The Trail of Want and Exodus
On a soft fall day in late October, a family takes a Sunday drive after Mass with no intended destination. The car radio plays, the children sing, the mother reads the parish bulletin. In the distance, the father sees a potato field. Not unusual on the east end, save the motionless silhouettes he sees set against the late afternoon horizon. In the failing sunlight there is a muted glow to them, as if flecked in bronze, or threaded with gold.
He slows and still they do not move. He stops the car and turns off the radio, drawing his family's attention to the still motionless panorama before them. As they exit the car and wander towards the field they come upon a path that winds through rotting leaves and weathered roots, leading them towards the silent silhouettes. They see now that they are life size statuary in bronze.
The first a farmer digging into tortured earth that yields but a blighted harvest as they read a plaque that describes the start of An Gorta Mor, the Great Hunger. Farther along they wander the path and come upon the gentry landowner on steed demanding payment from a tenant farmer, whose crop will yield no bounty. Along the way a family burying a child, the victim of starvation. Then a family driven from their home, country folk searching for work in the nearest town or city. Then the scene of ragged clothed urchins on street corners, begging homeless and orphaned. A city filled with husbandless mothers and motherless children, all waiting for the passage, abandoned with only hope to nourish them.
Finally, they come upon the Jeannie Johnston and her herded masses in exodus from the land they love, disembarking upon the land they will come to embrace and call their own.
This family, this day have come upon the Great Hunger Memorial, they have walked the Trail of Want and Exodus. And in the words of Ireland’s greatest poet, W. B. Yeats, “They are changed, changed utterly…”
Douglas MacKaye Harrington
February 24, 2007
This stunning and emotional 14-station, life size, bronze memorial will take months, if not years, to create and place on the campus of the Irish Cultural Centre of Long Island and Great Hunger Memorial. The culmination of the memorial will be the remarkable full size bronze of the Jeanie Johnston, the Irish Emigrant Ship, from midships to bowsprit, and will include the Captain and Dr. Richard Blennerhassett on the deck overseeing the disembarking of the refugees of An Gorta Mor to the shores of America. Please be sure to check back and visit often to witness the creation of what will be a world class memorial like no other.
