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COPYRIGHT 2003 Irish American Cultural Institute
CONTEMPORARY Ireland and Quebec each have centuries of complex language traditions in which Irish, English, and French have jostled in different ways at different periods of time. This article examines two sites--the 1909 Celtic cross at Grosse Ile, Quebec, and the 1903 Miss Erin monument at Kilrush, County Clare--to highlight ways in which texts at those sites were attempts to fix collective memory, but over the twentieth century have become a kind of fragmented conversation about language, famine, nationalism, and identity. At each site, stone structures soar over eye-level text panels that seem to display one single message in Irish, French, and English. Two of the three languages make visible a dual linguistic history in the surrounding cultural landscapes: French and English at Grosse Ile, Irish and English at Kilrush.
But why the third language? Was there a French quartier in Kilrush, an Irish Gaeltacht tucked away on the small Canadian island? If not, why did the designers feature another language that few visitors to the sites could have read? If the purpose of monument building is to make a particular memory publicly visible and thus more enduring, do the three languages aid that attempt or conflict with it? Does their presence raise silent questions about conflicts of memory? If needs for a third language were clearer at the time of construction than now, do monuments fix or mark the passage of memory? These questions suggest that visual displays of language carry meanings beyond those apparent in the written words. The broader contexts of the messages may have been so well understood in the early twentieth century that more explicit notation was unnecessary or intentionally omitted, yet other meanings may be clearer and more visible now.
IRISH MIGRATIONS TO QUEBEC
Before the nineteenth century Irish people emigrated to Quebec mainly through military service. After the Napoleonic wars in 1815, food shortages and epidemics in Ireland sporadically spurred Irish migrations to the predominantly French-speaking Catholic region. Between 1815 and 1861 the Anglophone population of Quebec rose from 15 percent to 24.3 percent. In this period the Irish accounted for almost twice the number of newcomers as English and Scottish immigrants combined (Dickinson and Young 2000:112). The cholera epidemic of 1832 stimulated more Catholic emigration from Ireland than usual, but until the massive influx of Irish Catholics in the years of the Great Famine, most Irish immigrants to Quebec were English-speaking Protestants. In the decade of 1845-55, there were unprecedented challenges to Quebec's religious, linguistic, and cultural demographics as thousands of Irish Catholics poured into Quebec City, Montreal, and other regions along the St. Lawrence River.
Catholic ecclesiastical institutions had been entrenched in Quebec society since the French settlements in the early seventeenth century; thus life was considerably less complicated for the Catholic population than it was under the restrictions of the Penal Laws in Ireland. Nevertheless, the financial and political interests of the English-speaking population had increasingly gained control in Quebec after 1760 when France ceded to Britain its remaining colonial holdings in the region. Unrest grew in Quebec as its French-based societal structures and institutions were increasingly challenged. In recognition of growing unrest in the thirteen colonies to the south, England gave concessions to French Canadians to ensure some measure of loyalty, and the 1774 Quebec Act was passed in England to institutionalize measures of cultural continuity for the French-speaking Catholics (Dickinson and Young 2000:55). (1) The precedence of this legislation linked the aspirations of Irish and French-speaking Canadians seeking more independence under British rule and subsequently influenced the development of British policy toward Ireland in the nineteenth century.
Irish Catholic arrivals to Quebec's predominantly rural farming landscape became religious compatriots with French speakers in some ways, but economic and cultural interlopers in other respects. Many newcomers were Irish-speakers; with them came multilingual Irish priests whose religious training in France facilitated communication with the established French Catholic hierarchy in Quebec but also challenged that power base. Confrontations arose among the clergy over the provision of English-language social services and religious instruction (Atherton 1914:263-69).
At one time religion and language were defining aspects of cultural identities in both Quebec and Ireland as well as common bonds of opposition to English domination in some Irish immigrant communities of Quebec. In recent decades issues of identity in Quebec have focused more on language, while religion has had that role in Ireland. Since 1994, however, interest in the Great Famine has renewed understanding of Quebec's prominence in migration to North America, Quebec's influence on Irish nationalism, and the substantial Irish dimensions of Quebec history. This background forms the basis of the analysis that follows.
GROSSE ILE: THE LANGUAGES OF THE CELTIC CROSS
One pivotal site in Irish migration to North America is Grosse Ile, a three-mile-long island about five miles out in the St. Lawrence River and forty miles northeast of Quebec City. The small isolated island functioned as a quarantine station for immigrants to British North America from 1832 to 1937. Immigration seasons were usually short in the northern climate and operations routine. The cholera epidemic of 1832 and especially the Great Famine of the mid-1840s were two extraordinary exceptions when immigrant numbers spiked to crisis levels. In both episodes the Irish were by far the largest incoming group. Estimates of the dead buried on Grosse Ile in 1847 vary from 6,000 to 20,000, but this is possibly the site of the largest single mass grave of the famine era (Quigley 1997a). The large number of Irish people buried on the island has enveloped the site in ah Irish identity.
As part of the Great Famine's fiftieth anniversary in 1897, members of Quebec's Ancient Order of Hibernians (AOH) visited the island and found the burial site overgrown. They proposed to mark the mass graves with a commemorative monument and began lengthy discussions to acquire a site (O'Gallagher 1984). Although the monument was not completed until 1909, the coincidence of the 1897 visit with preparations in Ireland for the centennial celebrations of the 1798 Rising is significant. The Grosse Ile monument commemorates tragic events that reverberated throughout eastern Canada, but the monument's design, especially the language on the text panels, speaks at least as much about Irish nationalism in 1898 as it does about the...
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