French-Canadians came to Quebec in the 1600’s and were farmers. Many Irish Catholics migrated to North America in the late 1840’s following the Irish Potato Famine.
Some of these Irish farmers were considered "redundant labor" or "surplus population" by their landlords and were "assisted emigration". The Canadian ships were primarily engaged in transporting lumber to Europe and offered cheap passage to Canada for human ballast. When the 1803 U.S. Passenger Act reduced the number of people U.S. bound boats could carry, fares to America more than doubled, while costs of going to Canada stayed low. So, while we think of Irish immigrants coming to New York, Boston, Philadelphia, etc. many came to Quebec. While some stayed in Canada, most crossed the border to America, lived in our industrial cities, worked on the canals and railroads, etc.
An estimated 74,000 people arrived in 1847 at the Grosse Ile quarantine station – an island in the St. Lawrence River, 30 miles East of Quebec City. After a 5-6 week journey, the immigrants were weak with hunger, and ravaged with many diseases, particularly typhus. O’Gallagher reports that typically, 40-50 people died each day at Grosse Ile and were buried in mass graves. There were few reports, but from May 10-July 24, it was reported that 4500 died – 1458 men, women, and children in the hospital, 2366 on ships from Great Britain, 721 on ships at Grosse Ile, and 27 in tents near the healthy. Again, O’Gallagher reports that nearly 1000 immigrant orphans were left at Montreal, with other large numbers at Quebec, Kingston, Toronto, and other towns. A priest’s register of 619 children at an orphanage in Quebec shows their age, entry date, boat, parent’s names, Irish town, and who adopted them. Many were adopted by French-Canadians. Per Paul Milner, when after the famine, the U.S. passenger lines ads showed that 30% of passengers to Canada died vs. 6% for passengers to the United States, only the poorest had to go to Canada.
In the second half of the 1800’s New England mill owner’s recruited immigrants to come to America for a better life. By 1900, nearly half of New England’s textile-mill workers were French Canadian men, women, and children. To protect their culture, these immigrants built separate French speaking churches, parochial schools, businesses, newspapers, etc. When I grew up in New Hampshire, my town had a French Catholic church and an Irish Catholic church. My parent’s marriage in the late 1930’s of an Irish Catholic man and a French Canadian Catholic woman was considered a "mixed" marriage. Much of this changed after World War II, the French Canadians were no longer able to keep a separate French-speaking society. Today – 60 years later, I am not even sure that a "mixed" marriage between a Catholic and another religion would be noticed by most people. And now, because of the shortage of priests in New England, many French and Irish churches are being combined into a single parish.