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rfmcdonaldAt the Brisbane Times, Siobhan McHugh has an article ("How the Irish rose above Australia's social apartheid") that makes me wonder at how the Irish diasporas in Canada and Australia have encountered such widely differing fates.
If McHugh's conclusions are correct, this suggests that Irish Australians were much more segregated than Irish Canadians (Multicultural Canada, Wikipedia), who formed relatively dispersed populations outside of cities and were assimilated into the dominant Anglophone and Francophone communities with relative ease. The Roman Catholicism of most of the Irish immigrants to Canada was a mark against them, but the presence of such a strongly Roman Catholic province as Québec made the sectarian balance much more endurable. By the mid-20th century, Irish Canadians had become an invisible ethnicity. Does anyone here in Toronto know of any real Irish pubs?
Thoughts, corrections?
Anglo-Celtic" has become a glib collective term for non-indigenous Old Australia — a polite way of saying White Australia before the wogs. But it is an insidious distortion of our past and a galling denial of the struggle by an earlier minority group in Australia against oppression and demonisation.
From the First Fleet to the 1960s, Irish Catholics were a discriminated-against underclass, openly barred from employment in much of the private sector and accused of disloyalty for putting Australia before the British Empire. In what we now cosily term "Anglo-Celtic" Australia, a virtual social apartheid existed at times between Catholics and Protestants. But the divisions were not about religion. They derived from England's colonial oppression of Ireland, grievances transplanted to Australia and nurtured with bitterness by both sides.
"This is a Protestant country and it is our pride that we have absolute liberty under the Union Jack,' declared E.K Bowden, minister for defence, in 1922. Four years earlier, in late 1918, an Irish Catholic priest in Sydney, one Dr Patrick Tuomey, was fined £30 for sedition for criticising the British presence in Ireland; he thereby "by word of mouth encouraged disloyalty to the British Empire".
Religion in "Anglo-Celtic" Australia was code for identity: it branded you as part of the Protestant Ascendancy or the Catholic "Bog Irish". To marry across these entrenched divides was nothing short of consorting with the enemy for many — yet one in five did, from the 1890s to the 1960s. Many of these couples were ostracised, sometimes by both sides of the family, to the grave and beyond.
If McHugh's conclusions are correct, this suggests that Irish Australians were much more segregated than Irish Canadians (Multicultural Canada, Wikipedia), who formed relatively dispersed populations outside of cities and were assimilated into the dominant Anglophone and Francophone communities with relative ease. The Roman Catholicism of most of the Irish immigrants to Canada was a mark against them, but the presence of such a strongly Roman Catholic province as Québec made the sectarian balance much more endurable. By the mid-20th century, Irish Canadians had become an invisible ethnicity. Does anyone here in Toronto know of any real Irish pubs?
Thoughts, corrections?
