--March 3, 2025.
On Sunday, March 2, over a hundred people – from as far away as Ireland, P.E.I., North Carolina, and Vancouver – joined QAHN live on Zoom, Facebook Live, and YouTube for our Ireland in Quebec livestream.
A special edition within QAHN’s 2025 Heritage Talks series celebrating the trailblazers of Quebec’s English-speaking heritage sector, we showcased three organizations working to preserve the memory of Quebec’s Irish history and culture across the province, and finished the afternoon with a set of live music from Montreal multi-instrumentalist Dave Gossage.
In their live interview, Joseph Lonergan and Bryan O’Gallagher from Irish Heritage Quebec shared stories Marianna O’Gallagher (1929-2010), their organization’s founder and her decades-long efforts to document Quebec City’s Irish community and honour the memory of the Irish who perished of typhus at the former quarantine station on Grosse-Île while fleeing the Great Famine in Ireland in the 1840s.
Fergus Keyes from Montreal’s Irish Monument Foundation gave us the Montreal side of this tragic chapter of Canadian history, while also providing us with an update on recent developments in efforts to create a memorial park around the iconic Black Rock monument in Griffintown to honour Montreal’s Famine and typhus victims and the many Montrealers who bravely came to their aid.
We then followed the Ottawa River until the road ends where we met with Lorna Brennan and Joann McCann of the brand-new Sheenboro Archives in the Pontiac. They told us all about Sheenboro’s musical, lumbering, and farming traditions and their work to preserve local heritage with a new archive. Lorna’s brother Jack who had stopped in for a visit, surprised us all by treating us all to a verse of the local song “The Sheenboro Way.”
The afternoon concluded with a visit to the Zoom pub, where Montreal’s flute and tin whistle virtuoso Dave Gossage floored us all with a set of haunting and gorgeous slow airs and lively reels and jigs.
Audience members were clearly moved by the presentations and music. Many contributed their own detailed reminiscences of how Marianna O’Gallagher had impacted their lives, expressed their admiration for the work of the Irish Monument Foundation and Sheenboro Archives, shared stories of their Irish heritage, and expressed how touching they found Dave Gossage’s music. Over 1,200 people had viewed the broadcast on Facebook by the following afternoon and hundreds of comments were left across our three broadcast channels.
QAHN thanks all who participated and wishes all its members a happy Green Season and St. Patrick’s Day.
Our next talk in the 2025 Heritage Talks series, "Seeding Black Community Development," with Dorothy Williams will take place on Thursday, March 6, at 7 p.m. For information on this program, or to view the complete 2025 program, click here!