Dedication of the
Western New York Irish Famine Commemoration
Monument, August 23, 1997
Western New York's
Irish-American community dedicated its monument to
the victims of Ireland's Great Famine of 150 years
ago in ceremonies Aug. 23 on Buffalo NY's
waterfront. The stark stone monument is at the foot
of La Rivière Street on a slight rise at the
edge of Erie Basin. The site is ringed by trees and
is separated from Erie Basin by a walkway. The
monument serves two purposes, according to Chuck
Treanor, president of the sponsoring Western New
York Irish Famine Commemoration
Committee.
"First, it commemorates
the millions of people who suffered and died in the
Famine years. This monument is part of the
world-wide observance of the 150th anniversary of
the Great Famine. And it also honors the many
people who came to Buffalo to form the present
Irish community."
A procession led by the
Erie County Sheriff's Department Pipe Band marked
the start of the dedication ceremonies on Saturday,
August 23, 1997.
Other highlights of
the morning, according to Mike Flynn, master of
ceremonies for the event, included:
The singing of the
U.S. and Irish national anthems. Patricia DeLaney
Coppola of the Town of Tonawanda will sing the Star
Spangled Banner and Bill O'Connell of the Olean
Ancient Order of Hibernians will sing the Soldier's
Song.
A blessing by the
Rev.William Roche, chaplain of the United
Irish-American Association.
A description by Chuck
Treanor of the committee's efforts to build the
monument. He also will recognize the committee's 18
founding organizations.
A talk on world hunger by
Erie County Sheriff Tom Higgins.
Dedication of the memorial
by the Most Rev. Henry J. Mansell, bishop of
Buffalo
The singing God Bless
America, led by Common Council Member Bonnie Kane
Lockwood.
Also attending the
ceremonies were a delegation from Cork City,
Ireland, including Lord Mayor David McCarthy, City
Manager Jack Higgins, Chief Legal Officer David
O'Hagan, and City Engineer Brian Parsons. Cork
provided invaluable assistance with the
monument.
The monument, designed by
Rob Ferguson, combines tradition with symbolism. A
12-foot-tall granite stone is the key element,
recalling the ancient standing stones that dot
Ireland. The stone is set in a well to symbolize
the great silence that fell upon Ireland when the
Famine struck. Fanning out from the monolith is a
field of granite memorial stones inscribed with the
names of individuals or families. It was the sale
of those stones that provided much of the funding
for the project. Forming the outer ring of the
monument are 32 limestone blocks, representing
Ireland's 32 counties, and four larger blocks
representing the four provinces.
The monument carries two
inscriptions, one in Irish and one in English.
Engraved in the stone around the edge of the well
is this verse by local poet Tim Daly:
"Our hearts
are with them in the Earth,
and they with us
within our hearts.
Now we, together,
live forever.
We are the harvest
of the blight,
let us not fail our
seed."
A plaque at the base of
the central stone is inscribed in Irish with a
verse from the Book of Luke. Translated, it reads:
"If they were to keep silence, I tell you the very
stones would cry out."
The city of Cork donated
the monument's 36 rough-hewn limestone blocks. For
more than 100 years those blocks were part of
Penrose Quay in Cork harbor, where so many Irish
took their last step in Ireland. The standing stone
is from Carraroe, County Galway.
More than 800 memorial
stones have been reserved. The stones are still
being sold. Each stone costs $125. Information
forms are available by mail from Craig Speers,
Treasurer, 140 Winston Road, Buffalo, N.Y. 14216.
Most of the larger stones have been sponsored. Each
will have a plaque with the name of the donor
organization or individual. A few of the stones are
still available, at $1,000 each.
The monument is near
what was once the western end of the Erie Canal, a
major route from the ports of the Northeast to the
American Frontier. Buffalo played an important role
in the lives of refugees from the Famine. Many
settled in this area. For many more, Buffalo was
the gateway to new lives farther west.
