Welcome to The Irish in Canada, the podcast exploring the lives and legacies of Irish immigrants and their Canadian descendants.
Join Jane McGaughey for a season of short, informative episodes about a kind of Canadian history you may never have heard before…
Season 2, Episode 6 - The Body of Mary Boyd
April 6, 2023
To end our second season, Jane is revealing some of her exclusive research from the Gender, Migration & Madness Project: the mystery surrounding the death of Mary Boyd. Mary was an Irish Quebecer who found work as a young maid in a Toronto doctor’s household in 1868. But the circumstances surrounding her suicide only a few months later caused a major scandal in the city about sex, virginity, pregnancy, medical experimentation, mental illness, and the immense power men had over women’s bodies. NB – This episode contains graphic discussions of mental illness, sexual assault, and suicide. Listener discretion is advised.
Listen →Season 2, Episode 5 - The Execution of Thomas Scott
March 30, 2023
Few people in Canadian history have created more division than Louis Riel. At the time of his death in 1885, he had been found guilty of high treason, but even the jury who condemned him agreed that something else in Riel’s past was why he was killed: the execution of Thomas Scott. Who was Thomas Scott? Why was he executed in Winnipeg during the Red River Resistance, and why did Riel feel fifteen years later that he was going to be hanged because of an Irishman? NB – This episode contains explicit language
Listen →Season 2, Episode 4 - The Battle of the Windmill
March 23, 2023
Wild hogs eating corpses on a battlefield, women shot in the face, Irish soldiers strung up by their heels and mutilated, hangings, deportations, and ghosts… Does this sound like Canada to you? Despite appearances of gentility in Upper Canada, the Battle of the Windmill was anything but – and for a Canadian battle, it was chock-full of Irishmen. At the tiny hamlet of New Wexford in November 1838, all sorts of horrible things happened; this week, we’re talking all about it.
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