The events of 1845–52 in Ireland known as the ‘Great Famine’ constituted a cataclysm unequalled in Irish history. With more than a million dead from starvation and disease, and more than a million in exodus from Ireland to Britain, North America and Australia, today Ireland remains one of the only European nations whose population is smaller than during the nineteenth century. Precipitated by the potato blight, the Famine was exacerbated by a colonial administration whose failure to alleviate the crisis proved disastrous: the impact of the Famine devastated Irish culture, language, and social demographics, formed the basis for the massive...

If twentieth-century attempts to give visual form to Famine memory are to be understood within a tradition of Famine image-making, the obvious antecedents lie in the visual representations of the Irish Famine from the nineteenth century. How was the Famine visually represented and interpreted in its own time, and what meanings do such images communicate? The evolution of the visual culture and representational history of ‘the Famine’ has yet to be satisfactorily mapped, and the relationship of its nineteenth-century iconography to latter-day visualizations both troubles and intrigues. This central question of how ‘famine’ (conceptually and historically) might be represented in...

If the visual record of the Famine from the nineteenth century awaits wider recognition and exposition, there is no doubt its visual representation fell sharply from the public eye with the onset of the twentieth.¹ As the Famine moved from direct experience to received memory, a consistent and defined space within the public sphere of memory, Irish visual culture and commemoration failed to coalesce until the 1990s. Although this chapter is largely concerned with the historical, social and political circumstances of Famine memory’s revival during its sesquicentenary and beyond, some initial reflections on its public memorialization prior to the 1990s...

In Ireland, unlike so many previous epochs of historical commemorations where local efforts piggy-backed onto or modified narratives enshrined at the national level (as with the 1798 rebellion, Easter Rising, or the First World War), the Famine was an intensely local experience, not one which occurred at a remove from daily life. Today the remnants of that experience pervade the depopulated Irish landscape: abandoned stone cottages, crumbling workhouses and overgrown mass graves, and the endlessly stonewalled and subdivided smallholdings that are testament to the meagre acreage allotted to the Famine poor existing at the very margins of society. At many...

As with the monuments of the previous chapter, most community commemorations in Northern Ireland and the diaspora represent vernacular counterparts to officially sanctioned and nationally scaled monumental projects, screened through local concerns, histories and places. Though the rallying cry ‘remember the Famine’ unites these memorials, the outcomes of more than three dozen projects in Northern Ireland, Britain, Canada and the United States constructed since 1990 indicate that key questions of what Famine memory actuallyisandwhyit should be remembered remain far from consensual.¹ From the outset there were concerns voiced in the Irish media that diasporic, particularly American,...

Monuments to the Irish Famine can be found in communities across three continents; while the majority remain relatively unseen, unknown affairs, a small proportion has attained widespread recognition and attention. These memorials are the products of sustained, well-funded, and organized commemorative efforts, usually supported by an infrastructure of official and/or national bodies, and present an embodiment of Famine memory explicitly intended for wider viewership. As a consequence, many bear the scars of protracted civic negotiation and politicized appropriation, of artistic vision and compromise, and of struggles between competing versions of Irish history and identity. They are, in every sense, ‘monumental’...

We have arrived at the beginning of the twenty-first century with two decades of Famine monument-making behind us, and undoubtedly more ahead. Ireland’s overstuffed commemorative calendar now includes an annual day of national Famine Commemoration, yet other memorial sites (in both Ireland and the diaspora) have slipped into quiet decay as the commemorative fever subsides. Throughout the 1990s former Irish President Mary Robinson widely promoted the notion of a ‘shared Famine heritage’ between Ireland and its diaspora, but the outcomes of the 150^thanniversary suggest such concordance is illusory. In Ireland, the legacy of the Famine remains one of displacement...