Irish Newfoundlanders

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Irish Newfoundlanders" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (September 2023) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

In modern Newfoundland (Irish: Talamh an Éisc), many Newfoundlanders are of Irish descent. According to the Statistics Canada 2016 census, 20.7% of Newfoundlanders claim Irish ancestry (other major groups in the province include 37.5% English, 6.8% Scottish, and 5.2% French).^[1] However, this figure greatly under-represents the true number of Newfoundlanders of Irish ancestry, as 53.9% claimed "Canadian" as their ethnic origin in the same census. The majority of these respondents were of Irish, English, and Scottish origins, but no longer self-identify with their ethnic ancestral origins due to having lived in Canada for many generations. Even so, the family names, the features and colouring, the predominance of Catholics in some areas (particularly on the southeast portion of the Avalon Peninsula), the prevalence of Irish music, and even the accents of the people in these areas, are so reminiscent of rural Ireland that Irish author Tim Pat Coogan has described Newfoundland as "the most Irish place in the world outside of Ireland."^[2][3]