Foggy Dew

One of the city’s oldest neighbourhood of Irish migrants would have been the Niagara area west of Bathurst Street running north and south from King Street West.  In 1852, St. Mary's Catholic Church that still stands around the corner from the King West Pub just west of then Belfast Row was built by those Irish migrants and the church itself was designed by Joseph Connolly, an Irish Canadian architect from Limerick, Ireland.

The beloved Foggy Dew Irish Public House derived its name from a song first arranged by Edward Bunting (1773–1843) in 1840. However, it was Fr. Charles O’Neill from Portglenone, County Antrim (1887–1963) that gave us The Foggy Dew in response to the Easter Rising of 1916. Many artists have given the world their renditions. Sinéad O'Connor’s with The Chieftains in my opinion gives the most chilling rendition that gets the hairs on the back of my neck to stand up every time.

The pub sadly closed its doors due to the mounting financial implications of the pandemic. Before it did a very old friend of mine met his forever love there and that is a grand thing indeed.