Thomas D’Arcy McGee

Born in Ireland in 1825, McGee moved to the United States at the age of seventeen, and quickly distinguished himself as an outstanding journalist.

He returned to Ireland in 1845, joined the Young Ireland movement, and participated in the abortive 1848 rising against Britain. Later that year, he escaped to America, where he proudly proclaimed himself a republican revolutionary and traitor to the British Crown. However, he rapidly became disillusioned with anti-Irish and anti-Catholic sentiments in the United States, and in 1851 embraced a deeply conservative form of Catholicism.

Convinced that Irish Catholics were much better off in Canada than in the United States, he moved to Montreal in 1857, where he launched the New Era newspaper, and became a Member of Parliament.

In Canada, McGee supported separate schools for Catholics, fought against both the militant Protestant Orange Order and the Irish revolutionary Fenian movement, and became an early, energetic and eloquent supporter of Confederation.

He advocated a “new nationality,” characterized by western expansion, economic growth, protective tariffs, a distinctly Canadian literature, and the entrenchment of minority rights. His uncompromising attacks on the Fenians alienated a significant section of his Irish Catholic constituency, and resulted in his assassination in Ottawa in 1868.