July
26, 2002 9:00 a.m. Grief
and Shame
Remembering
the Irish famine.
inding myself in downtown Manhattan on Monday afternoon with an hour to
kill, I thought I would take a look at the new Irish
Hunger Memorial, dedicated July 16 by New York State Governor George
Pataki and various other dignitaries. The memorial is in Battery Park
City, at the westernmost end of Vesey Street. I came at it from the north,
walking down Broadway, and without thinking just took a right onto Vesey,
intending to walk westward to the riverfront. That didn't work: because
of the events of September 11 last, a stretch of Vesey is fenced off,
and I had to hook round north and then south to get to the memorial. This
accidental juxtaposition of the horrors of our own time with those of
five generations ago gives food for thought all by itself, and helps put
one in an appropriately somber frame of mind when encountering the memorial
at last.
For commemorative
objects of this kind, the traditional approach favored stone obelisks
inscribed with words, or statues of representative human figures in suitable
poses, set on an inscribed plinth. The modern artistic imagination ranges
much wider than that, of course, and you either like this change of style
or else you don't. I myself mostly don't. In part this is because I dislike
the best-known instance of it: the Vietnam War memorial in Washington
D.C., which seems to me ill-conceived and depressing, encapsulating —
and designed to encapsulate — all the negative emotions about
that war that poisoned American life for an entire generation. In part
it is also because, whenever I see a striking piece of modern monumental
art, I look up the artist in a library or on the Internet to see what
he has to say for himself, and find that what he has to say is invariably
expressed in some dialect of post-modernist flapdoodle, studded with leftist
clichés. Brian
Tolle, leader of the team that designed the Irish Hunger Memorial,
is no exception to this rule.
I was therefore surprised
to find myself thinking that the Irish Hunger Memorial is a modest artistic
success. To get an idea of what it is like, imagine a large concrete slab,
irregularly shaped but roughly a rectangle, 30 yards by 50. Holding one
of the shorter sides of the rectangle to the ground, lift up the opposite
side to a height of about 20 feet. Cover this inclined plane with some
representative Irish landscape: soil and scattered rocks, imported heather,
grass and wild flowers, and a roofless, ruined stone cabin. Build plain
walls to support the slab beneath, and inscribe them with random sentences
drawn from contemporary accounts of the famine. Cut a tunnel from the
interior of that ruined cabin down to the sidewalk outside, and line the
walls of the tunnel with similar inscriptions. Include some speakers broadcasting
spoken equivalents of those inscriptions. Place the whole ensemble in
a quiet park overlooking New York Harbor, so that if you stand at the
high end of the slab you have a clear view to Ellis Island and the Statue
of Liberty.
Having been a proud
Englishman for most of my life (until April
19 this year, to be precise), and of a contrary and unapologetic cast
of mind, I had an extra layer of resistance to overcome before liking
this memorial. The fact is that English people, educated ones at any rate,
have a bad conscience about Ireland. We feel about the Irish the way white
Americans feel about blacks. There is a sense, of course, in which collective
guilt of this sort is absurd. I myself never did anything to any Irish
person; and when the Irish were starving, my own ancestors — peasants
and coal miners in the English North and Midlands — were hardly in
any better condition. (One of my Staffordshire forebears, in fact, according
to family lore, was transported to Australia for sheep-stealing just a
few years before the Irish famine, and never heard of again.)
And yet, if pride
in your country's past achievements is a proper component of honest patriotism,
as it surely is, then there is nothing unhealthy about nursing some shame
towards the past misdemeanors of your country (or, in my case, ex-country).
It doesn't do to let these sorts of emotions, neither the one nor the
other, get out of hand, and I don't approve of the kind of wallowing in
shame that the PC crowd go in for; but yes, if your country did something
wrong 150 years ago, you ought to be a bit ashamed of it. And there is
not much doubt that in the matter of the Irish famine, some blame must
fall on the British governments of the time.
Exactly how much
blame is a matter of lively argument among historians. There is an extremist
position — not held, I think, by any honest scholar — that the
famine was an act of British policy. That is preposterous. The personalities
of the political actors involved are all well known from their own letters
and writings, and from the reports of their contemporaries, both friend
and foe: none of them was of a type to contemplate anything so monstrously
wicked. Incredibly, though, this demented version of the famine story
is the one required by law to be propagated in the public schools of New
York State. "History teaches us," said Governor Pataki, signing
the relevant law into effect in 1996, "that the Great Irish Hunger
was not the result of a massive failure of the Irish potato crop but rather
was the result of a deliberate campaign by the British to deny the Irish
people the food they needed to survive." What history actually teaches
us that amoral shyster pols of the Pataki type will do absolutely anything
to curry favor with a noisy faction. Curious George's support of this
law was a straightforward pander to extremist Irish-American groups —
people who cynically use the memory of the famine to further their fund-raising
efforts in support of the international terrorist movement. (The upcoming
trial of IRA men in Colombia, accused of helping arm and train that country's
narco-guerillas, illustrates sufficiently well where these funds end up.)
The famine has, in
fact, been the subject of even more misrepresentation than is the average
for historical events that can be mined for political purposes. Its uniqueness,
for example, has been much exaggerated. Famine was chronic in Ireland
until the legal and social improvements of the later 19th century. Prior
to the Great Famine of 1845-47, there had been one in 1821-22 that was
almost as dreadful, with a quarter million people dying of hunger and
consequent diseases. The famines of the18th century helped drive the great
wave of "Scotch-Irish" Protestant emigration to America —
famine was no respecter of religious denomination.
Nor was famine an
artifact of British rule. There was a terrible famine in A.D. 665, long
before any such nation as Britain, or even England, existed. Responding
to it, the High Kings called an assembly of all Ireland at Tara, where,
under the encouragement of Abbot Fechin of Fore, the Gaelic warlords who
ruled the country prayed to the Lord to send some sickness that would
"relieve the nation of part of the burdensome multitude of inferior
people, so that the rest might live more easily ... the excess of numbers
being the cause of the famine." The monk Gerald of Mayo, in whose
hagiography these events are recorded, denounced the warlords for their
inhumanity, arguing that they ought to pray for God to increase the food
supply, which He could do just as easily as He could increase the population.
As things turned out, the prayers of the nobles were granted, but with
the inevitable ironic twist: a plague came and killed off the High Kings,
as well as Fechin and many great lords. Gerald was, of course, spared.
(And I can't resist noting that he seems to have been not a native Irishman,
but a Saxon convert from the British mainland!)
Remember These Derb Lines? — Pop Culture Is Filth — Let America's enemies crow today: Tomorrow they will tremble, and weep. — I don't see how you can ever have enough nukes
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inding myself in downtown Manhattan on Monday afternoon with an hour to
kill, I thought I would take a look at the new 
