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That polite silence on the history of the Irish in Canada has until now seemed entirely appropriate. In the 150 years since Confederation united the clashing provinces of British North America under a single constitution, Canada has emerged mostly as its founders anticipated, a nation open to all immigrants regardless of nationality, religion or culture.

In the words of Irish Catholic Thomas D’Arcy McGee, one of the Fathers of Confederation, spoken in November 1867 during the first session of Parliament on passage of the British North America Act, “This is the first Constitution ever given to a mixed people, in which the conscientious rights of the minority, are made a subject of formal guarantee … a guarantee by which we have carried the principle of equal and reciprocal toleration a step further in Canada than has been carried, in any other free government — American or European.”

Five months later, on April 4, 1868, McGee was shot in the back of the head outside his lodgings on Sparks Street in Ottawa in what today would be referred to as a terrorist assassination. He died just two blocks from where assorted Canadians of various nationalities will this weekend celebrate St. Patrick’s Day at at pub called D’Arcy McGee’s.

McGee’s assassins were members of the Fenian Brotherhood, extreme Irish nationalists whose various hallucinatory aims included a military takeover of Canada, mounted via an invasion of Irish revolutionaries from the United States, which would somehow force Britain to liberate Ireland. An invasion force did attack Canada in 1866, where 32 people died near Fort Erie in a military event known as the Battle of Ridgeway. The Brotherhood, formed in the U.S., spread to Canada in the 1850s and peaked as a threat in the 1860s, but became the foundation for the Irish Republican Army, whose murderous activities terrorized Britain for much of the 20th century.