IRISH-AMERICAN HERITAGE IN BUFFALO & WESTERN
NEW YORK
Immigration: Buffalo's
Famine Memorial
FAMINE MEMORIAL
RE-DEDICATION SPEECH, AUGUST 28TH, 1999
In August, a crowd
gathered on Buffalo's waterfront to rededicate the
Irish Famine Memorial. Many speakers had wonderful
things to say about those who contributed to help
make a dream become a reality. One speech in
particular, truly from the heart and soul of one of
Ireland's brilliant sons, brought tears to those
listening to the beauty and truth of his words. As
requested by many who attended, justice would not
be served for such eloquence unless his speech was
reprinted in its entirety and with full permission
...
Cuir suas duit féin
comharthaí bóthair,
Ardaigh clocha
críche;
Tabhair suntas math don
tslí,
An tslí ar imigh
tú.
One hundred and fifty
years ago there were people standing over there,
along where that famous canal is buried, who would
have understood these words of Jeremiah if they had
heard them in the language I've just spoken - the
Irish language.
Down there was the old
Eighth Ward and southwest of it the breakwater
where many Irish families clung to a close but
precarious existence. Many of these would have
understood those words.
Ed Patton reminded me that
up there, were the double span isn't, was Fort
Porter, where the Irish boys shipped out for war in
Virginia. Many of them would have understood those
words because we know they said their prayers in
Irish before they entered the Bloody Wheatfield or
stormed Marye's Heights. When they returned they
had to fight their way on old Erie Street over
there, where you drove in, to get to the polling
booths and vote. They were arrested for their
pains.
Most of all, in this
place, I think of Jeremiah's words from the Book of
Consolation, Leabhair an tsólas, being
understood by many of the tens and tens of
thousands who passed on canal barges behind you,
heading for Cleveland, Chicago, Nebraska.
If all these could hear me
now, they might indeed be consoled to know that six
generations after An Gorta Mór, the Great
Irish Famine, Yahweh's command to his shattered
people has been obeyed:
Set up your
signposts,
Raise yourself
landmarks,
Fix your mind on the
road,
The way by which you
went.
An tslí ar imigh
tú, the way by which you went. This signpost
and landmark, this stone monument sent from
Ireland, marks the way by which we went.
Like Jeremiah's people, we
were lost, scattered, oppressed, broken, our ways
and history and beliefs and language shunned and
despised, our spirit mangled and darkened by a
previous 150 years of exclusion, coercion, and
penal laws. Over half our people had been reduced
to existing on a single, vulnerable subsistence
crop. Over 800,00 had fled their homes for America
in the previous 45 years, homes said to be equaled
only by the hovels of the poor in
Calcutta.
Still they lived the laws
of their communal lives and amazed the horrified
travelers from abroad with their hospitality and
kindness to strangers, until a darkness and terror
and despair came that was a kind of final solution,
a kind of holocaust visited upon a land and people
that lived in the backyard of the largest and
richest empire the world had known. In five years,
1845 to 1850, three million poor souls were dead or
fled. Then came the Great Silence.
Maybe all the birds' eggs
had been eaten. Maybe the dogs that hadn't been
eaten had slunk into the hills. No song. No bark.
No word. The land lay like a stone. Deep within the
silence, in south Kerry, incised on a flat stone:
"1847. Let none meddle hear."
The Great Irish Famine was
unique in its scale and ferocity and duration in
modern world history, and it left after it a
frightening silence. Political and economic causes
were suggested, but what words could measure the
indescribable effects? Mass graves and mass
evictions. Numbers numb with zeroes. The terror
years of exodus. The loss of song, music, names,
place names, a whole language. But more sinister
than all this was the silence brought on by the
dark and bitter shame of any people deemed
dispensable, considered expendable, economically
unviable, better off dead.
