Recrimination and reconciliation: Great Famine memory in Liverpool and Montreal at the turn of the twentieth century

Abstract

The wave of interest in the Great Famine generated by the 150th anniversary commemorations in Ireland and across the diaspora indicates that public memory of the catastrophe remains vital to the formulation of Irish identities. The sesquicentennial not only focused popular, official, and scholarly attention on narrating the Famine, it also initiated ongoing debate over whether public acts of Famine remembrance produced meaningful or contrived connections to this painful past. In much of the commentary produced in the two decades since the sesquicentennial, sceptics and supporters alike have described Famine commemoration as a new cultural phenomenon – one that broke public memorial silence on the subject. Yet, there were various memorial practices and commemorative narratives long before the mid-1990s, most notably the acts of remembrance of Irish diasporic communities around the time of the Famine's 50th anniversary. This article addresses this issue in relation to Liverpool and Montreal – the busiest British and Canadian urban ports of entry during the Famine migration. Both cities were flooded with destitute and often ailing Famine migrants in the summer of 1847 when officials and residents struggled to contain a typhus epidemic that killed thousands despite quarantine measures. Though many of the Irish newcomers to Montreal and Liverpool out-migrated subsequently, Irish Catholic groups in both cities kept its memory alive through political rhetoric, religious rituals, and historical commemoration, often recalling it as the traumatic genesis of Irish emigration, and periodically mobilizing its remembrance in support of various forms of Irish nationalism. This article considers how public memorial sites and commemorative narratives were constructed in Montreal and Liverpool at the turn of the twentieth century to entrench local ethnic solidarity in the context of sectarian strains and fraught socioeconomic circumstances, and to reinforce Irish national and diasporic connections amidst political contestations over Home Rule.