That the world’s largest collection of visual art and printed materials relating to the Great Famine is in storage in America is a grim story of what happens when a nation fails to take ownership of a central part of its own history
That the world’s largest collection of visual art and printed materials relating to the Great Famine is in storage in America reflects a grim story of what happens when a nation fails to take ownership of a central part of its own historyDetail form Gorta, 1946, by Lilian Lucy Davidson , part of the collection of Famine art currently in storage. Copyright Estate of Lilian Lucy Davidson.
Remembering the Famine is tough because words can fail us. In the Netherlands, the potato blight of the mid-1840s was devastating: an estimated 60,000 people died. In Ireland, the death toll was 1.1 million. If the Dutch tragedy is horrific, appalling and terrible, what words are adequate for the second? The insufficiency of verbal language means that we need a visual one and, until recently, there was a place where such a visual language was most fully explored.
Subsequently, the university claimed that it was transferring the collection to the Gaelic American Club in Fairfield, Connecticut – a social and sporting organisation that is a hive of Irish-related activities but that does not and never has run a museum or art collection of any kind. In September 2022, GAC announced that while it endorsed the idea of moving the collection to Fairfield, “we cannot be a party to the transaction”.
Again, the word that comes to mind is exceptional. Would any other country allow this to happen to such an important repository of the collective memory of its most formative trauma? Indeed, would this happen to an equivalent collection that dealt with the parts of modern Irish history we do like to talk about such as, say, the 1916 Rising? Perhaps, even if the Famine no longer generates a great silence, it remains incapable of generating a coherent sense of collective ownership.
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