Irish Memorial (Leacht Quimhneachain Na Gael) at Penn's Landing in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
by Glenna Goodacre (click name for more of that artist's work)

Erected to commemorate An Gorta Mor - Ireland's Great Hunger of 1845 - 1850 when more than one million Irish were starved to death and another million forced to emigrate. We celebrate the indefatigable spirit of the Irish that enabled them to triumph over tragedy. With the opportunity to use their innate talents in a free country, the survivors and their descendants contributed in great measure to the development of this nation. Glanna Goodacre, Sculptor 2002

The hunger ended but it never went away. It was there in silent memories from one generation to the next.

The time to take away the silence has come, to commemorate, to mourne what was lost, to celebrate what survives - without apology or fear.

We have it in our power not only to remember what took place but to relive it ... To find in the hungry and lost, not a different race ... but the faces of our ancestors ... An image of ourselves. Peter Quinn

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1. Ireland's Past - A Prelude to Disaster

To fully understand The Great Huner, its impact on the Irish people, and the resulting diaspora of th Irish nation, it is essential to examine both the history of Ireland and events leading up to the catastrophe. The twelfth century marked the beginning of 800 years of English rule and Irish resistance. Throughout the centuries, English laws were enacted to strip the Irish not only of their land, but also of their unique cultural heritage, their customs, language, laws, and religion. These unjust laws punished the Irish simply for being who they were

The mid-sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw the greatest confiscation of the most fertile Irish land located in the eastern part of the country. By 1691, approximately 80% of the land had been taken, forcing many Irish people to flee westward. The results of these forced displacements were evident in the 1841 census, which indicated that the greatest population density was now found in western Ireland, a region where, unfortunately, the poorest farmland was located.

This brutal confiscation of land was followed by more than a century of "Penal Laws." These policies, designed to virtually enslave the Gaelic majority by allowing foreign landowners to possess large tracts of land, reduced Irish land holdings, thereby eliminating any real participation of the Irish people in the governing of their own country. To vote, one had to own property. The land was usually owned as large estates by absentee English landlords who subdivided it into smaller parcels and then rented it at predatory rates to their Irish tenants, ironically, often to the very same tenants whose families had once owned the land.

The impoverished Irish farmers warded off eviction by paying the high rents with the crops they grew. However, to sustain their families, tenants needed to find an additional crop to grow for their own food; a crop that would prosper in even the poorest soil. With it ability to produce a strong yield, its high caloric content, and its rich supply of vitamin C, potassium and carbohydrates, the potato became the perfect solution for staving off their hunger. Because virtually no alternative food was available, the potato became the staple of the Irish diet. Thus the stage was set for a catastrophe when this source was lost.

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2. The Potato Blight - Its Origin

The fungus that decimated the potato fields of Ireland in the mid-nineteenth century is well named. Phytopthora infestans, literally "infesting plan destroyer," can, under the right conditions, reduce the foliage of a field of potatoes into a putrid mass in just a few days. A common disease of potatoes wherever they are grown, the devastating fungus is particularly prevalent in area where the weather is unusually cool and wet, such as it is in Ireland. Remaining localized during the years where weather conditions were warm and dry, the disease became widespread in the wet years of the mid-1840s.


Crossing from North America to Belgium in 1843, the potato blight traveled to the Isle of Wight and then to England. Following its devastation of the potato crops in both France and Holland, the fungus appeared in Ireland in September 1845 where it promptly destroyed about forty percent of the country's potato crop. In 1846, almost 100 percent of the crop was lost. The year 1847 was considered the wost of all because of the especially harsh winder; crops fared no better from 1848-49. These losses were catastrophic to the people who lived in rural Ireland because of their forced and complete dependence on the potato.

The disease remained a mystery to botanists, who mistakenly attributed its cause to excess moisture created by the damp, still weather. In 1845, the official committe of inquiry, believing the disease to be a kind of "wet rot," suggested that the best way to prevent the rotting of the potatoes was to store them in well-ventilated pits. Other suggestions offered to alleviate the dampness included drying the potatoes with air, drying them in a kiln, or covering them with ashes. Most experts in 1845 did not seriously consider the idea that the mold on the potatoes could have been caused by a fungus. This misdiagnosis led to government complacency about the potato harvest [of] 1846 and the failure to remedy the problem in the years immediately following.

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3. An Gorta Mor - Ireland's Great Hunger

To this day, all over Ireland the landscape bears mute testimony to the events that occurred in the horrific period from 1845 - 1850. Starvation graveyards offer silent tribute to the millions of Irish men, women, and children buried in unmarked mass grames. Thriving villages were replaced by heaps of moss-covered stones. Although historians have not agreed on the numbers who perished, most estimates range between one and three million.

