{"id":681046,"date":"2026-05-20T03:21:16","date_gmt":"2026-05-20T03:21:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/681046\/"},"modified":"2026-05-20T03:21:16","modified_gmt":"2026-05-20T03:21:16","slug":"opinion-how-moving-to-french-speaking-montreal-brought-me-back-to-the-irish-language","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/681046\/","title":{"rendered":"Opinion: How moving to French-speaking Montreal brought me back to the Irish language"},"content":{"rendered":"

This article was originally published by the Irish Times<\/a> and is shared here with permission. <\/p>\n

Fifty years ago I left\u00a0Belfast\u00a0for\u00a0Canada, and like most Irish I landed in the English-speaking part of the country. However, after three years, in 1978, I moved to francophone Montreal.<\/p>\n

My new city was love at first sight. This helped me to brush aside Quebec\u2019s \u201cnation once again\u201d fervour and its new language law. I embraced French and it embraced me right back. By keeping my ears open and parroting back what I heard, I quickly became fairly fluent.<\/p>\n

Two years after I arrived, on May 20, 1980, 60 per cent of voters in the first Quebec referendum chose to stay within Canada<\/a>. Despite this reassuring outcome, all of my non-francophone colleagues in the cigarette factory resigned and left Quebec.<\/p>\n

By early 1981, as the only remaining \u201canglo\u201d in the factory\u2019s 800 employees, semi-jokingly I\u2019d refer to myself as \u201cthe last of the Mohicans.\u201d<\/p>\n

It seemed ironic to me that back home in Gallaher\u2019s Tobacco Company, Belfast, as a \u201cwee Fenian,\u201d I was less a minority than I was here, as a \u201cwee anglo.\u201d<\/p>\n

With separation off the menu, French acquired a new importance as the cornerstone of Quebec identity. Thanks to my progress in French (and I suspect my Irish roots), I was well-accepted in the factory.<\/p>\n

But even a love of French couldn\u2019t save my job as quality manager in Canada\u2019s vicious 1992 recession.<\/p>\n

By now in my early 40s, as an \u201canglo\u201d and immigrant in francophone Quebec, I feared my employability wasn\u2019t great.<\/p>\n

To give me an edge in the jobs market, I decided to write, in French, an article about quality management, something I was (and still am) passionate about.<\/p>\n

Without a computer, word processing, translation or spellcheck software, producing the 600-word article took about three hours per day for a month. Once ready, I submitted it to a francophone daily newspaper that, amazingly, published it.<\/p>\n

The article helped me into a new job and career as an ISO 9000 consultant with the Quebec government\u2019s productivity research centre. My very francophone manager told me my article had won him over; it showed I understood that French was a pillar of Quebec identity.<\/p>\n

Returning to Montreal, reunited with French, I felt more complete.<\/p>\n

By now, French had already become part of my own sense of identity. I had discovered this during an ill-fated attempt to settle back in Belfast. Despite finding a job and somewhere to stay, I missed French, its sounds and its warmth. Returning to Montreal, reunited with French, I felt more complete.<\/p>\n

Recently I took another big step outside the English language. In 2025 I registered for a six-month Irish-language course at the department of Irish studies at Concordia University. I felt some trepidation about this. After all, in my school years Irish was even more incomprehensible than French. However, in Montreal, my success with French gave me the courage to have another go at Gaeilge.<\/p>\n

It was amazing. In the first three-hour class I had learned more Irish than I had in three years at St Mary\u2019s in Belfast. Surprisingly soon I knew enough to show my neighbours that Irish is a language, not a dialect of English, and that \u201canglo\u201d label didn\u2019t do me justice.<\/p>\n

Most of all, I no longer experience the shame of not being able to back up my claim to Irishness with a few words of Irish.<\/p>\n

If French made me more complete, Irish has taken me further along that path. It would be very strange if it hadn\u2019t.<\/p>\n

I am learning more Irish each day, and while I may never get to fluency, I am enjoying making my way toward it.<\/p>\n

So that\u2019s the story of how emigration, Montreal and French led me back to Irish and, I believe, to a more complete version of my own wee self.<\/p>\n

Patrick McKenna is a Belfast-born retired chemist and educator.<\/p>\n

\t\tEditor\u2019s Picks\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This article was originally published by the Irish Times and is shared here with permission. Fifty years ago…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":681047,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[49,48,295,66],"class_list":["post-681046","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-environment","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-environment","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/681046","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=681046"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/681046\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/681047"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=681046"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=681046"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=681046"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}