Great Irish Famine Memorials in Words and Images

International Journal of Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage

Volume 6 Issue 2 What is Pilgrimage? Article 12

2018

‘at the altar of memory’: Great Irish Famine Memorials in Words and Images

E. Moore Quinn College of Charleston, [email protected]

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Recommended Citation Quinn, E. Moore (2018) "‘at the altar of memory’: Great Irish Famine Memorials in Words and Images," International Journal of Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage: Vol. 6: Iss. 2, Article 12. doi:https://doi.org/10.21427/s09w-rw18 Available at: https://arrow.tudublin.ie/ijrtp/vol6/iss2/12

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Cover Page Footnote Sincere gratitude is extended to the author's fellow editors of this special issue, and to the Journal's editors for their tireless efforts and indefatigable patience. Most of all, the author wishes to thank all of the 'Famine Walk' travelers, visitors and mourners who shared feelings, insights, and family stories while visiting commemorative sites dedicated to the victims of An Gorta Mór. Go raibh míle maith agaibh go léir.

This academic paper is available in International Journal of Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage: https://arrow.tudublin.ie/ijrtp/vol6/iss2/12 © International Journal of Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage ISSN : 2009-7379 Available at: http://arrow.dit.ie/ijrtp/ Volume 6(ii) 2018

‘at the altar of memory’: Great Irish Famine Memorials in Words and Images

E. Moore Quinn College of Charleston [email protected] After discussing some of the most important facts and figures pertaining to An Gorta Mór (the Great Irish Famine of 1845-1852), this article turns to some of the images of monuments, crosses, stones and sculptures erected in commemoration of those who succumbed during the period. Alongside the images are travelers' statements, many of which were captured by the author while journeying to 'dark pilgrimage' sites in Ireland, Canada and the United States. Key Words: dark pilgrimage, famine walks, memory, An Gorta Mór, Great Irish Famine

Throughout the world, wherever people from Ireland and-a-half fled starvation and disease on ‘coffin ships’ migrated in the mid-nineteenth century due to the which all too often became, as Daniel O’Connell travail of the Great Famine, one finds travelers eager to labeled them, ‘ocean hearses’ (Potter, 1960: 155). learn more about the relatively unknown story of what When the potato failed, the indigent succumbed is more commonly referred to today as An Gorta Mór, because even basic nutrition was beyond their means The Great Hunger, The Great Starvation, or, to be most or because it was earmarked for lucrative export. accurate with the Irish language translation, The Great Hurt (Kinealy, 2002: 2). A major current of modern Relief measures, frightfully inadequate and often ill- travel is ‘dark tourism’ or ‘dark pilgrimage,’ journeys conceived, failed to stem the tide of suffering, and undertaken to historic sites of tragedy in order to attitudes toward the needy were full of castigation and express sorrow, to demonstrate solidarity, to recover blame (Daly, 1995: 126). One Cambridge University identity, and even to seek reparation. Travelers take professor opined: ownership of a woeful past to alleviate the pains of injury caused by An Gorta Mór; they visit the sites The people of England and of Ireland . . . are where the horrendous events occurred, witness their among the most dissimilar nations in Europe. aftermaths, and participate in a shared recuperation. One is chiefly Protestant, the other is chiefly Roman Catholic; one is principally This is how the past becomes present; it is also how manufacturing and commercial, the other pilgrimage fulfills one of its promises to become almost wholly agricultural; one lives chiefly in transformative on personal, communal, and global towns, the other in the country. The population levels. of one [England] is laborious . . . no fatigue repels them—no amusement diverts them from Most visitors to Great Hunger memorials, whether they the business of providing the means of come singly, in pairs or in droves, are on these sorts of subsistence . . . That of the other [Ireland] is commemorative quests. Longing for a chance to pay indolent and idle (cited in Small, 1998: 20). their respects, they wend their way to sites as near as With dominant ideas about a denigrated ‘other’ their own hometowns and as far scattered as the holding sway, it is little wonder that, for nearly a satellite memorials of Montréal, Toronto, Boston and century, knowledge about An Gorta Mór was New York (Mark-Fitzgerald, 2015). One man revealed destroyed, obscured and/or suppressed (Kinealy 1995: that it was his lifelong wish to visit Grosse Île, Canada, 29; Lee 1995; Ó Gráda, 1992: 87-102). Largely told where some of his kin, after having fled Ireland, perished all the same. ‘I have been given a chance to grieve,’ he told me. Kind acknowledgements are extended to all of the individu- als who shared with me their experiences of traveling to An Gorta Mór sites in Ireland, Canada, and the United States. I During its most baleful years of 1845-1852, An Gorta also wish to thank my fellow editors whose careful com- Mór claimed over one million lives; another million- ments improved this work. Go raibh mile maith agaibh go léir.

