On St Patrick’s Day in 1901, the St Ann’s Young Men Society mounted their annual play at Théâtre Monument-National. Irish Catholic families, especially from Griffintown – ‘a poor inner-city working-class neighbourhood’ in Montreal – packed the audience. The pride of Killarney, a melodrama, followed the life of Maurice O’Donnell. O’Donnell, an Irish gentleman, angered an English rival by winning the heart of a young Irish woman. To exact revenge, the rival led O’Donnell into a life of drinking and vice. However, the hero triumphed in the end. Evoking the Irish countryside and the virtues of protagonists with typically Irish names, the play marked a symbolic return to a romanticised Ireland. More, the production synthesised a simplified, yet aspirational, Irishness performed not just on the stage, but as part of a wider projection of working-class Irish Catholic identity in Griffintown and Montreal (pp 40–45).
While there is a significant historiography on Irish immigrants in nineteenth-century Montreal, Matthew Barlow’s Griffintown concentrates on the interconnection of memory and Irish Catholic identity since 1900. The book argues that, despite the neighbourhood’s always diverse population, representations of Ireland and Irish culture remained central to both the lived and imagined Griffintown (pp 7–8). In doing so, it draws on the work of cultural geographers and the critical scholarships on memory, performativity, and diasporas. ‘Memory work’ – defined as presentations of cultural memory – is the book’s operative concept (p. 11). Barlow asserts that memory work is embedded in social and cultural processes, as well as rooted in place. Therefore, the creation of a ‘usable past’ had a distinctive character in Griffintown. Barlow stresses that working-class residents actively shaped the process (pp 14, 18). The study will appeal to readers interested in memory and ethno-religious identity, as well as the history of the Irish diaspora.
The book progresses chronologically, following three narrative arcs. The first story is about an Irish Catholic neighbourhood forged in the 1900s–1920s; the second focuses on the dissolution of the community in the 1930s–1960s; the third traces the projection onto Griffintown of an imagined history of Irishness in the 1990s–2000s. The three parts of the book offer rather different approaches to the study of memory, though Barlow does little to highlight the divergence. In the first phase, the analysis concerns working-class identity formation. In the second period, oral history is used to reconstruct the character of everyday social life. In the final phase, the book provides a critical reading of nostalgia-tinged commemoration.
The early chapters are the most effective. Blending social and cultural history, they reveal the popular politics and cultural production of working-class residents. Barlow argues that, if the Irish-Catholic proportion of the population declined, residents ensured that Griffintown continued to be seen as Irish (pp 25–7). Chapter one focuses on the activities of the Ancient Order of Hibernians (a fraternal society) and the St Ann’s Young Men Society (a parish organisation), as well of the annual St Patrick’s Day parade. An essentialised Irishness was repeatedly articulated and reinforced (p. 48). During and following the First World War, as Chapter two traces, residents expressed dual Canadian and Irish loyalties. Neither identity was uncomplicated. If numerous men volunteered to serve in the Irish Canadian Rangers, some Irish Catholics opposed conscription (pp 49, 66–70). Moreover, amid a radicalisation of Irish politics, Irish Montrealers diverged on whether to call for home rule or demand Irish republicanism (pp 73–5). In the 1920s, diaspora politics in Montreal became more muted and the St Patrick’s Day parade shrunk in size and importance, suggesting an extenuation of Irish Catholic identity (p. 80). Taken together, these chapters demonstrate the grassroots memory work that went into forging working-class Irish Catholic identity.
The middle chapters, which draw on oral history, are the least persuasive. Chapter three offers a sketch of popular social life. It insists that residents retained a sense of community despite population decline, deindustrialisation, and transformations in the built environment. Barlow maintains that the St Ann’s church, and its parochial organisations, were central to Irish Catholic community (pp 84–6, 94–5). Chapter four discusses postwar urban redevelopment and goings-on in the parish. Strikingly, ‘Irishness’ is scarcely a theme of these chapters. Barlow does go partway in explaining this absence. Intriguingly, he argues that Irish Catholics assimilated into a generalised Anglo-Montreal identity in the 1950s and 1960s (p. 85). This contention is not sufficiently sustained with evidence, though. Barlow’s repeated proclamation of Griffintown’s coming ‘death’ is grating (e.g., p. 105). Here, the author adopts the language of urban ecology, a model (originating in the 1920s work of sociologist Robert Park) comparing the city to the body and the natural world. Martial metaphors, like the recurring insistence that Griffintown was ‘under assault’ from an ‘infrastructure onslaught’, are also prominent (pp 87, 91, 121). The figurative language focuses attention on the physical landscape, and the net effect is to reify a place called Griffintown. However, the parish-based attachments described in these chapters unsettle Barlow’s insistence on Griffintown as the unit of analysis. If the book foregrounds a story of Irish-Canadian neighbourhood ‘death’, a subtler counter-narrative of outmigration and declining church attendance in an Irish Catholic parish in Montreal is also evident.
Chapter five shifts attention to memorialisation. Through a critical analysis of oral histories, it argues that former residents contributed to a re-Irishification of Griffintown in vernacular memory (pp 144, 153). Barlow works to trouble the essentialist portrait, but also suggests that the popular effort to insist on Griffintown as the Irish neighbourhood in Montreal largely succeeded (p. 185). For a book titled Griffintown, only the memory work in this last chapter is definitively ‘Griffintown’-specific. Yet the ways in which civic working-class Irish Catholic identity, parish-based social memory, and neighbourhood commemoration overlapped speaks to some of the book’s complexity.
Engagingly, and to his credit, Barlow situates himself relative to his text. He has been involved in commemorating the neighbourhood and opposing its gentrification (p. x). While he distinguishes his study of public memory formation from participation in that same process (p. 148), he still expresses ambivalence over change and concern over the loss of Griffintown’s memory (p. 192). An example of active history, Griffintown certainly walks a line between historical scholarship and invoking the memory of one neighbourhood.
