The New Brunswick Irish Portal
Exhibits Databases

Dr. Stewart Donovan - St.Thomas University

The epic tale of the Irish arrival and settlement in the Province of New Brunswick has, until very recently, been an unknown and an untold story—their history, in all its complexity, pain and triumph, has been largely a hidden one. Just as the Irish writer and nationalist, Daniel Corkery, once spoke and wrote of a hidden Ireland, so Canadians can read and talk of a hidden New Brunswick. And what was largely hidden for almost a century belonged in custom, memory, religion, ceremony, and ethnicity, to Ireland. There are many reasons for the existence of this forgotten record of one of the provinces founding peoples and we shall explore some of these as this journey into the Irish past of New Brunswick unfolds through this portal.