Examining the connection between the Irish Famine and the 9/11 tragedy

Rocks from Mayo, accounted for in the chaos following 9/11, lie at the core of a Famine memorial in New York, just a stone’s throw from Ground Zero, says Bette Browne.

AMONG the crowds paying homage today at New York’s September 11 memorial, some will likely pause nearby at a roofless cottage marking the Irish Famine and recall the poignant link between both memorials.

Work on the Irish Hunger Memorial, built with stones from Co Mayo, began around the corner from the World Trade Center in March 2001, after the go-ahead from then New York governor George Pataki, and was half completed six months later when terror struck.

The 9/11 attack pulverised the area around the memorial, but it survived. The project’s earth-moving equipment and some raw materials were commandeered during the rescue effort by firefighters and police, many of whom were Irish-American and some of whom died in heroic rescue bids. It was a poignant confluence of tragedies.

“There’s a certain arrogance in assuming that a new tragedy is the worst tragedy,” said memorial designer Brian Tolle at the time. “It is a different kind of tragedy and suffering.”

In another link in the chain, he noticed something unusual on television as he saw the tragedy unfolding. “I evacuated the area like many other people did and when I finally reached safety and had access to a TV set, one of the things that was most shocking to me was seeing Site 26, which is the site just across the street from the World Trade Center and also the place where we had been storing all of the stone materials for the memorial.

“I was surprised to see that in the early hours of the disaster those stones had been accounted for, that someone had actually put police tape around them. It was such a strong image to see the total destruction of the buildings, this heap of devastation and — why on earth in all of this did somebody think that these stones were important? And they were important.”

In fact, the stones were the very heart of the memorial. They were donated by the Slack family of Attymass, Co Mayo, the first village said to have recorded Famine deaths.

The abandoned-looking cottage was constructed on the half-acre site on a hill 25ft above the southern tip of Manhattan, overlooking the waters of the East and Hudson rivers and within sight of the Statue of Liberty. The impact, as I stood atop the hill, was physically and emotionally breathtaking.

The walls of the tunnel entrance to the memorial are covered by almost two miles of illuminated texts of Famine poems, statistics, and quotes, some of which highlight areas of the modern world affected by hunger. Mr Tolle has described the memorial as “a little fragment of Ireland built on a heap of language”. Surrounding the cottage are fallow potato furrows, stone walls, and Irish grass and over 60 varieties of wild flowers and shrubs like heather, foxglove, and gorse.

Stones from Ireland, carved with the names of each of the 32 counties, lie along the grass path, like headstone markers over the dead.

“The firefighters of Irish extraction that lost their lives [during 9/11] were there only because of the cottage,” remarked former President Mary McAleese at the formal opening of the memorial a year after 9/11. The silent voices of Irish Famine victims will now be heard even more, she said, because of the memorial’s proximity to the city’s own tragedy. In that tragedy, some 1,000 of the almost 3,000 who died were of Irish descent, many of whom would have traced their lineage to Famine emigrants.

The designer, Mr Tolle, also wanted the memorial to serve as a reminder of those still fleeing hunger today in so many parts of the world and certainly his juxtaposition of the memorial near the skyscrapers of the wealthy heart of New York City does jolt the conscience.

THE rain was beating ceaselessly as I moved on from the Famine cottage towards the nearby 9/11 memorial along the wet familiar streets of the city I had once called home.

But I kept remembering the raw terror in another city that morning of 9/11. When the planes struck the World Trade Center, I was working with Reuters two blocks from the White House as rumours spread that that was the next target.

Then came the thunderous noise of interceptor planes overhead and reports of another plane down in Pennsylvania. The uncertainty of the next horror chilled the newsroom. In the end, the Pentagon alone was hit.

But the heart of New York had been ripped out. Over a decade later its wounds were still raw: a bunch of flowers tied to the railings of St Paul’s church near where the Twin Towers had once stood and inside on display the heartbreaking photos of the missing that were distributed after the attacks by people frantically searching for their loved ones. When the Twin Towers collapsed, entombing more than 2,500 people, this small church escaped and became a refuge for families and rescue workers.

As we walked on through security checks towards where the towers once stood, my daughter clutched my hand. She had spotted the 9/11 memorial — a huge water pool and then another. She led the way, pointing as we got closer to the names on bronze plates on the stone surrounds of the pools.

The 76 bronze plates hold the names of 2,977 people: 2,600 killed in the Twin Towers and on the ground; 125 in the Pentagon, 44 in Pennsylvania and 202 in the four hijacked planes, as well as the names of six people killed in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

We traced our fingers along some of the names… Ryan, Kelly, Silverstein… as the water cascaded down the dark walls into the deep void of the pool like constantly flowing tears. Beyond was the faint sound of the traffic on the wet streets. But the rain seemed appropriate. Indeed, everything seemed appropriate. New York got its 9/11 memorial exactly right — just as it had its Irish Hunger Memorial.