A four-year-old girl called Mary McAleese died on board the Tamarch which sailed from Liverpool on May 26th, 1847, and arrived at Grosse Ile on July 11th. "I cannot help wondering if this little girl might not have been a relative of my own children," the President, Mrs McAleese, told the 100 people gathered on the former quarantine island on the St Lawrence river, where thousands of Irish are buried, yesterday afternoon.
Grosse Ile, 2.5km long by 0.8km wide and 48km downstream from Quebec City, was recently constituted a national park. One old fever shed and the disinfectant station have been preserved, and a huge stone Celtic Cross, the Irish Memorial, has been erected.
The President and Dr Martin McAleese and the Minister of State for Foreign Affairs, Ms Liz O'Donnell, and their party arrived by helicopter and were shown around the island by the Minister for Canadian Heritage, Ms Sheila Copps, and the local MP and Secretary of State for Food and Agriculture, Mr Gilbert Normand. Music was provided by the Irish Descendants, a band from Nova Scotia.
Opened as a quarantine station in the 1830s, it was the scene of more than 5,000 deaths from ship fever or cholera among Irish emigrants during the famine years.
On Saturday Mrs McAleese laid a wreath at the Celtic cross monument in Saint John, New Brunswick, remembering the 2,000 who died on the nearby quarantine station, Partridge Island.
It is the Thanksgiving holiday weekend in Canada, but for the Irish party, after a week of celebrating the new, modern, successful Ireland, it was a time for remembering the tragedy of the 1840s. Mrs McAleese, in a series of speeches, reminded her audiences of the pitiful state of those arriving on the famine ships and the compassion that greeted them in this part of North America.
In Canada, Mrs McAleese said, Orange and Green reached out to each other and put the past behind them. Their successful experience of power-sharing was an example to the peacemakers of today. The Irish who fled from the famine were pitiable, fever-ridden and dangerous, a burden in their poor health and impoverishment.
But those who survived stayed in Canada because life moved on and there was hope. Many of those she addressed at functions in Saint John were the descendants of the 15,000 Irish who arrived in the town of 30,000 inhabitants during the famine.
The President's host on Saturday night was the beleaguered Solicitor General of Canada, Mr Andy Scott, the regional minister for New Brunswick. Mr Scott is accused by opposition politicians of prejudicing an ongoing inquiry into alleged use of excessive force by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police against protesters during a visit to Vancouver nearly a year ago by President Suharto of Indonesia.
Following the disclosure of details of a private conversation between Mr Scott and a friend on an airline flight, in which he is alleged to have said the outcome of the inquiry was a foregone conclusion, the Solicitor General has been under constant pressure to resign. On Saturday night he drew applause from the guests by saying how extremely pleased he was to be with them.
In her speech, Mrs McAleese offered support without referring to the controversy. Praising the Minister of State for Foreign Affairs, Ms O'Donnell - who is accompanying her for the second week of her state visit - for the work she had done to secure the Belfast Agreement, the President said politicians got very little thanks for all the work they did, only the "barbed comment".
They didn't work for praise and they didn't get it, but we wouldn't be where we were today but for politicians and we should give thanks to our political leaders for our well-being.
Mrs McAleese spoke of the association of her predecessor, Douglas Hyde, with Saint John, where he worked for a number of years. She also attended a reception in the local museum, where a large painting titled The Vice Regal Lodge, Phoenix Park, Dublin, by an unknown artist circa 1840, is on display.