Quebec Letter:On every number plate in Montreal are the words "Je me souviens".
"I remember," the poem goes, "that I was born under the fleur-de-lys" - the flag of imperial France. For this is Quebec, the French-speaking province of Canada, which is famous for its feisty, rebellious Gallic spirit. Or should that be Gaelic?
According to some estimates, 40 per cent of Québécois can trace an Irish grandparent or great-grandparent. I am in Montreal for the oldest St Patrick's Day parade in North America.
First I must check into the Hotel Nelligan, named after Émile Nelligan, born to an Irish father and Québécoise mother, who is hailed as one of French Canada's greatest poets. The boutique hotel, with its trendy bare brick walls, looks like it is straight out of an episode of Friends. And walking through the old port area, I feel like I am among the tenement blocks of New York. But when I arrive at the Saint-Amable restaurant, in the elegant Place Jacques-Cartier, with its Norman architecture and French cuisine, I begin to doubt that I have crossed the Atlantic at all. That is until I go to meet the parade organisers - at an ice hockey match.
"Son," one Québécois comedian's father told him, "there are two important things in life: religion and ice hockey. And never make fun of ice hockey."
Quebec, like Ireland, was dominated by the Catholic clergy, and the shared religion was the main reason why the descendants of Irish and French settlers got on so well. Marrying a Protestant would have meant excommunication in the late 19th century. But since the 1960s, the clergy has lost its grip on power and Quebec is now a very liberal place. It has licensed gay marriage, this year a vicar's daughter is queen of the St Patrick's Day parade, and a few years ago its queen was black - the daughter of an African mother and an Irish father.
The Irish integrated so well with the Québécois that you would have to look hard to find the Irish influence here. The Irish, often working as navvies, were instrumental in organising the labour movement. The workers on the Lachine canal were among the first to go on strike when their wages were cut and they were paid in coupons.
The Great Lakes and Chicago are just down the St Lawrence - you can go white-water rafting on the rapids the canal was built to avoid - and it was the Irish who built the first bridge across the river.
But when they started digging the foundations the workers discovered a mass grave containing the remains of Irish immigrants who had fled the Famine in 1847-8 only to die of ship fever - typhus - on arrival. If you go to nearby Victoriatown you can still see the Irish Stone, erected in their memory in 1859.
But to really learn the history of the Irish in Quebec you have to go to the capital of the province. Montreal, with its population of 3.4 million, may be the more vibrant of the two cities, but Quebec City, dating from 1608, with a population of only 700,000, must be the most beautiful city in North America.
I am here to visit historian Marianna O'Gallagher, who was awarded the Order of Canada in 2000 for her single-handed, and single-minded, work in uncovering the role of the Irish in Quebec.
Where I am staying, the historic Wexford B&B, on rue Champlain, hosted one of the first Irish communities of dockers, O'Gallagher explains. In the 1840s Quebec City was the fifth-largest port in the world and the city would have been a quarter Irish.
The difficulty in estimating the number of Irish here, O'Gallagher tells me, comes from the fact that their arrivals were not always recorded. Unlike the Irish migrants to America, these were citizens travelling from one part of the British Empire to another. What is recorded are the graves of the 5,424 immigrants, most of whom were Irish, on Grosse Île in 1847. The island, an hour by boat from Quebec City, but only accessible from May to October, was used as a quarantine zone to prevent a cholera epidemic and now is home to mass graves of those who, escaping the Famine, died on or after the journey across the Atlantic.
Those who survived were well received. They never lived in ghettos and rapidly became part of the community, with no anti-Irish feeling as there was in other parts of the country. But even in the 1880s a by-law was passed prohibiting the playing of hurling in the street, says O'Gallagher, so the Irish identity clearly remained.
All around Quebec City are mementos of home, such as the Martello towers of the Plains of Abraham. This is where the British defeated the French in 1759, but a less well-known battle also took place here. It was, as O'Gallagher says, a battle between one Irish general and another. Defending the town was the governor of Canada, Guy Carleton, and attacking was Brigadier Richard Montgomery.
The British had allowed the Québécois to remain Catholic and keep their French language and law because trouble was brewing to the south. Sure enough, in 1775, a year before the American declaration of independence, Montgomery led an army of conscripts on Quebec City in an attempt to gain the support of the French-Canadians.
However, the campaign took much longer than expected, and the poorly equipped Montgomery had no choice but to attack on December 31st, 1775, as the soldiers' contracts expired the next day.
Legend has it that a startled seminarian saw the approaching forces, fired a cannon at random, and managed to blow Montgomery's head off. What is certain is that Montgomery was killed and his forces routed.
That was the last time the walls of Quebec City - the only walled city in North America - were used to defend it. Today they stand as testament to a province that has remained resolutely French - and Irish - against all the odds on a hostile continent.