According to Irish folk tradition, the earliest Irish visitor to Canada was St. Brendan, a monk and navigator who some historians say sailed to North America around 545 A.D. Irish immigration dates back to the early 1700s, but was relatively small until the Irish potato blight of 1845. Starvation, disease and centuries of brutal rule by England made many Irish people move to Canada.
During the 1840s and 1850s, many thousands of Irish people (immigrants) made their way to Canada in crowded, disease-ridden ships that took anywhere from 45 days to four months to cross the Atlantic. Many died on the ship or shortly after arriving in Canada. Typhus (really bad fever caused by lice) outbreaks took the lives of thousands, some of whom were buried in mass graves near Montreal and Quebec City. Many of the early Irish immigrants engaged in farming or worked as labourers on canal and railway projects. In what is now Alberta, approximately 20 percent of the early fur traders were Irish.
Today Canada is the home of approximately 3,800,000 Irish Canadians, 461,000 of whom live in Alberta.
)
