Flight from Famine

This is the moving story of the mass migration that brought a million Irish men and women to Canada in the first half of the nineteenth century. After leaving conditions so bad that one witness described how “they wandered into towns and died in the streets,” many arrived penniless, hoping to “make good” in the new world. In one tragic year, 5,000 died at sea and another 5,400 got no farther than a grave on Grosse Île. But, despite the countless daily hardships facing settlers in a harsh new land, by the time of Confederation the Irish were the second-largest ethnic group after the French.