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only in whispers or in the confines of family anecdotes This photographic essay seeks to provide yet another and narratives, folkloric accounts revealed tales of dimension to the opening of what has remained too what had happened in communities and local districts: long out of sight and out of mindfulness. Allowing the words and images to speak for themselves in a There were houses in this district in which all minimalist fashion, it is a small compendium of what died of fever and none were buried. Things my fellow ‘pilgrims’ told me as we moved through the were so bad at that time that no one cared how sacred spaces of An Gorta Mór monuments in Ireland, the other was. Every household was left to itself Canada and the United States. Together we came to and no one would come in or out of it. Families understand how memorialization ‘helps people cope began to die and the rest were so weak and far spent that they could do nothing for them but with the existential dramas of our human condition in leave them until the last one in the house died. post secular society’ (Margry, 2011, 8). We came to All in the house died and bodies lay here and the experiential understanding that memorials hold not there through it. They were never moved from only the dark and bitter truths; they occupy carved it . . . (cited in Quinn, 2001: 79). shelters for memories where surviving generations can pause to bear witness and mourn. As grandchildren and However, the overall tone was one of silence: great-grandchildren burning with a desire to know the truth of our families’ pasts, we cobbled together The land of song was no longer tuneful; or, if a fragments of ‘who’s who,’ reminded that ours are not human sound met the traveler’s ear, it was only that of the feeble and despairing wail for the the first searches; indeed, thousands more were made dead. This awful, unwonted silence . . . during during the staggered afterlife of An Gorta Mór as well. the famine and subsequent years, struck . . . One of many entries in the Society of Missing Friends fearfully upon [the people’s] imaginations . . . reads: (Petrie, 1855: xii). Of BRIDGET CARROLL, a native of If there was little to sing about, there was also little to Killacooly, parish of Drumcliff, co. Sligo, who talk about, especially in the mother tongue. Many of was taken into Grosse Isle hospital, below those who perished from the hard-hit areas had learned Quebec, in June last, and has not been heard Irish at their mothers’ knees without a written form; from since. Any information respecting her will many survivors who took to the high seas were native be thankfully received by her brother, Patrick Carroll, care of Mr. Samuel Downer, Second monolingual speakers of Irish as well. How could the street, South Boston, Ms. 1 January 1848 (Irish latter tell of their travail in the language of the Central, 2012). destination societies to which they traveled? By and large, their suffering had muted them: And so our journey begins at Grosse Île, an island in the Saint Laurence River of Canada, and the Irish It is not surprising [that] they never wanted to Memorial National Historic Site. talk about it and who could blame them . . . they were ripped from their families, catapulted across the bitter bowl of tears . . . [they] arrived penniless, many speaking no English (Irish Central, 2012).

Only in recent times scholars, professional and amateur alike, are translating the few recorded testimonies in Irish Gaelic and lifting the veils of reticence regarding the cultural, economic, social, religious and geographic realities of what happened between the fateful years of 1845-1852 (Kinealy, 1997; Ó Gráda, 1999; Ó Murchada, 2013; Quinn, 2018). In the process of learning about those wrenching times, tourists and travelers are visiting sites and monuments in their resolve to keep the story of An Gorta Mór alive. This is productive pilgrimage, travel that refines and restores memories threatened with the same extinction as those mourned.

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‘I am but one of so many descendants who stand at the altar of memory in reverence, hungering to know the story that ultimately illuminates my life.’

Figure 1: Installation in the lazaretto [hospital] at Grosse Île, Quebec, Canada. E. Moore Quinn, 2017. Used with Permission.

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‘. . . we are here in great privilege to remember . . .’

Figure 2: Tourists boarding the ferry to Grosse Île’s Irish Memorial National Historic Site, Quebec, Canada. E. Moore Quinn, 2017. Used with permission.

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‘Our people have suffered great losses . . . We are here to heal the past and work for a future free of such devastating loss.’

Figure 3: Tourists entering the lazaretto [hospital] at Grosse Île’s Irish Memorial, Quebec, Canada. E. Moore Quinn, 2017. Used with Permission.

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‘ . . . I blinked away the tears as the priest sprinkled holy water onto the engraved names . . . his simple gesture reminding me of oceans crossed, salty tears of loss shed. My people . . . were represented among the names inscribed . . .’

Figure 4: Partial view of the list of names who perished at Grosse Île’s Irish Memorial, Quebec, Canada. E. Moore Quinn, 2017. Used with permission.

