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.

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

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Lahey’s speeches brought the issue of the Great Hunger to the attention of Murray Lender, a Jewish immigrant whose father fled persecution in Poland, came to New Haven, and started a bagel business that became Lender’s Bagels, a multi-hundreds-of-millions-of-dollars company that was ultimately sold to Kraft approximately 15 years ago. “While I was giving all these speeches [as Grand Marshal], he came to me and said, ‘John, it’s just amazing to me, this story of the Great Hunger.’ You could tell that he associated it with persecution of the Jews and other ethnic groups, African Americans, Native Americans, in this country, and he said, ‘I’ll give you a gift for the library but it’s got to be for the Irish Great Hunger special collection. You go out and tell me what you need to do and collect the art and get the research materials and the books and periodicals, and I and my brother, Marvin Lender, we’ll take care of it.’”

With this outside help, Lahey began collecting materials for the Quinnipiac collection of Famine works. “[Rowan Gillespie’s] The Victim was my first piece. I literally carried it back on the plane [from Ireland] with me, I wouldn’t let it go. It is such a powerful piece; the facial expression captures everything about the suffering and pain. Later in that same summer, we went back to Ireland, to a Westport art show and I saw Margaret Chamberlain’s sculpture of people with psychological problems and I could just tell that she was an artist who was able to capture the torment, and I commissioned her to do the original piece The Leave-taking.

“Another powerful piece we have is a miniature version of John Behan’s The Famine Ship, the original of which sits at the foot of Croagh Patrick. I can remember when I first saw it. I was with my son and we parked the car in the parking lot. It’s a bit of a walk to get to it. It’s very big, and it looks from a distance like a sailing ship, but it wasn’t until I got pretty close to it that I could see the skeletons stretched across it.”

The collection has since outgrown the space that was originally set aside for it, and Lahey plans an expansion for the near future that will bring it to the attention of a larger public. “We own a good sized building on Whitney Avenue and we have some people in there right now, some different offices, but our plan is to move them out over the next few years and to turn that into a Great Hunger Art Museum. It’s not going to be the size of Yale’s British Museum but it will allow us to display much more of the collection than we’re currently able to display . The other thing is that it will be more accessible to the public. Now they have to literally come on the center of campus so we don’t get quite the visitation we’d really like to get. Whitney Avenue is a very public place, the main street which runs all the way from Hartford to New Haven. We can get very public signage and there’s plenty of parking there and that will allow the collection to be much more accessible and we can have public events there and so on.”

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