150 years later, on
February 2nd, 1995, the President of Ireland, Mary
Robinson, broke the silence in an address to the
combined houses of the parliament of the Irish
Republic. She called on all her scattered diaspora
around the world, 75 million now, 43 million in
this country alone, to launch a global and local
commemorative effort to remember and understand An
Gorta Mór, the Great Irish Famine, so that
he healing could begin and the people be united, so
that the gaping wounds could be salved and sutured,
so that the hurt silence could ring with the voiced
of a diverse people who had assumed their proper
dignity, and so that the experience of such a
healing could serve as a beacon to people suffering
hunger and political and economic breakdown in the
present, and to those who might be unaware of
disasters yet to come.
She said: The weight of
the past, the researches of our local interpreters
and the start of the remembrance of the famine all,
in my view, point us towards a single reality: that
commemoration is a moral act, just as our relation
in this country to those who have left it is a
moral relationship. We have too much at stake in
both not to be rigorous.
To commemorate means to
call to remembrance. A monument is a structure of
stone erected so that the dead will be remembered
perpetually. But it's also something that serves to
identity, to locate, to mark, to indicate, even
something that gives a warning, as a portent does,
of dangers and disasters to come. This mute
monolith is indeed then, in Jeremiah's words, a
signpost, a landmark on the way by which we went,
the first word in a new language of
care.
It is the gift to us from
the city of Cork, along with the 32 county stones
from the quay in cork upon which tens of thousands
of famine emigrants trod before they boarded the
boats that would bring them here. In the eloquence
of these stones, Ireland touches us, comes to us,
joins her voice to ours. Here, we live again in
Ireland, in Western New York, in the world, and Rob
Ferguson's design incorporates the displacement
westwards of a centre and an origin. The field of
names whispers to us not only of those who have
gone before, but testifies that his monument was
built by the ordinary, the extraordinary, people of
Buffalo and Western New York.
Like the ancient,
eloquently silent standing stones of Ireland, which
invariable stand in or by a spring, this granite
signpost emerges from a well of silence and so
breaks that silence. The Irish words within it are
those of Jesus when he is warned by the authorities
to silence his followers on his last journey to
Jerusalem: "If you shut these people up, the stones
themselves will scream it out."
For hundreds of years
Ireland had a Pale, behind which a well supplied
and defended authority dedicated laws and values to
the mere Irish outside. The Pale is much, much
larger now, but outside it are hundreds of millions
of mere humans in Africa, in Asia, and in the
Americas --the dispensable ones, the expendable,
the economically unviable, the better off
dead.
Let this monument on
Buffalo's waterfront rise from the well of silence
to say this far and no farther to the forces of
erasure and forgetting and indifference.
I hope you will take care
of it, and that the names of the people who built
it will never fade.
And I hope it will always
remind you of the too often unheard principle on
which it was built: that all are as one.
Go n-éirí an
bothair libh go léir.
--- Speech given on the
occasion of the re-dedication of the Western New
York Irish Famine Memorial on the Buffalo
Waterfront, August 28th, 1999, by Laurence J.
Shine
The Famine began in August
1845 as a blight began killing the sole subsistence
crop, the potato, and the Irish people fell victim
to catastrophe. During the next five years about 1
million Irish people died of starvation or disease
and another million were forced to leave
Ireland.
The committee is
sponsoring a Famine Mass to commemorate each of the
five years of the Great Famine, 1845 to 1850. Each
memorial Mass features Irish music, poetry readings
and the recitation of the Lord's Prayer in Irish.
The Mass for 1997 was October 4 at Our Lady of
Victory Basilica in Lackawanna.
The committee also
is working to fight the hunger that continues to
plague Western New York and the world. As a living
memorial to the Famine victims, committee members
collect food and cash at each public event for
hunger relief. Since that aspect of the committee's
Famine commemoration began, hundreds of dollars and
hundreds of pounds of food have been collected for
the Western New York Food Bank.
The Western New York
Irish Famine Commemoration Committee is a
non-profit organization in the State of New York.
For more information contact: Edward J. Patton, The
Western New York Irish Famine Commemoration
Committee, P.O. Box 192, Buffalo, N.Y. 14208-0192.
The telephone number is (716)
662-4300.
