Among the journalists following Mark Carney around Westport last weekend was one Kate McKenna of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. And while Carney was tracing his Irish heritage, I was guessing hers.
“Yes!” she said, when I correctly surmised she had roots in Co Monaghan. More specifically, in the northern half of it.
In fact, as I learned, she is one of the small, elite group of tourists who have visited Monaghan deliberately (as opposed to the ones who got lost on the way to somewhere else).
Now on a roll, however, I also anticipated with confidence that the “very Irish” part of Canada she had mentioned being from was Prince Edward Island (PEI). “Yes!” she said again, leaving me two for two and feeling smug.
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In fairness, for someone himself from the Oriel County, this did not require any great detective work. I may have exaggerated a little when telling Kate that PEI is “one of our more important overseas colonies”.
But uniquely, whereas Irish twinning arrangements are usually between towns or cities here and abroad, the whole of Monaghan is twinned with the province of PEI. This is because of extraordinary levels of emigration from the former to the latter in the early 19th century.
As for connecting the McKenna surname with north Monaghan, that came naturally.
Yes, the name has spread to many other parts of Ireland in modern times. Even so, the tribal heartland remains where it was in the days when Red Hugh O’Donnell stopped there. Red Hugh was limping back to Donegal after his spectacular jail-break from Dublin Castle in 1592, minus two toes lost to frostbite.
The Truagh Welcome, a bardic-style ballad composed to mark the occasion (and named for the now Border-adjacent parish where the McKenna clan was headquartered), praises the local chieftain’s hospitality to the fugitive via a series of rhetorical questions. The implied answer to all of these questions is “no”.
This passage is a case in point: “Shall the son of O’Donnell be cheerless and cold/While McKenna’s wide hearth hath a faggot to spare?/While O’Donnell is poor shall McKenna have gold/Or be clothed while a limb of O’Donnell is bare?”
More than two centuries later, in 1813, the song was still famous enough to be one of those Irish and Scottish ballads for which Beethoven wrote arrangements.
It was in 1830 that the first McKennas and other emigrants left Monaghan to start new lives in eastern Canada.
The catalyst was a Father Patrick Moynagh, who pioneered an assisted emigration scheme in the decade that followed, paying the costs himself. On one day alone, it’s said 850 people landed on the quays of PEI’s capital, Charlottetown.
The migrants were unusual, therefore, in leaving Ireland before the Famine. And it is perhaps ironic that PEI’s nicknames include “Spud Island”: a tribute to the fame in Canada of its potatoes, both in quantity (25 per cent of the country’s total) and quality.
That too has been the subject of a ballad: the 1969 folk song Bud the Spud, which immortalised the crop and the iron-rich red soil that produces it, via the character of a truck driver delivering the produce to market: “It’s Bud the spud from the bright red mud/Rolling down the highway smiling/The Spuds are big on the back of Bud’s rig/They’re from Prince Edward Island.”
To much of the world, meanwhile, PEI is known mainly for Anne of Green Gables, the 1908 novel by Lucy Montgomery.
This is especially true of Japan, where a 1954 translation of the book caught the public imagination and sent successive generations of Japanese tourists to PEI in the same way Heinrich Boll’s Irish Journal unleashed waves of German tourism here.
The novel’s eponymous orphan girl has red hair and, intriguingly, the surname Shirley, something she shares with one of Monaghan’s historically dominant landlords.
Any suggestions of Irishness seem to begin and end there. But while searching the archives about Montgomery, I accidentally learned something new about the name of a well-known Dublin pub, one of my locals.
In her journals, the writer at one point refers to her birthplace as “the old stand”: a footnote to which explains that this is “Irish slang: [meaning] home again, a common name given to pubs in Ireland and the US.”
Another thing PEI and Ireland have in common is that their capitals both have a Grafton Street. And speaking of pubs, the Charlottetown Grafton Street has several Irish ones in the vicinity.
So I’m going to go out on a limb again here and, attempting three from three, guess the identity of at least one ballad that has been sung there over the years.
Whatever about McKenna’s Welcome to Truagh, the Charlottetown pubs have surely reverberated on occasion to the words of another, later Monaghan bard: “On Grafton Street, in November/We tripped lightly along the ledge/Of a deep ravine, where can be seen/The worth of passion’s pledge.”
