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Book on immigration to Canada republished
By Noreen Bowden | August 20, 2009
A revised edition of a 1991 book detailing Famine-era migration from Ireland to Canada has just been published. “Flight from Famine: The Coming of the Irish to Canada” was written by Donald MacKay.
In an interview with the Chronicle Herald, the author says that he was inspired to write the book on a visit to Ireland, when he realised that the Famine emigration was a seldom-discussed topic.
“We were in Ireland one summer in the late 1980s and we had noticed that nobody ever talked much about the famines and the migrations. We couldn’t find much about those events and my wife said I should write a book about them.”
Journalist Lorna Inness continues:
As he noted in the epilogue to the revised edition, the general atmosphere of silence, both here and in Ireland, has changed over the past 20 years.
In 1995, then-president Mary Robinson, speaking to the Irish Parliament, broke “the great silence” and the result was “almost as if a barrier had dropped . . . on both sides of the Atlantic.”
Read the articles on the Chronicle Herald website:
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