Week of events planned for the world’s first Great Hunger Museum at Quinnipiac

Museum set to officially open on October 11

By

CAHIR O'DOHERTY,

Irish Voice Reporter

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Robert Ballagh

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On Friday Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut, will dedicate Ireland’s first Great Hunger Museum, which when it officially opens to the public on October 11 will become the world’s largest collection of visual art, artifacts and printed materials relating to the Irish Famine.

A weeklong program of cultural events and lectures to mark the opening of the groundbreaking facility has been scheduled for this week and will culminate in a dedication day this Friday, September 28.

First of the distinguished speakers to speak this week was Gerry Adams, president of Sinn Fein, who delivered a lecture titled Irish America and the Struggle for Freedom in Ireland on Tuesday, September 25 at Burt Kahn Court on the Mount Carmel Campus.

Catherine Marshall, the senior curator and head of the collection at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin, will moderate a panel discussion on the theme of Depicting the Great Hunger Through Art at 3:30 p.m. on Thursday, September 27 in the Grand Courtroom of the School of Law Center at Quinnipiac. This event is free and open to the public. Irish artists scheduled to participate in the discussion include Robert Ballagh, John Behan, Brian Maguire and Geraldine O’Reilly. 

Acclaimed Irish historian Christine Kinealy, widely regarded as a world-renowned authority on the subject of the Irish Famine and its consequences, will deliver the lecture Fifty Years of the Great Hunger: The Remarkable Legacy of Cecil Woodham-Smith. on Thursday, September 27 at 7 p.m. in the Grand Courtroom of the School of Law Center.

It’s an auspicious start to one of the most important historical and cultural initiatives ever undertaken by a major U.S. university (or an Irish one, at that).

The collection at the new Hunger Museum will focus on the famine years from 1845-52, when blight destroyed virtually all of Ireland’s potato crops for consecutive years.

The museum makes clear that that the blight, coupled with longstanding British governmental indifference to the plight of the Irish, resulted in the for the most part needless suffering and deaths of 1.5 million Irish men, women and children and the emigration of more than two million to nations around the world.

The new museum also makes clear that the tragedy occurred even though there was more than adequate food in the country to feed its starving populace. The ports remained open, the tariffs were still paid. Exports of food and livestock from Ireland actually increased during the darkest years of the Great Hunger, at times under armed guard.

Art works by celebrated contemporary Irish artists will be featured at the museum, including internationally known sculptors John Behan, Rowan Gillespie and Eamonn O’Doherty. Other works by contemporary Irish visual artists like Robert Ballagh, Alanna O’Kelly, Brian Maguire and Hughie O’Donoghue will also be shown.

Featured paintings that capture some of the sense of crisis and calamity also will include several important 19 and 20 century works by artists such as James Brenan, Daniel MacDonald, James Arthur O’Connor and Jack B. Yeats.

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