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In this paper the political fortunes and identities of Irish Catholics in US and Canadian cities are explored through a comparative study of Buffalo and Toronto. Local spaces of political administration in the urban arena, such as wards, were significant in affecting the generation of sociopolitical networks of power which in turn had implications for the sense of political identity and involvement felt by Irish Catholics within these two places. The importance of such spaces, however, was also contingent on the interaction between these cities' Irish Catholic populations and wider geographies of social, economic, and ethnoreligious relations over time as well as on the topographies and traditions of political power that extended beyond the municipal scale in both societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]