Irish Examiner view: Learning compassion from our history 

As President Michael D Higgins noted in a speech in Co Donegal on National Famine Commemoration Day, the fall-out from those years lives with us still. Picture: Clive Wasson

Last weekend’s National Famine Commemoration Day events brought out a number of sobering parallels between the events of 175 years ago in Ireland and what is happening right now in our modern-day society.

An Gorta Mór, ‘the great hunger’, directly caused the deaths of more than a million Irish people and — between 1845 and 1855 — forced some 2.1m people to leave Ireland, in what was one of the greatest exoduses from a single island in history.

The period was contemporaneously known — as Gaeilge — as ‘an drochshaol’ or ‘the bad life’ in literal translation, and the worst year of the crisis was 1847, which became known throughout the land as Black ’47.

As President Michael D Higgins noted in a speech in Co Donegal on National Famine Commemoration Day, the fall-out from those years lives with us still:

Its legacy is one of involuntary emigration, cultural loss, demoralisation and loss of confidence… ramifications which still play out today on so many levels.

President Higgins added further assertion that, in looking to the future, Irish people must reflect on the best lessons we could take from a painful history, and how it might influence our contemporary lives and the lives of others.

That truth is one we as a nation cannot forget. Nor can we overlook that there are now an estimated 63m people of Irish origin living around the world, most of whose ancestors fled a humanitarian apocalypse in this country to find succour elsewhere.

That the Irish thrived and prospered in places as diverse as Britain, the US, Canada, Australia, Argentina, and Chile, is something we should not forget — as is the debt we owe to those places for welcoming our fleeing brethren.

In the context of Irish history and in respect of our wide diaspora, it is incumbent on us, as a modern society, to maturely reflect on our emigration past and welcome those who need help, those needing support and assistance, in the same way it was provided to our countrymen and women when they had nowhere else to turn.

President Higgins’ insistence that Ireland has a moral and ethical responsibility to those seeking shelter here is perfectly correct. 

A growing right-wing clamour for action to prevent immigrants coming to our shores — and even the worrying outbreak of misplaced ‘citizens’ concern’ in Co Clare in the past week — is not only un-Irish, but it is a far from fitting Irish reaction to those in need of our help.