Music, literature and especially history were the focus of a full day of activities at St. John Fisher College on Sunday May 19, 2013, recalling the Irish famine years known as The Great Hunger.

Thousands of victims of Ireland’s Great Hunger remain buried under Staten Island’s modern structures in unmarked mass graves. Now, over 160 years later, the remains of some of those victims will be re-interred in a Memorial Green, part of the multi-million Supreme Court complex, in St. George.

The Connemara country house and sporting lodge, the Delphi Lodge, is taking responsibility for its part in Famine deaths by participating in the annual commemorative famine walk. During the Famine, Delphi Lodge turned away hundreds of people who later perished from hunger, cold and disease.

St. John Fisher College, in Rochester, NY will host an Irish famine remembrance event called ‘A Rochester Irish Gathering’ beginning at 10 a.m. on Sunday May 19.

A Connecticut university will host the symposium, “Exploring the Legacies of the Great Hunger: The Cultural, Spiritual, Psychological and Political Consequences for Today’s Ireland from Centuries of Colonization” on May 17.

Tim Pat Coogan, the Irish historical writer and author of “The Famine Plot,” will lecture and sign books at Ireland’s Great Hunger Museum at Quinnipiac University.

The absence of cameras in 1845 and the lack of shocking artifacts as are found in Holocaust museums could have hindered Quinnipiac University’s chances of creating a successful Irish potato famine museum.

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.

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.

The crisis moment in our collective history, the year zero through which our past and our present must always travel, is 1847.

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.

Taoiseach Enda Kenny was on hand in Drogheda, Co Louth for the National Famine Commemoration Day. Kenny spoke in front of a crowd of 1,500 people who turned out to remember those lost during the Famine.

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By: Sheila Langan

When John L. Lahey was a boy, he once accompanied his father, a hard-working bricklayer, to a worksite. He wanted to see what his father’s job was all about, and to try it out for himself. His grandfather, Daniel Lahey, an immigrant  from Knockglossmore, Co. Kerry, had been a stone mason, so the craft was in the family.

It has been confirmed that the Ottoman Empire did give aid to the Irish people during the Great Famine.