Irish Canadian Conflict and the Struggle for Irish Independence, 1912–1925 by Robert McLaughlin (review)

Robert McLaughlin elaborates a series of ways in which those of Irish origin in Canada responded to a wave of increasingly dramatic events in early twentieth-century Ireland. In the ancestral homeland, the promise of self-government (or “home rule”) through constitutional means was interrupted first by world war and then by the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin. Britain’s decision to swiftly execute the rising’s leaders produced the latest set of Irish nationalist martyrs and, by 1918, heightened significantly the degree of popular support for more hard-line approaches to attaining national independence. At the same time, substantial numbers of union-supporting Protestants in the north of Ireland loudly proclaimed their intention to defy attempts at removal from the United Kingdom.

Scholars of the Canadian Irish have now firmly established the importance of Protestant immigration throughout most of the nineteenth century, with Catholic arrivals concentrated mostly around the time of Ireland’s midcentury potato famine. The twentieth century, in contrast, remains relatively open for investigation, and, having documented a significant degree of homeland-centric activity between 1912 and 1925, McLaughlin challenges arguments of ethnic fade-out among the Irish.

Within his five-chapter study, McLaughlin charts quite well a range of fundraising and other anti–home rule activities by the Protestant Orange Order fraternity in central and eastern Canada, inspired by “Ulster Canadian” personalities such as Toronto’s Fred Dane. He also captures to a good degree the participation of Canadian branches of the Catholic Ancient Order of Hibernians (AOH) in the circulation of Irish nationalist discourse, with small-town Ontario lawyer and provincial president Charles J. Foy proving a particularly compelling figure. The Hibernians’ integration into a larger American organization, though tested by anglophobic outbursts within the latter group in the first years of world war, was successful. Militant republican attitudes within the American AOH were not new, however, as a closer examination of the career of Matthew Cummings, its national president between 1906 and 1910, would have revealed. Nonetheless, the presence of Irish republicans within the Ontario AOH in the early 1920s is notable and worthy of further study.

Newspapers are a key source, with McLaughlin’s evidence drawn mainly from two Catholic weeklies, one in Toronto, the other in Saint John, as well as the Toronto-based weekly Orange Sentinel. The nationalist activism he uncovers in Winnipeg, however, suggests that more attention to Manitoba and the weekly Northwest Review would have paid dividends. So too would have some indication of how Canada’s mainstream media engaged with the Irish home rule issue at its most critical junctures. Surprisingly, cultures of martyr commemoration (present in Irish America) are not considered as a potential source of Irish nationalist sympathy. A more serious flaw, however, lies in the book’s failure to incorporate recent scholarship. The bibliography contains no works published after 2008, thus omitting relevant works such as Simon Jolivet’s contribution on the Self-Determination for Ireland League of Canada in the Canadian Historical Review (2011) and Frederick McEvoy’s chapter in the Irish Nationalism in Canada collection (2009), to cite but two.

Furthermore, although McLaughlin shows that religious affiliation mattered in terms of which Canadians of Irish descent supported nationalism or unionism in Ireland, the argument is presented too simply. For example, his examination of Protestant Irish Canadians is reduced to “Orange-Canadian unionists.” Though he is aware of an Irish Protestant Benevolent Society in Montreal (one also existed in Toronto, at least) during the period, McLaughlin does not investigate its reaction to the events unfolding in Ireland. Would they have simply duplicated Orange intransigence in supporting their northern Irish brethren? While I am persuaded that Irish-Canadian nationalists were Catholic in the majority, it is unlikely that Lindsay Crawford, an ex-Orangeman who became head of the Self-Determination for Ireland League of Canada in 1920, was the only Irish Protestant in Canada supporting the nationalist cause. Little room for nuance...