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BUILDING AMERICA · THE IRISH WHO DUG NEW ORLEANS · 1768 - 1850s· 

Bloody O'Reilly and the Irish Canals

Why did New Orleans execute five men on the street that now bears their name — and why does Cuba still celebrate the Irishman who ordered it?

The Irish who dug the New Basin Canal left a written record — not a death toll, but a letter to the editor demanding fair pay, an end to the company store, and a doctor who wasn't a quack. They weren't dying quietly. They were organizing.

ABOUT THE GUEST

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Every New Orleanian knows twenty thousand Irishmen died digging the New Basin Canal. She read every newspaper from those years and found no such thing.

Laura D. Kelley, Ph.D., was born in New York City and grew up between Mexico, Texas, Alaska, and the U.S. Virgin Islands before spending her twenties in Europe and California — a restlessness she traces to her own Irish ancestors. She came to New Orleans for her doctorate and stayed, drawn to an Irish history threaded through the city that she felt had gone largely untold. She teaches at Tulane University, where she also directs the Dublin study-abroad program, and her book The Irish in New Orleans traces that community from the Spanish colonial period forward — separating what the records show from what the city likes to believe.

EPISODE RESOURCES

PUBLISHED WORKS

"There's this lore of the Irish digging and dropping dead and people stepping over the bodies and continuing to work, like zombies. Have you ever met anybody who's that passive about anything? Not an Irishman." — Dr. Laura D. Kelley

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