John Lahey and Great Irish Hunger collection

In the tradition of great educators who helped the Irish grab the first rungs on the ladder of success, Dr. John Lahey, President of Quinnipiac University, reminds us from whence we came and the struggle to get where we are.

Larger Text

Print

E-mail

1 Comment

Gerry Adams and Dr. John Lahey pictured in Quinnipiac Special Collection Room.

Tweet

As president of Quinnipiac University for the past 23 years, John Lahey has played a vital role in educating the public about the story of the Great Hunger. Through his appearances as Grand Marshal of New York’s St. Patrick’s Day Parade in 1997 and the Great Hunger Lender Family Special Collection at Quinnipiac that came into existence soon afterward, Lahey has championed the need for the history of An Gorta Mór to be accurately and completely told. Quinnipiac’s trove is one of the most extensive collections of art and literature in America devoted to Ireland’s Great Famine.

Lahey recently wrote a letter to The Wall Street Journal in response to a column by William McGurn, “My Wild Irish Woes,” which asserted that Great Hunger memorials emphasize defeat rather than pride, and explained his need to clarify his disagreement with McGurn’s stance. “I’m an educator, so I think accurate historical facts and explanations of events and history are important,” said Lahey. “It’s a fact of the Famine that the story wasn’t told accurately, it wasn’t told in a balanced way. The Irish were citizens of the UK, and clearly the [English government] showed a callous disregard for human life and basically used a tragedy that wasn’t of their making, in the sense that it was the potato failure itself, and allowed it to be used for land reform and other economic and political desires on their part. They allowed a million and a half people to die of starvation and another two million plus to leave, and basically decimated the country. None of that was really told; as you can imagine, no art was produced, reporting that or commemorating that at all. . . . So it’s really just beginning something that really should’ve been done 150 years ago, that under more normal circumstances would’ve taken place and so that’s why it’s important to do it now.”

Lahey’s roots are in Knockglossmore, a town outside of Tralee in Kerry. His paternal grandfather, Daniel Lahey, was born there and emigrated to Canada and then to New York City. His grandfather was a stonemason and brought the trade to America, where Lahey’s father worked as a bricklayer in New York. Daniel Lahey married Agnes Roche from Cork. Lahey’s mother’s family were Griffins, from County Clare, all areas that were affected deeply by the Great Hunger.

In 1997, when Lahey was asked to serve as Grand Marshal of the St. Patrick’s Day Parade in New York City, he decided to use the platform to speak about the Famine. “I read Christine Kinealy’s book, This Great Calamity, in 1995. When you see the painstaking detail that she went to in terms of the research and talking about the food and the shipments on the boats and the records, you see that for a five year period of time, in fact, very little was done to ease the suffering, the ports were not closed. . . . Food was shipped out of Ireland in increasing amounts in the years of the Famine. … [When] I was approached to be Grand Marshal of the St. Patrick’s Day Parade in 1997, I wanted to make the Great Hunger the theme of the parade that year. I didn’t think my own Irish life was all that interesting; a lot of the Grand Marshals talk about themselves, but being the educator I am, I wanted to use that opportunity and that platform to talk about the Great Hunger, so I did. … From January 1 to March 17, all the Irish organizations, the county organizations, the AOHs, they all have their annual events and they invite the Grand Marshal. Literally, I think there were almost 200 invitations. So, I went and I talked.”

Print

E-mail

Tweet