Language, monuments, and the politics of memory in Quebec and Ireland

Eire-Ireland:Journal of Irish Studies, Spring-Summer, 2003 by Kathleen O'Brien

Unlike the monument at Grosse Ile, the three texts at Kilrush project one message in all directions, but the French panel performs multiple tasks. Through its emblematic presence, if not its legibility, the monument gathers local lore of many diversely motivated armed risings into a single portrait of long-standing noble commitment to unrealized dreams of Irish independence. At this site the visual presence of French back-to-back with Irish, with English just around the corner, again invokes the revolutionary French philosophy of liberte, egalite, fraternite, but it also reaches back further in time to romanticized accounts of the Flight of the Earls to France in 1607 and the French army's Irish Brigade after the Treaty of Limerick in 1691. Erin's gaze across the Irish landscape suggests undercurrents of French ships expected along Irish coasts in 1796-98 in support of Irish rebels. Miss Erin's "still waiting" posture, however, deflects attention from the calamities that resulted when adequate French support failed to materialize. The presence of French at Kilrush potently promotes a memory of historic links with France but erases the problematic details.

The Manchester martyrs marked 1867 as a tumultuous year in Ireland. It was also a historic turning point in Canada, and the Irish role in it was significant. Throughout the 1830s discomfort with aspects of British rule in Ontario and Quebec had been stirring, and influential Irishmen were among those protesting British policies in Quebec. Jocelyn Waller, Daniel Tracy, and Edmund Bailey O'Callaghan were editors of two Montreal newspapers critical of British policies. The most radical antigovernment forces were les Patriotes, Lower Canadian radicals who associated themselves with other national-democratic movements of the day, and with American, Dutch, and French revolutionaries of the previous century. When calls for government reforms failed, demands for more aggressive measures increased, and O'Callaghan tried to rally support in Irish communities for the Patriotes (Greer 1996:125), but when violence erupted in 1837-38, Irish communities in Quebec mostly remained on the sidelines.

In the early 1860s another series of threats raised fears in British North America. The Civil War in the United States as well as a series of Fenian raids launched from the United States into Canada stirred British and Canadian fears of a US invasion into border areas including Quebec. Subsequently the British North America Act of 1867 resulted in the Canadian Confederation of Upper and Lower Canada. Though contested by many factions, commitment to Quebec's cultural differences within the confederation was needed to gain approval by French Canadian leaders. The Irish voice--fragmented as it was by religious, economic, and linguistic differences--was an important link between Francophone and Anglophone interests. One of the most eloquent supporters of Canadian Confederation was Thomas D'Arcy McGee, a New Irelander from County Louth. Disillusioned with Fenianism in the United States, he came to Montreal in 1857 and soon became a controversial Montreal politician, highly influential until his assassination in 1868. Fenian activity was implicated in the assassination though never decisively determined. McGee's influence was one of many complexities in post-famine Quebec, where the Fenianism celebrated at Kilrush also reverberated in divided Irish communities. The Irish text panel at Grosse Ile can thus be decoded in part in light of the Kilrush commemoration: the French panels of the two monuments are linked beacons to memories in Quebec and Ireland.