YYZ Why?: Ireland Park is Toronto’s memorial to the Irish Famine

Located off the beaten path at the foot of Bathurst Street and Queens Quay West in downtown Toronto, Ireland Park is the principal memorial to the Irish Famine experience in the city.

The focal point of the park is five bronze statues representing the “arrival” of the starving Irish in Canada.

The sculptor, Rowan Gillespie, first created seven bronze sculptures displayed in Dublin, Ireland to depict Irish Famine migrants making their way to embark upon their journey to a new land.

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Gillespie later produced five figures for the opening of Ireland Park in 2007 to represent those migrants who landed, but not without incredible hardships.

From seven figures in Dublin to five figures in Toronto, this symbolizes the loss of life experienced by the Irish through the 1840s.

“The actual arrival site would have been on the docks on Front Street at that time — around Peter Street, Simcoe Street, that is where the fever sheds were.

All the immigrants that came to Toronto were put into the fever sheds because a lot of them would have had these diseases: Cholera and Typhoid,” said Toronto historian Bruce Bell, noting many Irish migrants died.

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“There was about 1,000 people who died just in 1847 alone,” said Bell.

Almost 40,000 Irish Famine migrants arrived in 1847 when the population of Toronto was around 20,000.

Starving and in many cases sick or having experienced the loss of a loved one, there were still more obstacles ahead for Toronto’s Irish.

“Because we were then a very British Protestant society, they (Irish-Catholic migrants) weren’t allowed to actually live in the city itself,” said Bell.

“They had to go live on the outskirts — Cabbagetown and Corktown — but back then, that would have been a vast slum of 30,000 people shoved into a few small streets.”

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The bronze statues at Ireland Park are upsetting to look at and that’s the point: a gaunt man with his arms raised at the prospect of Toronto in front of him, a woman collapsed in the final moments of life, a pregnant woman with hands around her belly to symbolize new life.

Further to the west part of the park, a massive sculptural rock-face of black, Kilkenny limestone stands with the names of 675 famine migrants who died in Toronto in 1847 are carved into the openings of the rock.

But Bell said you don’t have to be of Irish descent to appreciate the memorial and relate to the story.

“This memorial speaks to all of us as Canadians. So many of us are children of migrants and are migrants ourselves,” he said.