HISTORY in the making

Meg Walker meets Ireland’s Ambassador to Canada, Eamonn McKee.

Born in Dublin, Dr. Eamonn McKee became Ambassador of Ireland to Canada in October 2020. He previously held ambassadorial positions in Seoul and Israel and has spent the last eight years as Director General of the Trade division at the Department of Foreign Affairs. He is passionate about history and writes about it and other interests at eamonncmckee.com.

Taking on the ambassadorship in the midst of the Covid pandemic; the challenge was immediate In a diplomatic posting, the first thing you do is meet people and we weren’t able to do that. You have this cognitive dissonance where you’re in a country, listening to and reading the news, but not actually meeting people. It’s very strange. Thank goodness for technology – we were able to keep going and put a lot of content online. Diplomacy now very definitively involves social media, which I think is good. It also allowed us time to reflect on what we’re trying to achieve. We have a global Ireland strategy – there’s one for Ireland and Canada – so we were able to assess how we were implementing that and we created a project managementbased approach to our objectives. We also used this time to explore the links between Ireland and Canada. December two years ago, when the Royal Irish Academy published Irish Lives in America, I thought, what about Irish Lives in Canada? Within days, thanks to email, we assembled a group of historians. We launched that project in March this year, releasing one profile every day of the month. Our ambition is to have a book published by the end of the year. Our moto is that the history is complicated but one way to see the 300-year span of the Irish presence in Canada, is through individual lives.

The Irish are in all walks of life. You have Anglo-Irish; colonial administrators and soldiers who were there at the formation of the colonies; Arctic explorers like Francis Crozier and Francis Leopold McClintock; the women involved in religion, which was an outlet for women’s leadership and talents that wasn’t available elsewhere in society because they weren’t given education or a professional career.

Mother Teresa Ellen Dease moved from Rathfarnham and set up Loreto Colleges for women and children across Canada. You’ve got people like John Egan, a penniless immigrant from Connemara, born in 1811, who came to the Ottawa Valley, became the richest lumber baron in Canada and encouraged Irish settlement. The three Governor Generals who were there before, during and after Confederation, when Canada was really born as a nation – Anglo-Irish. On and on it goes… The founding father of Canadian botany John Macoun; John Pallister, the explorer of the North West; James Robert Gowan, who wrote most of Canadian criminal jurisprudence and statutes and was hugely influential in the formation not just of the law but of the judiciary. The more you look, the more you find. We started doing a heritage trail in Ottawa and discovered that Ottawa was an Irish town – there was a huge Irish settlement there.

The Irish presence in Canada most people see as immigration, but in fact is a colonial story: 106,000 Famine refugees came into Canada in 1847, looked after with tremendous compassion by the Canadians. Through that, they had hope and opportunities but they weren’t really immigrants in the classic sense. Nor were there 10,000 tenants from the Coollattin Estate in Wicklow – it was forced relocation. It’s a complicated story about colonialism across the Atlantic – Ireland is one colony and it becomes in a way, willingly or unwillingly, transplanted to create another one here in Canada. Looking at the 300-year span of Irish immigration here, there are all types of Irish identity – Anglo-Irish, Orangemen, Nationalists, Constitutional Nationalists, Fenians. There are business people, historians, poets and visionaries. The whole panoply of Irish identity as it evolved in all its complexity over the years is represented here in Canada.

We’ve achieved a lot in the last couple of years. We’ve been engaging with the Canada-Ireland Interparliamentary Group, bringing historians to talk to them and build up their expertise about Ireland and the Northern Ireland peace process. We have a lot of great Irish Chambers of Commerce here who’ve been revived by the new Irish that have come in and the Ireland Canada Business Association. We really want to strengthen the connections and business opportunities and increase co-operation at the research and innovation level. The big thing this year is to get people travelling back and forth. We’re also working closely with the Canada Ireland Foundation, who are building a centre for culture, performance and heritage in Toronto in The Corleck Building. The highlight last summer was opening the consulate in Toronto. We opened the consulate in Vancouver five years ago. We’re getting stronger and that’s only going to help in terms of building the relationship between Ireland and Canada.

I was involved for 20 years in the Northern Ireland peace process, and if there’s one lesson from that it’s that history has a very long path. It shapes issues, it shapes our attitudes, and it explains things. Coming to any country, whether Korea, Israel or Canada, it’s about discovering how these countries evolved into what they are – you can’t understand a country without looking at the history. Imagine going to Ireland and trying to understand it without ever reading the history – it wouldn’t work. You couldn’t understand our attitudes to land, emigration, politics without knowing some of the context. I joke that I think sometimes Canadians think Canada was invented by Pierre Trudeau, that nothing ever happened before, like it just popped out with the flag and devotion to international law and human rights, but in fact, Canadian history is long and fascinating.

There are huge opportunities here in Canada. Irish people who come here do really well. They have an amazing work ethic, they’re flexible, committed, creative and productive. I would advise anyone to come prepared, particularly financially. It can take longer than you think to get established. Province by province, the administrations are different – healthcare, for example, is administered on a provincial basis. Get in touch with ICAN, the Irish Canadian Immigration Centre in Toronto who operate across Canada, to get advice. Don’t get isolated, reach out and engage with Irish organisations. Don’t underestimate the challenges. Once you’ve got those firmly in perspective and have contacts and the wherewithal, it’ll be great. Do your research and engage with people who’ve been here – you’ll find a network willing to help you.