You don’t have to scratch too deep to find the Northern Ireland connection in Katikati.
Stand at any intersection and look up. The street names are innocuous enough but reflect the town’s deep Irish roots. Like Carisbrooke Street – named for the Carisbrooke Castle, the ship that carried the Protestant families from Ulster to Katikati in the 1870s.
And Rae Rd, Mulgan St, Jocelyn St, Morton Rd, Wright Rd. “All named for the first 80 Irish families in Katikati,” said Paula Gaelic, manager of the town’s Western Bay Museum.
Mark of unity
September will mark the 150th anniversary of the arrival of George Vesey Stewart and various tenant farmers of Northern Ireland in the Katikati area. “But as a community, we decided we wanted to acknowledge and celebrate that connection during Matariki, because Matariki is about reflection, acknowledging what happened in the past, and setting new goals for the future, it’s about community unity,” Gaelic said.
Towns celebrating an anniversary of early settlements often failed to acknowledge mana whenua being there before them. “So by celebrating the 150th anniversary of the arrival of the Irish at Matariki, we are also celebrating the fact this land was inhabited, developed and used by Māori beforehand. It signals community unity.”
To enforce the unity, Ireland’s Ambassador to New Zealand, Jane Connelly, will return to Te Rereatukahia Marae for the Reading of the Stars event on Thursday evening, June 19, and the Matariki Dawn Service the following morning, at 5.30am at Park Road Reserve.
The Northern Irish and Māori had much in common, as both were colonised by the British, Gaelic said. “Both were stripped of their language, land and culture. We can’t change history, but we can certainly change things moving forward as a community. And that’s really healthy.”
Everyone was comfortable about celebrating the 150th anniversary of the Ulster pioneers along with mana whenua, she said.
Embraced and celebrated
She believed the Irish who came to Katikati wanted a new life to “escape war, devastation and hunger” at home. One of the Carisbrooke Castle passengers was a five-year-old boy called David Gallaher from County Donegal. He would become one of Katikati’s most famous sons – Dave Gallaher, the freezing works foreman who would captain the 1905-06 “Original All Blacks”, the first NZ representative rugby team to tour the British Isles. Eleven years later, he would die in the trenches of Passchendaele. The boy from Katikati is now a son of Belgium too.
The Ulster-Irish founder of Katikati, George Vesey Stewart.
By 1968, there were few, if any, direct descendant Irish families left. “They intermarried and moved to other parts of the country. But you can’t take away Katikati’s Ulster connection,” said Gaelic.
“It’s in the names; it’s in the murals.” Like the image of the late George Vesey Stewart, the Ulsterman elected first Mayor of Tauranga in 1882. It’s etched in the history and the town’s DNA. “It’s going to be there forever,” said Gaelic. And it will be embraced and celebrated by Katikati at Matariki.