Grosse Isle

Of the remaining Protestant quarter, most of them would have been Anglican.

So when you look at the monies, the funds that remained at the quarantine station in Grosse Ile or at the Port of Quebec, it gives you a sense that people were coming with some resources, with some money.

People would have looked at them in the streets of Quebec City, for example, or in the streets of Montreal and thought they looked like down and outs, but they were not the poorest people.

In Ireland, it wasn't quite that simple.

But there is no doubt that it could be a very uncomfortable and frustrating journey for many people, especially, of course, those in steerage jobs.

Yeah, but of course, that was only one part of the experience.

Grosse Ile in the St. Lawrence River above Quebec was a quarantine station, which tens of thousands of immigrants passed through and where thousands died.

Tell us a little bit about the role of the island and what the experience was like for those who arrived there.

Yeah,

now, of course, there is a lot of family links and the famine ship that used to go from near Tralee went to Grosse Ile in Canada.

And I remember during the fisheries dispute when there was Minister Tobin over there, all the Canadian flags with the Dingle fishermen.

Having said that, I'm kind of wondering where Ursula von der Leyen is going with this, what discussion she has ever had beforehand.

We are once more underway and floating up the river with the tide.

Grosse Isle is just five and twenty miles below Quebec.

A favorable breeze would carry us up in a few hours.

As it is, we can only make a little way by tacking from side to side when we lose the tide.

So the documents we got in 2011 gave us back the names of the families, gave us back the number 1490 on those ship lists.

I suppose in 2014, as part of the commemoration, we engraved those names on a glass wall in Strokes John Park that mirrored the glass wall in Grosse Ile in Canada, where our people had landed before they scattered all across North America.

And we then, when that was unveiled in 2014, we began to wonder what their last journey on Irish soil had been like.

In 2015, a small group of us, we had discovered that they had walked the back roads to Clondrave, which is about 20 kilometres, and then the entire length of the Royal Canal, which would have been the motorway of its day, a further 145 kilometres to Dublin, where they reached the quayside and boarded four boats for Liverpool and onward to Quebec.

And I was actually on holidays in Spain at the time.

And our very first VC, we realized we could work really, really well together.

So we decided that maybe we'd look at one pair of bronze shoes for Grosse Ile.

You know, it was to be a small project.