A Demographic and Social Profile of Quebec City's Irish Populations, 1842–1861

by Robert J. Grace

IN THE FIRST HALF of the nineteenth century, the port of Quebec handled over two-thirds of total European immigration to the British North American colonies. Most of these immigrants had embarked somewhere in the British Isles and the Irish constituted the largest group for much of the half century. Both Irish Protestants and Irish Catholics made their way across the Atlantic to Quebec where, after disembarking, most continued on to points further west or south while some remained in the city. The Protestant proportion in this migration was at its most important in the first three decades of the century while the movement of Catholics gained strength in the mid–1830s and culminated in the huge immigration of the Famine (1845–49) and post-Famine (1850– 54) periods. A sizeable proportion of the early Protestant arrivals settled on the expanding rural frontier of Upper Canada (Ontario) while many of the later Catholic immigrants found work on the canals, in the lumber trade, on the railroads and in the cities of the two Canadas. By midcentury, significant Irish settlements could be found in the Maritimes, Quebec City, Montreal, Toronto, Hamilton, Kingston, and rural Ontario. Yet, of all these areas of Irish settlement, Quebec City stands alone as the only one with a clear Roman Catholic population, that of Montreal being a mixture of the two cultures. This Catholic majority in Quebec City proved to be significant with respect to the subsequent social development for both the Irish Catholic and Irish Protestant communities.