The Irish of the Ottawa Valley

One cannot practice law in the Ottawa Valley for nearly four decades without taking the Irish into account. They fill, disproportionately, the ranks of lawyers in Ottawa and the Valley towns, but they also punch well above their weight in the police forces, business, and the arts. In my day, I would guess, easily a third of all lawyers and judges were alumni of St. Patrick’s College.

Bright, sharp, witty, eloquent, clever, passionate, living high and living hard, they ensured that every court appearance was an event, a performance, a memory, part of the legend. If you were their friend they would cross Hell to rescue you, but if you betrayed them, then they would cross Hell to settle things.

Their forebears first were navvies building the Rideau Canal in the early 1800s, blasting through the granite of the Canadian Shield, dying by the hundreds of malaria in summer and of bitter cold in the winter, the survivors sending home to bring family over to the promised land. The Irish poured into the Valley by their thousands on promises of rich farmland.

But when the forests were cleared they found mostly swamp, rock, and thin soil whose fertility vanished after a few decades. Today, in the quiet back corners of Mount St. Patrick, Brudenell, Letterkenny, and O’Grady Settlement, the old homesteads can be seen along the back roads, long since abandoned amongst tumbled outbuildings and overgrown laneways, descendants all gone to the cities.

For generations these hardy people raised families of twelve, fifteen, sometimes eighteen, instilled in them a fierce work ethic, and insisted they become educated. And by their thousands, they did just that, through the parochial schools, St. Pat’s, and off to Toronto or Montreal to learn a profession. The Ottawa Valley Irish became the backbone of the legal, medical, and of course clerical professions not just of the Valley, but of much of the province. I recall often opening a copy of the Ontario Reports wherein the Justices of the Supreme Court were listed, noting that often as many as one half were Ottawa Valley Irish.

I also recall a business meeting with a high-powered executive in Toronto in which he exploded with a roar of, “Bullshit!”. I twigged to his pronunciation of “bull”, not as in “full”, but as in “dull”. After the meeting was over I asked him from what part of the Valley he hailed. “Calumet Island! How did you know?” “When you said ‘bullshit’ like that,” I responded. Once a Valley boy, always a Valley boy. But the moral of the story is that this farmboy had gone to the big city and created a business which gave him an imperial mansion in the Muskokas and a Bentley to get him there.

Of course, with national television and YouTube and all of our apps, our regionalisms and our local lilts are fading away. Rarely will one hear anymore the common language of my youth, “I took the cayows aouta de bairn an drove em up de loin.”, which is to say took the cows out of the barn and drove them up the line, which is further to say, upriver. Ottawa’s Irish, like all the rest of us, are being assimilated.

But not on St. Patrick’s Day, 2025.

Go raibh míle maith agat. May you have a thousand good things.