St. Michael’s Basilica in Toronto, built by Irish bricklayers. The author worked here for a year as an electrician on a major renovation. Photo by BriYYZ/Flickr.

It’s St. Patrick’s Day again. Time for another round of green beer, ridiculous grinning leprechauns, and people puking in the streets. Green beads, sparkly clover hats, and Guinness. Did you know that the St. Patrick’s Day parade in Toronto was actually illegal until 1988? I grew up spending my elementary school years in a city that still tried to erase our presence—this Orange Protestant stronghold they called “Toronto the Good.”

Today, the parade exists—and in many ways, it’s a lively, joyful celebration. I usually march with my trade union, and it’s mostly green with a little bit of orange. The music is mostly Irish, but besides the Irish performers, the organizers include participants from other ethnicities. This year there were steel pan drums, mariachi bands, and a dragon dance. It’s a festive scene, and if you’ve been part of it, you know why people love it.

The parade reflects what St. Patrick’s Day in Toronto could be—a truly inclusive, politically aware celebration of Irish history—if the event weren’t still so constrained. Solidarity organization Irish4Palestine was barred from marching this year, despite the long-standing history of Irish-Palestinian solidarity. Anything deemed too political is excluded, and Irish republicanism is largely downplayed, leaving participants to present a safe, sanitized version of themselves on the streets.

Those of us who belong to the Irish diaspora here in Canada could call ourselves Irish-Canadians, but a hyphenated identity doesn’t resonate; it means nothing but some subset of Irish-American, an ethnicity made from the McDonald’s Shamrock Shake and green sparkles. It’s a state of being part of whiteness and empire and colonization and also not—set apart, only a half step away from the precipice.

In 1969, Bernadette Devlin, an Irish republican politician, visited the Irish diaspora community in the United States at the height of the civil rights movement. She famously said:

I was not very long there until, like water, I found my own level. ‘My people’–the people who knew about oppression, discrimination, prejudice, poverty and the frustration and despair that they produce–were not Irish Americans. They were black, Puerto Ricans, Chicanos. And those who were supposed to be ‘my people,’ the Irish Americans who knew about English misrule and the Famine and supported the civil rights movement at home, and knew that Partition and England were the cause of the problem, looked and sounded to me like Orangemen. They said exactly the same things about blacks that the loyalists said about us at home. In New York I was given the key to the city by the mayor, an honor not to be sneezed at. I gave it to the Black Panthers.

The Irish occupy a peculiar place in Canada. The Montréal Irish have a better sense of themselves than we Ontario Irish descendants. The Montréal Irish have to, living where they do at the intersection of the old English Canadian elite and the Québécois. We descendants of the Potato Famine, who are historically Catholic, are mostly English-speaking, but we know that English was forced upon us, and we shared a religion and a place in society with the French-Canadians (Québécois, Acadians, Franco-Ontarians, and others).

The Fenian raids, in which Irish proto-republicans invaded British North America, were a key factor in rallying support for Canadian Confederation. And that’s where Irish history ends in official accounts in Canadian textbooks: the Potato Famine, the Fenian raids, and then nothing. But we are still here.

It’s not considered “cool” today to talk about your specific white ethnicity. We are expected to act as if whiteness erases all other differences. Are the Irish white? Maybe we are, or maybe the distinctions we once had have been washed out. But maybe not. My mom’s family settled on Ojibway land, near what is now Alderville First Nation. My dad’s family became fishermen in a mostly Acadian town on the edge of Prince Edward Island, all of which is Mi’gmaw land. We came to Canada and colonized Indigenous territory. We were used as settler shock troops on the edge of empire, sent to displace the people who lived there by the people who had starved and displaced us—even after everything done to us, largely by the Scots, who themselves had been colonized by the English.

Megan Kinch and her daughter at a prior year’s St. Patrick’s Day parade in Toronto. Photo supplied.

All this has serious political implications today. It’s relevant to the debates around Catholic schools, and to the difference between the old Canadian Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) party, which had roots among working-class people like my great uncle Jack—a dairy farm union leader—and the NDP, which has often failed at organizing working people. There are many lingering impacts: the Irish republican rap group Kneecap, for instance, is barred from entering Canada over its support for “terrorist organizations” (Hamas and Hezbollah), but most see this as craven punishment for the band’s pro-Palestinian solidarity.

We of Irish descent form one of the largest ethnic groups in the country, and we have a choice. We can choose to side with the oppressors. There are people who have sold out and become cops and joined the army, people among us who forgot our own language and put away our drums, and people who have worked for and continue to work for the same powerful forces that destroyed us. Sure, some people made it up through the ranks to the upper middle class, but, as in the case of all ethnic groups, the majority did not ascend that ladder.

The far-right wants us “old stock white Canadians” to form a united fascist front against racialized immigrants and Indigenous people. We’re supposed to ignore the major differences between how and why we came here and how we lived for decades—some people as rulers and some as indentured servants, then workers and “white trash.”

Our other option is to pick up the almost forgotten threads of our own ethnic struggle and fight in solidarity with the oppressed peoples of the world. It’s part of the lie of Canadian multiculturalism that you only fit in as long as you forget yourselves, as long as you don’t stir up past conflicts, as long as you remain complicit in the process of colonization, of stealing Indigenous land.

The choice I want us to make is to reconnect with our roots and our own historic struggles and remember our experience as an oppressed people. I want us to find the best parts of ourselves, to think about how we got here, on this land, what we did, and how to build for a better future.

And if you must drink on St. Patrick’s, give the green beer a pass and order a whiskey or a pint of Guinness from your local pub instead!

Megan Kinch is a union electrician and freelance writer living in Toronto. You can find her on X at @meganysta.

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