Free Quebec - Irish Immigration?

[PuffyClouds]

So Canada becomes a sovereign country after the American Revolution, and gets at least the territory of Upper Canada. When the Potato Blight hits Ireland, will the Canadiens welcome Catholic Irish to help settle the rest of their territory? How many do you think will come in?

 

[Steno]

I imagine the Canadiens wouldn’t be opposed to more Catholics though I’m not sure many Irish would choose a mainly French-speaking nation over the English United States. I guess it might depend on language vs religion.

 

[FillyofDelphi]

It probably mostly depends on where the job opportunities are.

 

[funnyhat]

Québec received a large number of Irish immigrants IOTL. It's said that 30 to 40 % of Québécois have some Irish ancestors. (Many changed their names into French ones, so Reilly became Riel, Sullivan became Sylvain...) So there is no reason to doubt that the same would hold in TTL.

 

[PuffyClouds]

Over one hundred thousand came to OTL Canada as a result of the Famine.

There might also be an initial pulse of emigres fleeing the Irish Rebellion of 1798 to create a founder community.

 

[Gabingston]

This could be important for me to know too, since I am doing a timeline on a French colonized Australia, and I need and idea on how many Irish would show up during the potato famine. I'm thinking of having the first gold rush during the same time period, and I am not just doing that to wank French Australia, but because it'd take a few decades to find gold anyway.

 

[PuffyClouds]

In a 2011 thread from @Hierophant titled Get the Irish to Quebec? the user archeogeek stated

The irish were largely catholic.
IOTL there was a rather large irish immigration to lower canada.
It also tended to adopt french more often than not, finding more affinity with the canadiens than the canadians; some of the better known french canadian authors were irish-descended.

There are only about half a million self-identified irish Quebecers (most are french speakers), but according to a few historians about 40% of the province's french population has at least one irish ancestor.

There's a historian who actually tracked down historical patronymic changes: the nationalist PM during the 1995 referendum came from one of the quebecois-irish families: Bourque used to be Burke. A bunch of old-root french canadian last names are french transcriptions of gaelic or anglo-irish surnames that eventually get replaced.

Alternately national identity of french and english are not particularly clear at times; for example you have a largely-french speaking subclass of immigrants from Jersey who were known, because of their origin in a crown possession, as "english", and were generally seen as opportunists and rural masters.

That said, the majority did leave for the west.