Famine Museum an inspiring tribute - world’s largest collection of Irish famine art at Quinnipiac, CT

Museum officially opens on October 11 in Hamden, CT

By

CAHIR O'DOHERTY,

Irish Voice Reporter

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Illustrations from the period 1845-1852 at the museum.

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Irish Consul General Noel Kilkenny said, “If you look around these walls you see figures who are Irish, but tragically they reminded me of other figures we saw during the 20th century. We must give great credit to the Jewish community in New York for the money they gave to help in Irish famine relief and in the construction of this museum.”

Agreeing with his sentiments Blumenthal added, “I believe today we are all Irish. In particular in recognizing this museum as a milestone in recognizing human rights. The other day when Gerry Adams was here he said the Irish hunger was not a real famine, it was preventable. One of my mentors Daniel Patrick Moynihan, used to say that everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.

“The Irish Great Hunger was avoidable and it offers a great lesson. We cannot stand by when there are similar violations of human rights. This museum will always provide us with that warning.”

Kinealy put the day and what it stood for in context to the Irish Voice.

“Before the famine the Irish people were the tallest people in Europe,” she said. “Most people nowadays don’t know that. When I ask my students how we as historians know that they say, ‘Is it through coffins or doorways?’ The answer is more mundane. We know they were the tallest because the Irish were such a presence in the constabulary, and in the British Army, and though convict records.”

After the famine one of the longer-term consequences of prolonged hunger and malnutrition was that they dropped in size, she added. After the famine the Irish were no longer the tallest people in Europe.

“Famine is never solely about food shortages,” Kinealy explained. “Famine is always about political division. The same is true today as it was in the 1840s.”

The wide screen monitors on one of the museum’s main walls ask visitors if they know how many people died in the Irish famine? The answer given is that we don’t know.

There is a consensus among Irish historians that it was over one million people. An even higher number emigrated. But those statistics do not do justice to the callousness of the British government which refused when challenged to keep records of the numbers who died.

Nor do the raft of statistics do enough honor to those who died slow, agonizing deaths, coffin-less, nameless and uncounted. Suffering cannot be reduced to a statistic, which the creators of the Great Hunger Museum are only too aware of.

They pull no punches about where to lay the blame either -- to the vast, resource rich British Empire, the lives and deaths of the famine era Irish did not matter. 

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