Land estate owners in Ireland would either evict landholder tenants to board on returning empty lumber ships, or in some cases pay their fares.

[17] The great majority of Irish Catholics arrived in Grosse Isle, an island in Quebec in the St. Lawrence River, which housed the immigration reception station.

A large number of the families that survived continued on to settle in Canada West (now Ontario) and provided a cheap labor pool and colonization of land in a rapidly expanding economy in the decades after their arrival.

The anthem "The Maple Leaf Forever", written and composed by Scottish immigrant and Orangeman Alexander Muir, reflects the pro-British Ulster loyalism outlook typical of the time with its disdainful view of Irish Republicanism.

Spatially, Orange lodges were founded as Irish Protestant settlement spread north and west from its original focus on the Lake Ontario plain.

[26] In Montreal in 1853, the Orange Order organized speeches by the fiercely anti-Catholic and anti-Irish former priest Alessandro Gavazzi, resulting in a violent confrontation between the Irish and the Scots.

[citation needed] The Irish would go on to settle permanently in the close-knit working-class neighbourhoods of Pointe-Saint-Charles, Verdun, Saint-Henri, Griffintown and Goose Village, Montreal.

Examples from political leaders include Laurence Cannon, Claude Ryan, the former Premiers Daniel Johnson and Jean Charest, Georges Dor (born Georges-Henri Dore), and former Prime Ministers Louis St. Laurent and Brian Mulroney.

From the times of early European settlement in the 17th and 18th centuries, the Irish had been coming to Ontario, in small numbers and in the service of New France, as missionaries, soldiers, geographers and fur trappers.

[30] In the years after the War of 1812, increasing numbers of Irish, a growing proportion of them Catholic, were venturing to Canada to obtain work on projects such as canals, roads, early railroads and in the lumber industry.

[31] Peter Robinson organized land settlements of Catholic tenant farmers in the 1820s to areas of rural Eastern Ontario, which helped establish Peterborough as a regional centre.

In response the Church built a network of charitable institutions such as hospitals, schools, boarding homes, and orphanages, to meet the need and keep people inside the faith.

Employment opportunities in the cities, in Toronto but elsewhere, occupations included construction, liquor processing (see Distillery District), Great Lakes shipping, and manufacturing.

[citation needed] Redclift (2003) concluded that many of the one million migrants, mainly of British and Irish origin, who arrived in Canada in the mid-19th century benefited from the availability of land and absence of social barriers to mobility.

He contended that the numerical dominance of Protestants within the national group and the rural basis of the Irish community negated the formation of urban ghettos and allowed for a relative ease in social mobility.

[38] Likewise the new labour historians believe that the rise of the Knights of Labor caused the Orange and Catholic Irish in Toronto to resolve their generational hatred and set about to form a common working-class culture.

[39] McGowan argues that between 1890 and 1920, the city's Catholics experienced major social, ideological, and economic changes that allowed them to integrate into Toronto society and shake off their second-class status.

Immigrants from earlier decades may well have experienced greater economic difficulties, but in general the Irish in Ontario in the 1890s enjoyed levels of wealth commensurate with the rest of the populace.

[44] Ciani (2008) concludes that support of World War I fostered an identity among Irish Catholics as loyal citizens and helped integrate them into the social fabric of the nation.

In August 1969, some 150 Irish Canadians in Toronto announced that they intended to send money, which could be used to buy guns if necessary, to the Catholic women and children of the Bogside in Derry.

[50] Between 1979 and 1986, loyalist paramilitaries received 100 machine guns and many rifles, grenade launchers, magnum revolvers, and hundreds of thousands of rounds of ammunition from Canadian sources.

There are many communities in Ontario that are named after places and last names of Ireland, including Ballinafad, Ballyduff, Ballymote, Cavan, Connaught, Connellys, Dalton, Donnybrook, Dublin, Dundalk, Dunnville, Enniskillen, Erinsville, Galway, Hagarty, Irish Lake, Kearney, Keenansville, Kennedys, Killaloe, Killarney, Limerick, Listowel, Lucan, Maguire, Malone, McGarry, Moffat, Mullifarry, Munster, Navan, New Dublin, O'Connell, Oranmore, Quinn Settlement, Ripley, Shamrock, Tara, South Monaghan, Waterford and Westport.

The BIS was founded as a charitable, fraternal, middle-class social organization, on the principles of "benevolence and philanthropy", and had as its original objective to provide the necessary skills which would enable the poor to better themselves.

Newfoundland then joined Canada by a 52–48% margin, and with an influx of Protestants into St. John's after the closure of the east coast cod fishery in the 1990s, the main issues have become one of Rural vs. Urban interests rather than anything ethnic or religious.

To Newfoundland, the Irish gave the still-familiar family names of southeast Ireland: Walsh, Power, Murphy, Ryan, Whelan, Phelan, O'Brien, Kelly, Hanlon, Neville, Bambrick, Halley, Houlihan, Hogan, Dillon, Byrne, Quigley, Burke, and FitzGerald.

The original Mi'kmaq inhabitants, Acadian French, Lowland Scots, Irish, Loyalists from New England, and English have all contributed to a history which has included cultural, religious, and political conflict as well as cooperation and synthesis.

[70] While some influential Canadian politicians anticipated that the assisted migrations of Irish settlers would lead to the establishment of a 'New Ireland' on Canada's prairies, or at least raise the profile of the country's potential as a suitable destination for immigrants, neither happened.

They clashed with Catholic Métis leader Louis Riel's provisional government during the Red River Rebellion, and as a result Thomas Scott was executed, inflaming sectarian tensions in the east.

After World War I and the de facto resolution of the religious schools issue, any eastern Irish-Canadians moving west blended in totally with the majority society.

The Irish were thus a vital force for cohesion in an ethnically diverse frontier society, but also a source of major tension with elements that did not share their vision of how the province of Saskatchewan should evolve.