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Archives provinciales du Nouveau-Brunswick

Dictionary of Miramichi Biography

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DUNNE, MICHAEL (1802-1853)

DUNNE, MICHAEL, political activist; b. Co. Laois, Ireland, c1802, s/o Patrick William Dunne and Amelia Marcella Malone; unmarried; d. Chicago, Ill., 16 Sep 1853.

Michael Dunne, the eldest of twelve children of a family which came to the Miramichi in 1825 from Stradbally, Ireland, was a leader of Catholic and Irish nationalist causes in Chatham in the 1840s and a player at the local level in the provincial elections of that decade.

Dunne was an organizer of a grand St Patrick's Day temperance parade in Chatham in 1842. This was sponsored by the Roman Catholic Total Abstinence Association, which was created in the wake of the temperance crusade launched in Ireland in 1838 by Father Theobald Mathew. In 1844 Dunne was the principal founder and leader of the Miramichi Repeal Association, a local movement for the repeal of the parliamentary union of Great Britain and Ireland that was also directly reflective of the movement overseas.

Dunne was an organizer of the supporters of the Chatham candidate, John T. Williston, in the provincial election of 1842-43. In the follow-up election held in July 1843 he was the seconder of Williston's nomination and delivered "an eloquent speech." He was present when the bloody melee erupted between the Chatham and Newcastle factions at that election, but it seems unlikely that he would have participated in the violence. In 1846 he himself was one of seven nominees for the four Northumberland County seats in the Assembly, but he and two of the others agreed to withdraw to avoid the necessity of a contest.

In 1847 Dunne was one of the incorporators of the Miramichi Mechanics' Institute. In 1848 he, his widowed mother Amelia M. Malone, and most other members of the family departed Chatham for Chicago, where they made a new home, and where Dunne died five years later. Among his six brothers was Dennis Dunne, who was trained for the priesthood in Quebec City and was later vicar-general of the archdiocese of Chicago. His five sisters included Mary Dunne, who was married at Nelson in 1839 to Matthew Riordan, a ship carpenter from Kinsale, Ireland. She and her husband were the parents of Patrick William Riordan, another Catholic priest, who became archbishop of San Francisco.

Sources

[d] Manny index / Dunne family data; Fraser (C); Gleaner 21 Jul 1843, 17 Jan 1844, 13 Apr 1847; NB Elections


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