US museum illustrates horror of Irish Famine

While he grew up in New York, John Lahey recalls, the Famine was almost a taboo topic.

But these days, the Quinnipiac University president and former grand marshall of the New York St Patrick’s Day parade is determined to show the world the horror and learn from the tragedy.

Ireland’s Great Hunger Museum, which the Connecticut university is opening to the public on Oct 11 in Hamden, has the world’s largest collection of visual art, artifacts, and printed materials related to the Famine, officials say. It’s known in Irish as Músaem an Ghorta Mhóir.

“To have this museum right here I think is going to be a huge draw for Irish-Americans and others,” said Mr Lahey, 66. “I think it’s going to become a nationally known and indeed an internationally known place to come and to learn about that part of Ireland’s history.”

Mr Lahey, citing the work of historians, blames the British government that ruled Ireland at the time for making the tragedy much worse. There was plenty of food to feed the starving masses, he claims, but exports of food and livestock were shipped under military guard to England.

“I would describe it as a callous disregard for human life,” Mr Lahey said. “The response was minimal at best. I think the message of the Great Hunger is that governments have a responsibility for their citizens and when there is a crisis of that nature, it’s not business as usual.”

Historians have argued for generations over the degree to which Britain contributed to the disaster. The British government had refused to send large-scale food aid after the first year of the Famine because it would cost too much and hurt agricultural prices.

Former British prime minister Tony Blair in 1997 offered a statement of regret for British policy during the Famine.

Among the 75-80 exhibits in the museum is a painting of a couple burying their child and another of three peasant children representing the three faces of Ireland — the beautiful, the mischievous, and the dangerous.

Another exhibit commemorates hundreds of Famine immigrants who died of disease in quarantine camps on New York’s Staten Island and buried in a mass grave. Their names, ages, and cause of death are etched into bronze tables.

Newspaper illustrations from the time show starving children, barefoot and dressed in rags, turning the soil trying to find a potato.

“Each day, each hour produces its own victims, holocausts offered at the shrine of political economy,” one letter to a newspaper stated. “Famine and pestilence are sweeping away hundreds, but they have now no terrors for the poor people. Their only regret seems to be that they are not relieved from their suffering and misery by some process more speedy and less painful.”