestors, and outrage at the atrocities committed by the Black and Tans, a large number of Irish Catholic Canadians, from coast-to-coast, including newspapers, clergy, and the AOH sent subscriptions to the Irish Relief Fund to advance Home Rule. By 1920, there was also widespread Irish Catholic Canadian support for the Self-Determination League for Ireland, which pressed for Home Rule by holding mass meetings in several Canadian cities including Toronto, Vancouver, Winnipeg, Halifax, Montreal, and Ottawa.
As the Irish situation became uglier, however, Canadian Catholic voices became shriller. In 1920, when the mayor of Cork was murdered, the Catholic Record pounced on the story claiming that if the murder “had occurred in Belgium during the German occupation [it] would have rung around the world as one more instance of the incredible brutality of Prussianism.” (3 April 1920) A small minority of Irish Catholics, the most notable of whom was journalist Katherine Hughes, favoured a republic for Ireland. When civil war erupted in Ireland between republican dissidents led by Éamon de Valera and the supporters of the newly formed Irish Free State led by Michael Collins, the Irish battle lines among those descendants in the Canadian diaspora were clearer. The Irish Catholic press in Canada overwhelmingly supported Collins, whose forces eventually prevailed. Irish Catholic Canadians recognized that Ireland, through the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921, had won a constitutional status similar to that of Canada. In fact, Canada’s Minister of Justice, Charles Doherty, had contributed references for at least three clauses in the Treaty. With the Free State secure by 1923, Irish Canadian Catholics shifted their attention away from Ireland, somewhat assured that a “Canadian” solution had been reached in the land of their ancestors.
Mark McGowan is Professor of History at the University of Toronto. He has published widely on the religious, social, and education history of Canada and Ireland. His most recent book is The Imperial Irish: Canada’s Irish Catholics fight the Great War, 1914-1918 (McGill-Queen’s, 2017).
