Ireland: The National Famine Memorial

Two summer's ago my family and I decided it was time to "visit the Motherland", and we took a two-week trip to Ireland. We stayed in a house on the west side of Ireland and traveled all over County Mayo and visited Galway, Ireland: a port city.  One day on our trip, my sister, my dad and I decided to hike up Croagh Patrick Moutain (picture above). Legend has it that St. Patrick climbed this mountain as a pilgrimage in forty days, and each year on a day called "Reek Sunday" around 15,000 people make a holy pilgrimage up this mountain...barefoot.  It has to be painful! From experience hiking this mountain (with shoes), I can tell you that the path you see is made completely of loose, jagged stones. We did meet some people in our journey up the mountain climbing barefoot but we soon passed them as they moved slowly and deliberately in pain.  While I could tell you some interesting stories about our climb up Croagh Patrick mountain,  I instead want to focus on a monument my mom discovered back down at sea level.

The first two pictures above are pictures of the National Famine Memorial in County Mayo. ( I had my own pictures, but i bought a new laptop before college and my pictures are saved back home.)  Many of you know the "Great Famine", as it is called in Ireland, as the "Irish Potato Famine" which occurred between the years of 1845 and 1852.  The famine was caused by a potato blight that left potatoes, the main food source for the impoverished Irish people, inedible.  The famine took the lives of over 1 million Irish people and caused the emigration from Ireland of 1 million more.  There are memorials across the country for this historic disaster, and each one tells an interesting aspect of the story of the famine through rhetoric. I want to focus on the one I saw personally and discuss how the sculpture conveys a story through its composition.

As you walk towards the structure you see an old, dark ship, and you begin to understand a story of travel. The ship is angled away from the inland and towards the bay which indicates a story of emigration instead of immigration.  You notice that the ship is in poor condition, it is dingy, dark and lacks sails. The masts to support the sails remain, and eerily look like crosses that you would find above a grave. You also see what looks like waves rolling along the sides of the ship, but from your viewpoint you can quite make out what they are. The story of the sculpture has enticed you, so you approach the sculpture to examine it closer.

When you reach the sculpture the message finally hits you like a mordant surprise. What you assumed were waves are really skeletons of famine victims.  The entire story can now be interpreted.  The skeletons seem to make up the ship, much like the famine makes up a large part of Ireland's history.  Their bodies are contoured in the shape of waves an many look like they are trying to jump off of the ship.  This tells that their emigration was an escape from certain death to a less certain death.  Many of the emigrants knew that they may not make it to America, but they were willing to risk the journey to avoid a certain death staying on the starving island.

Finally, the dark color scheme and jagged and spindly composition of the ship and the skeletons convey this event as a grim moment in the history of Ireland.  The Great Famine is a major part of the Irish heritage and a source of sadness.  Ireland lost close to 25% of its population in the great famine and this monument conveys a story of a struggle up to the point of death for the Irish people.  It is a story of sadness in which lucky people would risk death and emigrate from the homeland they loved, while the unlucky people stayed back and faced hardship, starvation and certain death.