Canada and Ireland – a mating of minds There are strong literary connections between the countries, helped by Irish genes dancing in Canadian blood

The reason they were coming was to help me celebrate literary connections between Ireland and Canada at a small festival that I as the Craig Dobbin Chair in the College of Arts and Humanities, Paul Halferty as head of Canadian Studies, and a dedicated team of UCD personnel had been madly preparing d...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inThe Irish times
Main Author Urquhart, Jane
Format Newspaper Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Dublin The Irish Times DAC 04.06.2018
Subjects
19th century
Area Studies
Atwood, Margaret (1939- )
Canadian Literature
Ethnic Groups
Families & family life
Famine
Imagination
Migrants
Novels
Quarantine
Writers
Canada
United Kingdom > UK
Ireland
England
North America
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Summary:The reason they were coming was to help me celebrate literary connections between Ireland and Canada at a small festival that I as the Craig Dobbin Chair in the College of Arts and Humanities, Paul Halferty as head of Canadian Studies, and a dedicated team of UCD personnel had been madly preparing during the previous six months. Or as Halferty put it later in the day when we knew for sure that everything would have to be cancelled, "we tried to bring Canadian literature to Ireland, but ended up bringing only Canadian weather". The Orange Order still dominated Canadian life and Canadian politics, and the little crumbs of official Canadian history taught in our schools made no reference to the presence of Irish Catholics in our midst. In spite of our lack of formal education on the subject, Canadian families of Irish descent never forgot Ireland, and because they did not forget, Ireland became an imagined sacred homeland for us, and - in some ways - set the tone for the future. Since the great Irish migration of the 19th century, immigrants from dozens of different backgrounds have repeated the experience of the Irish and have come to Canada.