St. Patrick's Society of Montreal

The St. Patrick's Society of Montreal (French: Société Saint-Patrick de Montréal) is the oldest fraternal organization in Canada.

However, it was founded mainly by Irish Protestants in the spring of 1834 in order to oppose the 92 Resolutions sent by Lower-Canadian Louis-Joseph Papineau's Patriotes to the British Government.

The national qualities and purposes of the various anglophone bodies were commented upon by the Honourable Peter McGill, the first English-speaking Mayor of Montreal, at a dinner given by St. Patrick’s Society on the evening of March 17, 1836.

The Society continued as non-sectarian until the year 1856, under the able presidency of such men as John Donnellan, Benjamin Holmes, Sir Francis Hincks, Bernard Devlin, W.F.

Among those who vigorously opposed the separation was Sir William Hales Hingston, a prominent surgeon and later, the Mayor of Montreal, who tendered his resignation from the Society as a gesture against what he termed the uncalled for division.

Perhaps somewhat hypocritically, the Society forwarded a letter of condolence to his family expressing their abhorrence of the crime and arranged for his burial in Notre Dame des Neiges Cemetery on Mount Royal.

At the 178th annual meeting, held June 19, 2012 at the Hyatt Regency Hotel, the members witnessed a highly informative and entertaining debate between David Wilson and J. Peter Shea, the Society's historian, about the merits of reinstating McGee's membership posthumously.

After the debate, which lasted forty minutes, the members present voted overwhelmingly in favour of reinstatement after 144 years as a Society outcast.

[2] The Society played a headership role with respect to scholarships, child welfare, Irish Home Rule and other kindred matters.

Of the six Irish mayors of Montreal in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – William Workman, Francis Cassidy, K.C., Sir William Hingston, James McShane, Richard Wilson-Smith and the Honourable James J. Guerin – all were members of St. Patrick’s Society of Montreal, and three were Presidents of the Society: Workman, Cassidy and Guerin.

After the various waves of nineteenth-century immigration from Ireland, by the turn of the twentieth century the membership of the Society essentially was composed of second-, third- and fourth-generation Irish-Canadians.

The annual St. Patrick’s Day celebration is now a business-type luncheon, with a guest speaker (almost always with an Irish background) who has played a prominent role in politics, business, academia, the arts, law, journalism or otherwise.

St. Patrick’s Society contributed the original seed money to launch the successful capital campaign of the Canadian Irish Studies Foundation, which raised millions of dollars.

The moneys raised at these events fund the operations of the Society, which is a registered federal charity, allows the Society to organize and sponsors a large number of cultural and educational activities that are open to all and to make significant donations to other Montreal charities and not-for-profit organizations that serve the less fortunate, homeless, children, families and elderly of the city, both Irish and non-Irish.