Patrick Boyle

Who is Patrick Boyle?

Patrick Boyle was a printer and publisher in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

Boyle was born in Newport, County Mayo, Ireland, in 1832. In 1844 he and his family emigrated to the United States, moving two years later to Toronto, Canada. From the early 1850s he worked as a printer at the Globe - then run by George Brown - and afterwards for the Catholic Citizen. He worked briefly at his trade in New York and New Orleans but had returned to Canada at the start of the American Civil War.

In January 1863 Boyle launched the Irish Canadian, a response to contact with the Irish nationalist paper, Phoenix, sectarianism in Toronto between Irish emigrants, and his personal fury at British colonialism in Ireland. The Irish Canadian was held to be a mouthpiece of the Hibernaian Benevolent Society of Canada, a working-class association of which Boyle was secretary. He agitated for Home Rule, the political advancement of Irish Catholics in Canada, as well as Irish rights in Canada and in Ireland. As of 1892 it had the largest circulation of any Catholic newspaper in Ontario.

Despite his sympathies for the Fenian movement, Boyle, through his paper, opposed any Irish invasion of Canada. His failure to fully distance himself from the movement led to a break between him and Irish-Canadians headed by Thomas D'Arcy McGee, James George Moylan, and Archbishop John Joseph Lynch.