Canada and Ireland: A Political and Diplomatic History by Philip J. Currie (review)

In the November 2020 ICUF D'Arcy McGee Beacon Lecture at University College Dublin, Jean Charest, the former premier of Quebec, recounted how he was teased in Sherbrooke as a child for being English. When he returned home and recounted the episode to his mother, she told him to tell those kids that he was not English; he was Irish. Even in the 1960s Canada of Charest's youth, the distinction would have mattered little to most Canadians. It matters even less today. That is the argument that Philip J. Currie makes in his new book: Ireland no longer matters in Canadian political life. There is now a great indifference to Irish affairs among politicians, the media, and the public more generally. When Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and the Irish Taoiseach, Leo Varadker, marched in the 2017 Montreal Pride Parade, it was about photo-ops and selfies, he suggests, not about the importance of Ireland to Canada: "the era of Canadian concern with Irish political issues … had passed" (223).

It was not always thus, however. Politicians from John A. Macdonald and Edward Blake to Mackenzie King and John Diefenbaker had treated the Irish question with a certain gravitas. Currie contends that what would become the Irish Republican Army had first taken up arms when the Fenian Brotherhood, an Irish revolutionary society, sought to hold Canada for ransom in exchange for Ireland's freedom. The threat from the Fenians helped push the colonies in British North America towards Confederation in 1867. Moreover, many of those politicians of the period were very interested in what was happening in Ireland, and a few of them, including the influential Edward Blake actually participated in Irish politics, advocating for self-government for Ireland. The Irish vote was also crucial when Canadians voted, particularly in municipalities such as Toronto.

Currie shows, however, that Canadian leaders often had trouble navigating the world of Irish politics because politicians in Ireland rebuffed the constitutional precedent that Canada had forged that saw it emerge as a self-governing, independent dominion within the Empire and later the Commonwealth. Prime Minister Mackenzie King had been sympathetic to the Irish cause, nonetheless, but with his passing and the emergence of the Cold War, Canadian interests became increasingly aligned with Northern Ireland (the six counties of the north of Ireland that remained loyal to the Crown) rather than with the southern Republic, which had remained neutral during the Second World War and, later, refused to join the fight against Communism. With the emergence, in 1969, of sectarian violence ("The Troubles") in Ulster, Canada insisted on its neutrality in the matter. As others have argued, Currie, too, contends that with increasing interest in an independence movement in Quebec from the early 1960s, Canada refrained from showing any sympathy for the Irish republican cause lest it embolden those pursuing independence in Quebec.

In many ways, though, this is a curious book, as the Irish and Canadian connection is not always evident in Currie's analysis. There are lengthy sections on political developments in Canada and in Ireland, ostensibly to provide context for his argument, but the connections are tenuous at best. They amount to synopses of important moments in Irish history and Canadian history without showing how those events impacted the Canada-Irish political and diplomatic relationship. When Canada again becomes involved in Irish politics, in the period leading to the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, Currie does not show how and why Canada played a role. John de Chastelain, the former Canadian chief of defence staff and former Canadian ambassador to the United States, became chair of the Independent International Commission on Decommissioning which oversaw the disarmament of paramilitary forces in Northern Ireland. Currie notes that another Canadian worked on the future of policing and another participated in an inquiry into the events surrounding "Bloody Sunday" in 1972, when British soldiers shot twenty-six civilians during a protest march against internment without...