Flight from Famine: The Coming of the Irish to Canada - Softcover

MacKay, Donald

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1554884187 ISBN 13: 9781554884186

Publisher: Dundurn Press, 2009

Synopsis

Winner of the 1991 QSPELL Prize for Non-fiction

One of Canada’s founding peoples, the Irish arrived in the Newfoundland fishing stations as early as the seventeenth century. By the eighteenth century they were establishing farms and settlements from Nova Scotia to the Great Lakes. Then, in the 1840s, came the failures of Ireland’s potato crop, which people in the west of Ireland had depended on for survival. "And that," wrote a Sligo countryman, "was the beginning of the great trouble and famine that destroyed Ireland."

Flight from Famine is the moving account of a Victorian-era tragedy that has echoes in our own time but seems hardly credible in the light of Ireland’s modern prosperity. The famine survivors who helped build Canada in the years that followed Black ’47 provide a testament to courage, resilience, and perseverance. By the time of Confederation, the Irish population of Canada was second only to the French, and four million Canadians can claim proud Irish descent.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

“Terrific popular history....Death ships lurching across the Atlantic, epidemics raging in Quebec, Catholic-Protestant skirmishes in the Ottawa Valley, the body of Thomas D’Arcy McGee being paraded through packed Montreal streets....Flight from Famine is a testament to the resilience and courage of a community.”
–Montreal Gazette

From the Inside Flap:

Flight from Famine is the moving account of the survivors of the Irish potato famine who helped build Canada in the years that followed Black ’47. Their tale is a testament to courage, resilience, and perseverance, as well as an important chapter in the development of pre-Confederation Canada.

About this edition

• Publisher: Dundurn Press
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 1554884187
• ISBN 13: 9781554884186
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 368