A West of Ireland town has remembered those who died or were forced to emigrate in the famine that robbed it of half its population.

Irish children in primary and secondary schools have been asked to hold a minute's silence to remember those who died in the Great Famine.

An Antrim potato farmer has re-cultivated a variety of potato at the root of the Great Famine, making it available in Ireland for the first time in almost 170 years.

Scientists at UC Riverside in California have discovered the genetic trigger for the Great Potato Famine in phytophthora, a genus of molds that infest potatoes, soybeans, tomatoes and avocados. It was known that phytopthora caused the potato rot but not how it took hold.

Documentary film ‘Famine and Shipwreck: An Irish Odyssey’ tells the gripping story of a group of Irish emigrants’ flight from the famine, their fight to survive shipwreck, and to start a new life in Canada.

Marie Reilly, a premier Irish fiddler who recently released her new album "The Anvil," will perform at Ireland's Great Hunger Museum.

When you step into the new Great Hunger Museum near the campus of Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut, you are almost entering hallowed ground.

Abraham Lincoln, the 16th President of the United States, was one of 15,000 people worldwide to donate money to Ireland during the Great Irish Famine. This is according to evidence unearthed by respected Irish historian Christine Kinealy, who has studied and written extensively on the Famine for 20 years.
 
Kinealy, a Professor at Drew University in Madison, New Jersey, was rustling through the list of donations and was taken aback when she saw the name of the legendary president who donated $10 or $500 in today’s financial climate.
 
‘This was back in 1847 when Lincoln was only a newly elected politician to the House of Representatives. It was an insubstantial sum from an unimportant figure at the time but it is retrospectively very interesting,’ the Trinity College graduate stated.
 
The 2009 winner of the Will Herberg Award for Excellence in Teaching asserts that this donation was not out of character for Lincoln, who had a lifelong rapport with the Irish.
 
‘I suppose Lincoln always had a great affinity for the Irish and their plight. He knew and recited Robert Emmet’s speech from the dock and his favourite ballad was Lady Dufferin’s poem ‘The Lament of the Irish Emigrant’ set to music.’ 
 
The celebrated politician’s generosity was not unrivalled however, and many other political figures gave money also. The famine was widely reported at the time and Kinealy’s ceaseless research also uncovered donations from then American President James L. Polk, who donated $50, and from controversial British monarch Queen Victoria.
 
‘There were so many donations across the world and it really shows how much sympathy people had for what the Irish were going through. There are donations from China, India, Australia and Russia to name but a few.’
 
Kinealy’s latest book is only one of a number of publications the academic has released on the famine and she is widely regarded as one of the foremost experts on the subject.
 
‘The Irish Famine is an essential part of the Irish story and has been my interest and passion for the past 20 years.’  
 
Her book, titled ‘International Donations, Private Charity for Ireland during the Great Hunger: The Kindness of Strangers’, will be published by Bloomsbury Press and is set to be released by the end of the year.

The Irish Famine Tribunal has planned a fundraiser in South Street Seaport, Manhattan, ahead of the Fordham Law School assessment of the impact of the Irish Famine.

Quinnipiac University President John L Lahey has announced that Ireland’s Great Hunger Museum, Museam An Ghorta Mór, home to the world’s largest collection of visual art, artifacts and printed materials relating to the Irish Famine, will open on 11th October 2012.

As part of an ongoing series Cohesion arts are set to release their second volume of musical stories relating the moving stories of Irish immigrants in the American Civil War.

In a Daily Beast column, author John Kelly writes that Paul Ryan is "making the same economic mistakes that hurt his forefather in the Great Famine."

From Irish emigrants during Ireland’s Great Famine to the Republican party’s candidate for the Vice President of the United States, Mitt Romney’s new running mate Paul Ryan’s Irish roots run deep, as his brother Tobin recently explained.

A memorial to the famine victims will be erected in Mayo to coincide with the Gathering festival for the Irish Diaspora next year.

The Great Famine Tribunal Committee will host an international tribunal in New York this October to examine from a legal perspective the response of the authorities to an Gorta Mór.

Up to three ships from the Ottoman Empire sailed up the River Boyne to Drogheda to deliver supplies during the famine, according to a local historian.

READ MORE ]]> http://www.irishcentral.com/story/roots/the_irishamerican/the-ghosts-in-our-genes-82722982.html http://www.irishcentral.com/story/roots/the_irishamerican/the-ghosts-in-our-genes-82722982.html Tue, 26 Jan 2010 02:30:27 PST The past is never dead It’s not even past,” the writer William Faulkner saidI was peeling potatoes for dinner when blindly reaching into the plastic bag my fingers felt something soft, and then the smell hit me I upended the bag and there was the rotten potato READ MORE ]]>