This collection is the first anthology of Irish-Canadian literature ever to appear, and brings together a representative selection of Irish-Canadian writing drawn both from neglected early sources and from the exciting range of Irish-Canadian writing in more recent and contemporary Canadian literature. The first section of the anthology provides writing that taken together provides real insight into the lives, attitudes, and concerns of the early generations of Irish Canada. Rare accounts of the reception in Quebec of the distressed famine orphans of the late 1840s, fiction from immigrants written on the Canadian Northwest, poetry, including selections by the great Irish-Canadian statesman Thomas D'Arcy McGee, and autobiographical accounts by Irish travelers, missionaries and Irish-Canadian soldiers who served in the Crimea, in India, during the Fenian raids, and in the Northwest during the Riel rebellions. The latter section of A Message to Eire anthologizes the works of the descendents of the earlier Irish settlers, and documents the exciting and important contribution of Irish-Canada to the literary history of the country. Including works by both 20th-century and contemporary Irish-Canadian authors from Quebec, the Atlantic provinces, and from further west, the anthology aims at providing an excellent representative sample of Irish-Canadians to Canadian and world literature.

Professor of Canadian Studies at Concordia in Montreal, Daniel O'Leary's poetry has appeared in Exile, Fiddlehead, the spoken-word anthology Poetry Nation, and in numerous other journals. Aside from an earlier book of poetry, The Sorcerer of Les Trois Frères, he has published work on early Canadian print culture in The History of the Book in Canada and is co-editor with Jonathan Wisenthal of What Shaw Really Wrote About the War. A descendant of early Maritime Canadian families, O'Leary was born on New Brunswick's Fundy coast and was raised there and in Nova Scotia.

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