There is a profound moment in Tom Murphy’s play ‘Famine” where John Connor, the Irish tenant farmer, pulls up the potato stalk by the root to see if the blight is back.
It is 1846. After a bad blight the year before there is hope that the humble potato, the only staple food of his country, will be back to normal.
Instead he pulls up a rotting plant and the awful truth dawns. He spreads his hand wide in a crucifixion moment. He knows he and all his people in the little village of Glanconnor are doomed.
It was a recreation of a moment when Ireland changed forever and so did America. By the early summer of 1846 the Irish had hung on to the bitter end after a bleak 1845 hoping against hope that the crop would come good.
It was not to be. What lay ahead was 1846 and then Black ‘47 the worst year of the Famine which would send a million to their graves and a million to the coffin ships.
Ireland and America would never be the same again.
Thanks to Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut, and its visionary president Dr. John Lahey, New York audiences are currently enjoying the Druid/Murphy three plays directed by legendary Garry Hyrnes at Lincoln Center.
I saw “Famine” on a recent Thursday night and it was an incredible theater experience.
Lahey, a former NY City parade Grand Marshal, is a college president who deeply treasures his own Irish heritage and understands the massive importance of entwined Irish and American history
In September, Quinnipiac will open its new Great Hunger museum in Hamden, making it the first museum in America dedicated to the Irish Famine.
That will be an extraordinary night and a magnificent accomplishment by Lahey, one that will create a permanent structure and monument to the most significant event in Irish history and arguably, one of the most significant in the life of America as well.
Murphy’s play, written in 1968, takes the audience through the terrible times, the blight, the British indifference, the evictions, the forced migration and the starvation.
But there was a place called America where the descendants of such men and women and their cousins who followed after would remember those who died so horribly. Dr. Lahey is among those. His ancestral town of Camp in Kerry was ravaged by the Famine.
He has spoken up for generations of Irish who never had a voice and by creating a Great Hunger museum has ensured that future generations will remember that too.
From a great tragedy generations later, comes a wonderful reminder in the Great Hunger museum why we will never forget.
19 Comments
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Switch to the desktop site to post a comment.sonyakay | Jul 26, 2012, 10:27 PM EDT
Hello To the Team at Irishcentral! Yes, I wrote a comment yesterday, 26th Oz time, but it seems to have dissappeared. The response you gave me was that same was to be checked/edited by you. BUT I was not a member of IC at that stage. I am now, cheers sonykay
Seanmor | Jul 18, 2012, 12:27 PM EDT
It is my understanding that the U.S. passed new Immigration laws in the 1920s which gave quotas to several countries based on the National Origins of the population of in the 1820 census. Ireland was given a large quota because of the high number of U.S. citizens who claimed Irish ancestry, the majority of whom were descendants of the Famine immigrants.
Seanmor | Jul 17, 2012, 11:56 AM EDT
Historians tell us that in the early 1860s 63,000 young Irishmen who had survived the Famine?/Geat Hunger in Ireland joined the Union Army upon arrival at New York. These Union soldiers played a major role in the war that reunited the divided American nation and abolished slavery. Fifyt-five years after that war ended, Partition was imposed on Ireland by a foreign power still exists, and as recently as this year's 12th of Julty a Loyalist band played anti-Catholic tunes as ir marched in front of St. Patrick's Church in the center of Belfast.
GoogieLaRue | Jul 16, 2012, 10:15 PM EDT
Check out "Paddy's Lament".
johnshiel | Jul 16, 2012, 10:22 AM EDT
IrelandNorth: I like your comment re reparation... and, out of the blue, wanted to say I'm nearly done reading book that gives much insight into the attitudes and economic power structures that caused the Horrific Starvation. It is called "The Killing of Major Dennis Mahon", a major landlord in County Roscommon, in November 1847. It's a slog, but worth it...
IrelandNorth | Jul 16, 2012, 08:15 AM EDT
If the Irish were to petition the UN for reparation for England's/Britain's misrule of Ireland for almost a milleniium, I'm sure it would be in the trillions. Since the then UK weren't shy about doing so with their erstwhile arch-enemies Germay after the WWI, why not Ireland now. Perhaps unionist/loyalist posters might consider contextualising the 2011 LOAN of STG£10b conferred by the British Chancellor of the Exchequer to Ireland against such a historical backdrop.
Seanmor | Jul 16, 2012, 07:35 AM EDT
The article reminds me of how Kenmare Street in lower Manhattan got its name. A politician named Big Tim Sullivan (born 1863) arranged to have the street named after the town in Kerry where his mother came from, Kenmare. Mrs Sullivan was probably a Famine era immigrant.
bunkerhill | Jul 15, 2012, 06:17 PM EDT
I did write a long comment but it was deleted.
