Irish Canadians
The first waves of Irish immigrants took place between 1763 and 1880. when ten thousand Irish immigrants arrived on the Island. From 1800 to 1850, "10,000 immigrants from every county in Ireland" had settled in Prince Edward Island and represented 25% of the Island population by 1850.
Irish people
The Irish people of the Late Middle Ages were active as traders on the European continent. They were distinguished from the English (who only used their own language or French) in that they only used Latin abroad—a language "spoken by all educated people throughout Gaeldom". According to the writer Seumas MacManus, the explorer Christopher Columbus visited Ireland to gather information about the lands to the west, a number of Irish names are recorded on Columbus' crew roster preserved in the archives of Madrid and it was an Irishman named Patrick Maguire who was the first to set foot in the Americas in 1492; however, according to Morison and Miss Gould, who made a detailed study of the crew list of 1492, no Irish or English sailors were involved in the voyage.