Exhibit A: the Irish

For a long time I have been mildly obsessed with this little mystery I like to call New Brunswick.  As in, New Brunswick, who the heck are we, anyway?

New Brunswick is a lot like Canada in miniature.  We like to talk about "Canadians" but it's really more of a term of convenience in many ways.  What makes a Canadian?  Love of beer?  Compulsive small talk about the weather?  Nobody is entirely sure what a Canadian is supposed to look like, or what language they are supposed to speak etc.  So it is with New Brunswick, too.

One thing is for sure - New Brunswickers have a serious deficit, and I'm not talking about money.  I'm talking about our lack of self-knowledge and cultural identity.  Name me one New Brunswick song, story or painting.  Name five New Brunswickers who have made a significant contribution to modern politics, business and culture.  I bet you are struggling right now. If you're not, please leave your list in the comments. We don't teach it in school so most people have no idea.

So . . . for a long time I've been contemplating the idea of a series of posts about New Brunswick, and all the different groups and their respective legacies.  Seeing as how tomorrow is Saint Patrick's day, I thought I would provide you with some interesting factoids about the Irish who passed through NB and settled.

• Historians estimate that, between 1815 and 1865, the majority of immigrants to NB were Irish (60%) 
•  In the period between 1827 and 1835, alone, some 65,000 Irish migrants landed.

We had different Irish here, as opposed to Halifax or Newfoundland.

• The sources of Irish migration to New Brunswick were not primarily from the port of Waterford.
• New Brunswick’s Irish generally came from either Munster or Ulster, provinces whose port cities had strong ties to timber ports and merchant centres in New Brunswick.

Irish Protestants settled in different places than Irish Catholics.

• While Protestant Irish tended to settle the Saint John River valley, Irish Catholics could be found in great numbers along the Gulf of St Lawrence, in the entrepôt of Saint John, or in the timber-rich valley of the Miramichi River, in the northeast.

I have Irish Protestants in the family, so it's not surprising we're here in the valley.  At some point in the future I will present a snapshot of the Scottish, the Acadiens and the original peoples who were here before "Crown Land." 

Here's a bit of Irish humour to go with your beer.

An American lawyer asked, "Paddy, why is it that whenever you ask an Irishman a question, he answers with another question? "Who told you that?" asked Paddy.
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An Irishman, an Englishman and a beautiful girl are riding together in a train, with the beautiful girl in the middle.The train goes through a tunnel and it gets completely dark. Suddenly there is a kissing sound and then a slap!


The train comes out of the tunnel. The woman and the Irishman are sitting there looking perplexed. The Englishman is bent over holding his face which is red from an apparent slap.

The Englishman is thinking "Damn it, that Mick must have tried to kiss the girl, she thought it was me and slapped me."

The girl is thinking, "That Englishman must have moved to kiss me, and kissed the Irishman instead and got slapped."

The Irishman is thinking, "If this train goes through another tunnel, I could make another kissing sound and slap that Englishman again!!