Following the passing of the 1800 Act of Union, which abolished the Irish Parliament, Ireland was included as part of a "United Kingdom." However, this change in status did not result in equal treatment of the Irish. When the potato blight struck, British government measures to mitigate the Irish starvation were limited by an economic ideological straightjacket favoring laissez-faire policies over human and social needs. British public opinion suggested that the fickle Irish had brought this disaster upon themselves. People now agree that it was an outrage that Ireland, a member of the United Kingdom, the richest kingdom in the world at that time, should have been brought down by starvation in an era of comparative peace and relative plenty.

Today a growing number of historians believe the term "famine," often used to describe the lack of food leading to this desolation, is totally inappropriate. Although it is certainly true that the fungus eliminated the potato as a food source, it is also true that only one crop failed. While her people cruelly suffered, Ireland was producing more than enough food to feed them, but food was being removed at gunpoint by Queen Victoria's troops garrisoned in Ireland for this purpose. In 1847 alone, 4,000 ships carrying L17,000,000 worth of foodstuffs, 10,000 head of cattle, and 4,000 horses and ponies sailed to England. That same year, etched in memory as "Black 47," saw 500,000 Irish people die of starvation and related diseases.

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4. Starvation

The Great Hunger in Ireland led to the greatest loss of life in western Europe in the 100 years between the Napoleonic Wars and World War I. Whole families and villages fell to starvation and accompanying diseases. Cholera, deadly fevers, dysentery, scurvy and typhus swept the population. People died in such great numbers that it was impossible to record all the deaths or to make enough coffins for burials. "Trap coffins," which were made with a trap door in the bottom, were used for the trip to the cemetery. Once there, the coffin was placed over the grave and the trap door opened to drop the body into it, leaving the coffin ready for the next victim.

Tenants who were unable to pay the landlords found themselves evicted and their homes destroyed, so that they had no shelter as well as no food. The homeless, evicted from their small plots, died along the roadsides. Those arrested for taking food for their starving families could find themselves bound in chains on prison ships to Australia.

British government relief efforts were largely limited to establishing soup kitchens, poorhouses, and public works projects, which failed because they were too few and poorly managed. The main voluntary attempts to deal with the crisis, especially in the west of Ireland, were undertaken by The Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) whose organizers included William E. Foster and James Tuke. Philadelphia merchant John Wanamaker, headed the Relief Committee and also contributed to the Friends' effort from this country. Eight ships filled with provisions sailed from Philadelphia. Others who contributed to the relief efforts included the Choctaw Indian Nation and The Society of the Friendly Sons of Saint Patrick of Philadelphia.

Gone were the laughter of children at play, the cheerful greetings as one neighbor met another: "The famine silence, as it came to be called, seized the imagination of visitors and gave them a deeper feeling of the country's devastation than anything else they encountered," writes Thomas Gallagher, author of Paddy's Lament. "It was," he continues, "as if the entire country had become an open tomb, with voiceless specters moving about under a shattered sky whose thunder and rain alone made any sound."

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5. Passage and Emigration

In hopeless circumstances at home, the Irish fled their homeland by the hundreds of thousands each year. From 1845 - 1855, nearly a quarter of the population emigrated, mostly from rural, Catholic, often Irish-speaking areas of Ireland. They fled to England, to Australia, and in greatest numbers to North America, seeking new homes in Canada and the United States. Thus began a pattern of emigration that would become a psychic trauma in Irish life for over 100 years.

There had always been a migratory pull to the New World of the Americas. The Irish had played a major role in the earliest days of colonial life in America, but those Irish were driven by a sense of opportunity and adventure in a new world. during the starvation years, the exodus of the Irish was driven by desperation.

At the height of the Hunger Migration the five to eight week journey was especially perilous. The most desperate took unprecendented winter passings to Canada on what came to be called "Coffin ships" where fever and typhus became unwelcome shipmates. Many of these shops were cargo vessels used to bring lumber from Canadian forests to build English cities. Now Irish immigrants served as human ballast in the holds of these ships for the return trip. Thousands perished on the journey or in quarantine stations on arrival in the land they had hoped would save them. Historian Cecil Woodham-Smith writes, "The thousands who poured over the Atlantic in 1847 were fugitives, a helpless horde of the kind which flees from a bombed town." Despite the trauma of the journey, they continued to come and would do so for generations following The Great Hunger.

Right: Excerpts from a letter dated 1847, written in Ireland by Hanna Curtis Lynch, to her brother John Curtis, in Philadelphia. It describes the destitute conditions in their townland. Hannah pleaded with John to send money to allow her and other remaining family members to buy passage. Hannah's pleas did not go unheard. She and her husband migrated in 1848.

