The Irish in Canada Podcast

In late July 1843, the colony of Upper Canada was stunned with the news of a bloody double-murder. Thomas Kinnear had been shot and Nancy Montgomery – his housekeeper and pregnant mistress – had been strangled and dismembered. The two people accused of the murders were Kinnear’s Irish servants: James McDermott and the teenager, Grace Marks. Grace’s story has since become one of the most famous fictionalised episodes from nineteenth century Canada, but what was the real Grace like?

The Franklin Expedition looms large in Canadian myths and legends, in large part because of what happened to the doomed crews of the HMS Erebus and Terror... or what we think happened. But at the heart of this story of the Canadian north is an Irishman from Co. Down who lived through the worst that the unforgiving winters had to offer, and then led the survivors as they abandoned the ships and wandered off into the ice. But who was Francis Crozier, and what do we know about the man at the heart of the mystery?

To end our second season, Jane is revealing some of her exclusive research from the Gender, Migration & Madness Project: the mystery surrounding the death of Mary Boyd. Mary was an Irish Quebecer who found work as a young maid in a Toronto doctor’s household in 1868. But the circumstances surrounding her suicide only a few months later caused a major scandal in the city about sex, virginity, pregnancy, medical experimentation, mental illness, and the immense power men had over women’s bodies.

NB – This episode contains graphic discussions of mental illness, sexual assault, and suicide. Listener discretion is advised.

Few people in Canadian history have created more division than Louis Riel. At the time of his death in 1885, he had been found guilty of high treason, but even the jury who condemned him agreed that something else in Riel’s past was why he was killed: the execution of Thomas Scott. Who was Thomas Scott? Why was he executed in Winnipeg during the Red River Resistance, and why did Riel feel fifteen years later that he was going to be hanged because of an Irishman?

NB – This episode contains explicit language

Nellie McClung was a provocative woman, stirring up controversies and column inches in her own lifetime and in all the years since she died. Arguably Canada’s most famous first-wave feminist, her efforts guaranteed that Manitoba’s women won the provincial vote in 1916, a first in Canada. She was also one of The Famous Five, the group of activists who won the right for Canadian women to be considered as legal ‘persons’ under the law. On the other hand, Nellie is also the first woman we’ve featured on this podcast to have been literally burned in effigy—and many of her opinions from the 1910s and 1920s are roundly criticized today. Controversial? Chances are, Nellie ‘Shanty Irish’ McClung wouldn’t have had it any other way.