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‘The memorial, so tall and majestic, erected so many years ago, still stands and gives memory to tragedy . . . ’

Figure 5: The Celtic Cross at Grosse Île’s Irish Memorial, Quebec, Canada. E. Moore Quinn, 2017. Used with Permission.

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‘Here in Cohasset, bodies thrown from the Brig St. John, children, mothers, fathers, aunts, uncles [were] lost to the towering gales of the Atlantic that taunted them with the site of the shore yet making land impossible. . . .’

‘ . . . I'm struck with the tale of the bundle that is discovered, an infant who has somehow survived, an infant who becomes a long time inhabitant of Cohasset, who lives to raise a family, whose descendants are here in this town.’

Figure 6: Celtic Cross Memorial, Cohasset, Massachusetts.

E. Moore Quinn, 2015. Used with permission.

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‘ . . . visiting the Brig St. John Memorial . . . always makes me think of my Father's mother . . . whose family emigrated from Ireland in the same year (1849) in three separate groups. Fortunately they all survived the horrific journey and settled in New York City. Honora, my grandmother, went on to marry another Famine survivor . . . who emigrated as a young orphan after his parents died.’

‘Their courage and determination in facing the multiple barriers of discrimination and [trying to] make the most of the opportunities in this country have always inspired me. When I think of those who died off the coast of Cohasset because of a Nor'easter, it makes me all the more aware that but for the Grace of God, my grandmother could have suffered the same fate.’

Figure 7: Base of the Celtic Cross Memorial, Cohasset, Massachusetts. E. Moore Quinn, 2015. Used with Permission.

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‘ . . . reminiscent of past memorials visited . . . graveyards of white crosses signify the lives taken by devastating hunger and accompanying disease; white crosses . . . and stones upon stones . . . some marked only with an x.’

Figure 8: The graveyard of victims of An Gorta Mór buried at Grosse Île’s Irish Memorial National Historic Site, Quebec, Canada.

E. Moore Quinn, 2017. Used with permission.

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‘I remember the search for the ‘black rock,’ which bustling commuters pass by daily without so much as a glance, but which to me represented the pilgrim’s search for another nugget of the story, another link in the chain of Irish migration to an oilean úr, the new world . . .’

Figure 9. The Black Rock Monument, Montréal, Canada. Part of the inscription reads, ‘To pre- serve from desecration the remains of the 6,000 immigrants who died of ship fever A.D. 1847-48.’ E. Moore Quinn, 2016. Used with Permission.

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‘What drives me to the shore of this site, to the other sites, what has driven me to New York City where stones from every county in Ireland come together in the remembrance of horror so long ago?’

Figure 10: Irish Hunger Memorial, Battery Park, New York City. E. Moore Quinn, 2017. Used with permission.

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‘How can I do any less than remember and salute them?’

Figure 11: Sculptures of the Ireland Park Famine Memorial, Toronto, Canada. E. Moore Quinn, 2016. Used with Permission.

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‘I’ll always remember learning that the Doolough poor and starving had walked miles, as they had been instructed to do, only to be told that the inspectors were at lunch and could not be disturbed.’

Figure 12: The Doolough Famine Walk Memorial, Leenane, County Mayo, Ireland.

E. Moore Quinn, 2017. Used with permission.

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‘I have traveled from upstate New York to be here and attend a memorial Mass for those lost so many years ago.’

Figure 13: Famine Graveyard Memorial, Skibbereen, County Cork, Ireland. E. Moore Quinn, 2016. Used with Permission.

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‘My heart swelled in acknowledgement of their belief in a better life, their journey to a new world, their indefatigable hope . . .’

Figure 14: Irish Famine Monument, Cambridge, MA. The base reads: ‘Never Again Should a People Starve in a World of Plenty.’

E. Moore Quinn, 2017. Used with permission.

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‘ . . . My own future is assured by their devotion.’

Figure 15: Plot of the un-coffined victims of An Gorta Mór, Famine Graveyard, Skibbereen, County Cork, Ireland. E. Moore Quinn, 2016. Used with Permission.

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‘They raised a family of ten and worked very hard to educate them, including the daughters.’

Figure 16: Irish Famine Memorial, Boston, MA.

E. Moore Quinn, 2017. Used with permission.

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‘As we walk . . . I realize the blessing of this memorial, like the others, is to bring people together as one, to call upon ancestors to fill our hearts with compassion. That is the best part of peace.’

Figure 17: Irish Hunger Memorial, Battery Park, New York City. E. Moore Quinn, 2017. Used with Permission.

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‘I have been given a chance to grieve . . .’

Figure 18: Plaque in the Famine Graveyard, Skibbereen, County Cork, Ireland. E. Moore Quinn, 2017. Used with Permission.

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