Irish Settlement of Newfoundland
Seven English colonies were established by royal charter in Newfoundland between 1610 and 1628, and London-based mercantile companies used Celtic-speaking peasants to settle each one. The colonists were primarily Welsh peasants but there were also many Irish peasants who usually only spoke Irish. The language was commonly spoken in rural areas until the mid-20th century. There is evidence to suggest that as many as 90% of the Irish immigrants to Newfoundland in the 17th and 18th centuries only spoke Irish.
Court records show that defendants often required Irish-speaking interpreters, which indicates that the dominant language in many areas of the Avalon Peninsula was Irish rather than English. Ecclesiastical documents bolster this case; for example, in the mid-1760s a Methodist missionary named Reverend Laurence Coughlan converted virtually the whole North Shore to Methodism. Observers credited the success of his evangelical revival at Carbonear and Harbour Grace to the fact that he was fluently bilingual in English and Irish. The Roman Catholic bishops also realized the importance of Irish-speaking priests - in letters to Dublin, Bishop James Louis O'Donel requested a Franciscan missionary for the parishes of St. Mary's and Trepassey, indicating that it was absolutely necessary that he should speak Irish.
Read more about this topic: Newfoundland Irish
Famous quotes containing the words irish and/or settlement:
“For every nineteenth-century middle-class family that protected its wife and child within the family circle, there was an Irish or a German girl scrubbing floors in that home, a Welsh boy mining coal to keep the home-baked goodies warm, a black girl doing the family laundry, a black mother and child picking cotton to be made into clothes for the family, and a Jewish or an Italian daughter in a sweatshop making “ladies” dresses or artificial flowers for the family to purchase.”
—Stephanie Coontz (20th century)
“The Settlement ... is an experimental effort to aid in the solution of the social and industrial problems which are engendered by the modern conditions of life in a great city. It insists that these problems are not confined to any one portion of the city. It is an attempt to relieve, at the same time, the overaccumulation at one end of society and the destitution at the other ...”
—Jane Addams (1860–1935)