Cyn | Jul 14, 2012, 04:25 PM EDT
Many Irish who made it to America found conditions here at least as horrid as they left. They did labor that was considered to dangerous or taxing to slaves (who were still valuable at the time), died in huge numbers by disease they had never been exposed to, starved in cities, were racially discriminated against, the list goes on. I wish all that part of history was also as well known as the myth that America welcomed the Irish with open arms.
gweno | Jul 14, 2012, 04:16 PM EDT
Hmm, oddly my comment did not appear so am trying to repost. As a Jewish person watching this play I have to say the comparison is apt... I kept thinking where WAS everybody? Jews in NY did contribute $1,000 that year (1846, not 1848 as above) in the play, the equivalent, according to an article in this site, of over $80,000. But this is a permanent stain on a "civilized" country... oppressed people recognize one another. in "Man and Superman," Shaw has a character refer to it as "The Starvation," not "The Famine." And he was right.
Searlit | Jul 14, 2012, 04:10 PM EDT
I'm interested in seeing this, although I agree with CitizenWhy, more of Irish history should be included.
CitizenWhy | Jul 14, 2012, 04:00 PM EDT
Iriush identity has many sources: the Children of the Famine/Great Hunger; the Children of the War of Independence and the Civil War (older generation in Ireland); the Children of the winning of Civil Rights for the Catholic Community in Northern Ireland and the Reconciliation with Britain (people currently living in Ireland); the Children of the Celtic Tiger and the EU; the Children of the Real Estate Bubble and Bust and the Banking Debts and the New Emigration(the people currently living in Ireland; the Children of the Collapse of the Moral Authority of the Catholic Church; the Irish-American Children of FDR; the Irish-American Children of Ronald Reagan/Ayn Rand. ... Irish-American have a very different Irish identity from those who have lived through all these sources of identity. In fact the last group, the right wing commentators found on this site, endorse the political/economic system (laissez-faire capitalism) that actually caused the hunger, starvation, and the cruelly managed mass uprooting from home and family. What happened in Ireland in the 1840's was not a famine. Only one crop failed, the crop the poorest Irish depended on. But there was plenty of food. The British government however, as believers in laissez-faire capitalism as the will of God, was morally opposed to providing any relief. It was not indifferent, it was hostile to the poor and believed they deserved their fate and that it would be immoral to use tax revenues for the relief of society's "losers." that is why the tragic event should not be called The Famine, but the Great Hunger.
CitizenWhy | Jul 14, 2012, 03:41 PM EDT
Focusing on the famine (which should be called the Great Hunger) is not adequate. This play needs to be part of a triology showing the aftermath of the famine and the current situation in Ireland. Otherwise there is the risk of assuming that Irish identity is primarily based on the famine. ... The aftermath of the famine in Ireland included a steep rise in the marriage age (making sure economic security was in place before marriage; the formation of the Land League and the driving out of the foreign, exploitative big landlords; and a determination to organize to win independence from Britain.
CitizenWhy | Jul 14, 2012, 03:32 PM EDT
For some reason I cannot post a comment. Why?
Dunkelly1 | Jul 14, 2012, 02:01 PM EDT
We staged a reading of this at Theatre for the New City about 15 yrs ago with the late Chris O'Neill, Jimmy Smallhorne and many others. It is a powerful piece.
murphy666 | Jul 14, 2012, 01:24 PM EDT
Seanmor, how much of the $170. wound up in executive salaries?
Rebelforce | Jul 14, 2012, 01:24 PM EDT
Like the Jewish people never forget Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen 1942-1945, the Irish should never forget 1845-1850 and their own Holocaust. The horrific, squalid condition Ireland found itself in in 1846 didn't happen by chance. It was the deliberate result of hundreds of years under a vicious, harsh and oppressive British colonial rule. When we teach about the degraded condition the Irish people found themselves in 166 years ago, we should make sure we also teach about the earlier dispossesions of the Irish-Catholic people from their land and the Penal Laws as well.
Seanmor | Jul 14, 2012, 10:47 AM EDT
While the potatoe blight caused the falure of the of the main staple of most Irish people, shiploads of grain and livestock were exported from Ireland as a million or more died of disease and starvatio. The government in London which ruled all olf Ireland at the time provided very little relief to the starving Irish. Much help was given by generous souls in the U.S., including the Choctaw tribe of Native Americans, who kindly donated $170 to Irish Famine relief. We are forever indebted to the CHOCTAWS for their great generousity in the time of Ireland's need.
seanaci | Jul 14, 2012, 10:21 AM EDT
It is a good time to be reminded of the Irish Famine. Cecil Woodham-Smith's “The Great Hunger” is reckoned to be one of the best researched and written books on the Irish famine. Reading it now one can’t avoid the striking similarity of the arguments of those in the UK government then and members of Congress and European governments now. Both place austerity and deficit reduction to preserve the free market – called “laissez faire” in the Famine era - ahead of helping the disadvantaged. Paul Ryan and Charles Edward Trevelyan have a lot in common – selfish policies and agendas plus cherubic appearances. Who says history does not repeat itself.