My Dear Brother John
My uncle told me you got a letter from me. I related to you the state of th Country in that letter. Therefore I need not go over it any more only the distress that was amongst the people at that time was nothing to what it is at present the people are in a [stormy?] state. the poorhouse is crowded with people and they are dying as fast as they can from 10 to 20 a day out of it there is some kind of a strange fever in it and it is the opinion of the Doctor it will spread over town and country. No person can be sure of their lives.

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6. Arrival and Reception

The New World was often hostile to this flood of impoverished Irish immigrants. In America's cities, including Philadelphia, they arrived to face the native "Know-Nothing" movement, which defined "American" in terms that excluded the newly arriving Irish as "papists," "foreign paupers," "a motley multitude." Most came from rural, agricultural backgrounds, but they landed in an urban, industrial world. Many had never been more than 20 miles from home before undertaking the hazardous trans-Atlantic journey. Apprehensive, but eager to start a new life in freedom, they disembarked at ports like this one on the Delaware River in Philadelphia. However, when seeking employment, they were often greeted with the message "No Irish Need Apply." Yet, by 1850, 18% of the population of Philadelphia was Irish.

Attitudes toward the Irish were typified by an English commentator who described Irish immigrants as "more like tribes of squalid apes than human beings." A prominent Philadelphian wrote of the Irish that they had "revolting and vicious habits. Being of the lower order of mankind, they were repellent to those hwo were further advanced in the social scale."

Philadelphia historian Dennis Clark summarizes their plight: "The antipathy toward them rested not only on their reputation for violence and their religious difference from the bulk of the city's natives, but also upon their competition for jobs at the lower occupational levels, their menial status, their foreign aspect and clannishness... To the grievous sufferings of the famine generation were added the cultural and class indictments of a largely hostile public opinion in the country to which they had fled."

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7. The Irish in America

The first wave of Hunger Emigrants faced enormous difficulties, but they found a foothold in what became America's first urban, ethnic ghettos. Often, they lived in overcrowded hovels beset by disease, crime, unemployment, drink, and despair. Their communities were dubbed "Paddytown," "Irishtown," "Micktown." But against great odds, they endured. They sought whatever work could be found, becoming newly industrial America's cheap laboring force. They built railroads and bridges, dug canals and tunnels, went into mines, tended furnaces, worked as servants and seamstresses, and fought and died to preserve their new found home. Two hundred sixty-three natives of Ireland would go on to earn the Congressional Medal of Honor, more than from any other foreign country. The Irish forged a cohesive communal voice by forming labor unions, political organizations, and cultural and religious societies. Gradually, they became Irish-Americans.

Their struggle paved the way for those who would follow. In the 60 years after The Great Hunger, over 6 million would leave their homeland, 80% coming to the United States, a pattern of chain emigration that would continue well into the 20th century. In 2000, over 44 million Americans claimed Irish heritage, many tracing their roots back to the dark days fo the Hunger Migration and its aftermath in Irish life.

Over the years the Irish have not only made a place for themselves in mainstream America, they have shaped it in new ways. By the beginning of the 20th century, only 50 years after the great migration, teh Irish had become major influences in every area of American culture. Their sportsmen flourished on the playing fields and in the boxing rings; their songs and music filled the stage. As time progressed, their writers redefined American literature; Irish names became prominent in business, science and industry. Perhaps one of their greatest achievements would come in fashioning a place in American political life. Coming from a world in which they had no voice, they flourished in the openness of American democracy. In 1960, a descendant of Hunger Emigrants, was elected to the highest office in the United States.

From great suffering can come great strength.

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8. The Lessons of the Great Hunger

This memorial commemorates the struggle and pain of those Irish who fled their homeland in the face of a hunger of catastrophic proportions. it celebrates their courage and honors them for opening the door for others. Their story springs from one dark period in the history of a distant island, but their journey and arrival changed the face of American life and forged an enduring link between Ireland and America.

As it was for the Irish long ago, America remains a hopeful refuge from suffering and injustice. The Irish experience, its traumas and its triumphs, stands as a model from which we can learn and grow. "The Irish, by being the first and largest urban minority group with which American society had to deal, and by working their way into the general society, would constitute an example for the array of immigrants who would follow them" (Dennis Clark).

In 1994, speaking at the site of a quarantine station at Grosse Isle, Quebec, where 5,300 Irish died in 1847, Mary Robinson, President of Ireland, challenged her listeners to be participants in history rather than mere spectators: "If we are participants then we realize there are no inevitable victims...If we are participants, we engage with the present in terms of the past."

In looking at this monument on the edge of a river in a great American city, we honor the past, but we are also challenged to look at the present and to the future. For the most part the children and grandchildren of The Hunger immigrants have prospered and are grateful for the bountiful blessings of America.

We must be mindful that prejudice still exists, especially toward newly arived immigrants. Let this memorial serve as a beacon of hope to all who come here. To them we say in greeting "Cead mile failte!" One hundred thousand welcomes!

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