ADDRESS BY THE PRESIDENT OF IRELAND, MARY McALEESE AT THE OPENING OF “AN GORTA MÓR-THE GREAT HUNGER”
ADDRESS BY THE PRESIDENT OF IRELAND, MARY McALEESE AT THE OPENING OF “AN GORTA MÓR-THE GREAT HUNGER” EXHIBITION
A chairde agus cairde Ollscoil Quinnipiac, is cúis áthais dom bheith anseo libh tráthnóna leis an taispeántas speisialta seo a oscailt mar chomóradh ar an Gorta Mór. This exhibition dedicated to Ireland’s Great Hunger has come to the Consulate General thanks to the work of Dr. John Lahey, the generosity of the staff and benefactors of Quinnipiac University and in particular the archival mission of the Lender Family whose Special Collection of rare art and literature allows us to interrogate that dreadful time through fresh eyes.
I particularly acknowledge the support of the Lender Family in ensuring that Quinnipiac had the resources to purchase and house this elegant and important collection on the Hamden campus.
An Gorta Mór - The Great Famine devastated 19th century Ireland and left a long-term imprint on the Irish psyche. It ruptured the history of Ireland and it changed the history too of the United States, Canada and Australia. The terrifying deaths of a million souls were followed by mass evictions and mass emigration. The failure of the humble potato crop on which so many depended revealed a much more complex set of frailties and failures for Ireland was then a deeply troubled British colony where even a British Government Commission had been forced to acknowledge in the years immediately before the famine
“our strong sense of the patient endurance which the labouring classes have exhibited under sufferings greater, we believe, than the people of any other country in Europe have to sustain”.
The causes, realities and consequences of the Famine have long since consumed the curiosity of artists, historians and a host of other commentators. We have the benefit of knowing how things turned out over the century and a half which followed and that gives us some degree of perspective. We can now interrogate more astutely the predictable culture of institutional denial and establishment-oriented analysis that follows such cataclysmic events. These things and the discourses they give rise to so often merely added to the sense of neglect of the true core of the story and that is the fate of the individuals whose lives were immediately and dreadfully affected, and the fate of those who carried their memory down through the generations, to the present day.
The artwork and literature that surrounds us in this exhibition can probe some of the emotions and responses evoked by the collective memory of those years. There can be little doubt that both the narrative of Irish nationalism and British Empire were changed dramatically by the Famine and its effects on the physical and psychological landscapes. These exhibits also help us to appreciate some of the most fundamental challenges that survivors and their descendants faced; challenges that were both practical and psychological, from the trauma of seeing so much suffering, to the trauma of uprooting and rebuilding a life in a strange place, living with grief and living also with both the gratitude and guilt of being a survivor.
Art and literature cannot tell it all but in a world of patchy memory and sometimes deliberate amnesia they can nudge us to a renewed empathy with those who suffered in our own awful past and a fresh determination to be among those who watch out for and speak up for the poor and oppressed in today’s world. In these magnificently harrowing works, the artists have succeeded in giving voice and above all respect to our voiceless and faceless forebears whose suffering and sacrifice is lodged somewhere in our individual and collective DNA.
The children I met at a school in Brooklyn today have been studying the Great Hunger and I was struck in talking to them just how naturally and spontaneously they turned their hearts and minds to the humanity of those who suffered and died. The unfairness of such poverty and oppression seems so clear to them and they look to us, the big people who are in charge of things, to reassure them that in our time and our place we are doing what we can to ensure there will be no more such episodes in the history we are creating today and tomorrow.
In the end words are inadequate to express the profundity of tragedies like an Gorta Mór so let me leave it now to the exhibits to do what art does best as it invites each one of us in. Go raibh mile maith agaibh.