Aussie artist's gesture for the Cork medics who saved his life
John Kelly and his wife Christina at the Famine memorial at their home in Reen.
Nicholas Cummins, a Justice of the Peace from Annmount in Cork City, penned a letter to the Duke of Wellington in the winter of 1846 to try to raise awareness of the horrors the potato famine was wreaking in West Cork. "It is situated on the eastern side of Castlehaven Harbour, and is named South Reen," Cummins writes of a village of 200 people that he had visited, before describing scenes that make for painful reading to this day: corpses eaten by vermin, mothers without the strength to bury their children's bodies.
The artist John Kelly now lives at the scene of these horrors: he bought a cottage and 13 acres in Reen in 2003, on a rugged headland where the village of South Reen once stood.
