Toronto has more people of Irish descent than any other city in Canada — a community whose roots go back to the Famine ships that arrived in the 1840s, when hundreds of thousands of Irish immigrants passed through Grosse Île quarantine station and settled in Upper Canada. On Bloomsday, that history and that community find one of their most literary expressions.
The Irish in Toronto have a different story from the Irish in Boston or New York. They arrived in Canada in enormous numbers during the Famine — Cork, Clare, and Connacht migrants who had neither the money nor the intention to travel further to America. Many stopped in Toronto and stayed. The city's Cabbagetown neighbourhood was the largest Irish slum outside of Dublin in the 1840s; the neighbourhood's name is said to come from the cabbages that Famine immigrants grew in every available patch of earth. That history gives Toronto's Bloomsday a particular weight.
The Irish Canadian Cultural Association is the primary organisation for Irish cultural life in Toronto. The ICCA runs events throughout the Irish calendar — Seachtain na Gaeilge, St Patrick's season, the Gathering — and Bloomsday typically features in their June programming. The Association's events range from formal literary evenings to pub sessions, drawing from Toronto's substantial Irish-born population and the larger Irish-Canadian community.
The Irish Consulate in Toronto sometimes contributes to or co-organises Bloomsday events. The diplomatic connection gives Toronto's June 16 observances a slightly more formal character than equivalent events in American cities.
Cabbagetown, now a gentrified neighbourhood of Victorian row houses in the east end of downtown Toronto, was the heart of Irish-Catholic Toronto from the 1840s through much of the twentieth century. The neighbourhood's Irish character has dispersed — its residents now include a much broader demographic — but its history is present in the architecture, in St Paul's Basilica on Power Street (one of the oldest Catholic churches in the city), and in the plaques and markers that record the Famine history.
Walking Cabbagetown on Bloomsday is to walk through the compressed history of Irish Canada: Famine arrival, Victorian settlement, Catholic parish life, mid-century working-class culture, and modern gentrification. It's not a literary walk in the Ulysses sense, but it's a walk through Irish continuity in the way that Bloomsday celebrates.
The stretch of Eglinton Avenue West known informally as "Little Dublin" — centred around Yonge and Eglinton but extending west — is where much of Toronto's Irish-born population settled in the 1980s and 1990s. Irish pubs, Irish emigrant support organisations, and Irish cultural businesses clustered here to serve the generation that left Ireland during the economic crisis of that period. The Feathers pub, O'Grady's, and a handful of other establishments on the strip mark Bloomsday with sessions and informal gatherings that have the character of pubs actually in Ireland on June 16.
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The University of Toronto has a long tradition in Irish and Celtic studies. The Celtic Studies department has produced significant scholarship on Irish language and literature. Bloomsday occasionally generates public programming from UofT's literary community — lectures, readings, and panels that connect the academic tradition to the broader Irish-Canadian cultural calendar. Check the Celtic Studies programme and the U of T events calendar from early June.
Daily Irish heritage — Bloomsday, the diaspora calendar, and the stories behind the Irish-Canadian community
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Related: How the Irish diaspora celebrates Bloomsday | Bloomsday in New York | Bloomsday in Chicago | Bloomsday in Boston | Bloomsday in Dublin