For hundreds of years before Confederation, Newfoundland and Ireland shared more than just the North Atlantic. We shared bloodlines, faith, struggle, and an unbreakable sense of identity that no empire could ever erase. When the first Irish settlers arrived on Newfoundland’s shores in the 1600s and 1700s, they found a land that mirrored their homeland — green, rugged, proud, and deeply spiritual. They came mostly from Waterford, Wexford, Kilkenny, Cork, and Tipperary — the same southern counties