More than 46,000 people in Windsor and Essex County say they are Irish, according to the 2011 National Household Survey.
That’s more than those who call themselves Italian, Polish, Lebanese or German.
Windsor has a higher number of Irish residents than the Canadian average, with nearly one in every seven people saying they have ties to the Celtic country.
“There are so many people I meet and they say, oh yes, I’m Irish,” said Jane Bryans, who immigrated to Canada in 1957 from County Antrim in the north of Ireland.
Bryans said she regularly encounters people with an Irish grandparent or with relatives from the country even further back in their heritage.
“Particularly on St. Patrick’s Day, a lot of people say that they’re Irish,” she said with a chuckle.
Bryans, a member of the Irish Canadian Cultural Club of Windsor, will be celebrating St. Patrick’s Day Tuesday with the singing of Irish tunes, listening to musicians and watching award-winning Irish dancers do jigs and reels.
Windsor’s Irish population is spread out through the county, but the highest percentage is the region just above the Town of Essex, where about 28 per cent of residents said they had Irish origins.
LaSalle and Amherstburg also each have neighbourhoods where about one in five people say that they have Irish roots.
The least Irish neighbourhoods had no people at all saying they had Irish heritage: the neighbourhood surrounding Ojibway Park and a stretch of land near Dougall Avenue and E.C. Row.
In downtown Windsor, about 15 per cent of the population calls itself Irish. That number gets bigger in Walkerville and Riverside, where more than 4,000 people say they have Irish roots.
The number of Irish in Windsor and Essex County still falls below the 70,000 people who say they have English roots and 79,000 people who say they descend from the French.
Nearly 10,000 people say they are of Lebanese descent and about 8,000 say they are Chinese.
While Windsor has many people saying they have Irish roots, there are only about 235 people living in the city who were born in Ireland — the lowest number of immigrants from a European country except for about 200 people from Russia.
About 7,000 Windsorites were born in the United States. More than 6,000 people were born in Italy and nearly 4,800 were born in the United Kingdom. Other large immigrant groups include about 3,775 people born in Iraq, 3,285 from Lebanon and 3,505 from China.
Ryan McAiney decorates for St. Patrick’s Day on Monday, March 16, 2015, at the Manchester Pub in Windsor, ON. After being close for a few weeks due to a flooding incident the downtown bar is ready to celebrate the event. (DAN JANISSE/ The Windsor Star)
