AMERICA:A memorial is using the tragedy of the Irish Famine to raise awareness about hunger in our own time writes LARA MARLOWE
THE QUARTER-acre farm was transported from Co Mayo, stone by stone. So were the grass and weeds.
The Famine monument is elevated and tilts upwards, as if it were about to take off over New Jersey.
The destruction of the World Trade Center, one block away, delayed its opening, when the 21st-century atrocity poured ash and debris on to the memorial to the 19th century cataclysm.
From the top of the Goldman Sachs tower, the Taoiseach and his delegation looked down at the tiny farm and were amazed to see “this little patch of Ireland” nestled at the foot of the skyscrapers, on the edge of the Hudson River.
Down on the ground, Brian Tolle, the artist who designed the memorial, explained it to me: the passage inspired by passage tombs, the striated bands of glass and stone to represent the geology of the Cliffs of Moher.
More than two miles of text about the Irish Famine can be read through the glass, but also about famine in today’s world.
Across the street, the Battery Park City Authority has donated a building to house the Action Center to End World Hunger.
“We’re using the tragedy of the Irish Famine to raise awareness about hunger in our own time,” Tolle explained.
“The Famine is really about the politics of land use; who owns it and who has access to it.”
I had just returned from Haiti, where absentee landowners are one of the biggest impediments to rebuilding homes destroyed in the January 12th earthquake.
“The politics of land use” suddenly seemed very relevant.
The most sensible thing I heard during a week in Haiti was Brendan Rogers, the head of Irish Aid, suggesting Haiti needed a land commission similar to Ireland’s in the 1930s.
At Arás ná hEíreann on July 12th, the Irish Voicenewspaper honoured 67 influential Irish and Irish-American women.
Niall Burgess, the consul general who is returning to Dublin after a brilliant three-year stint here, recalled how New York in the late 19th and early 20th centuries “was to a large extent run by Irish women.
“A lot of the great houses were maintained by Irish women who arrived penniless at Ellis Island.”
If Irish America has maintained a strong tradition, Burgess suggested, “it is because the sense of Irishness was transmitted very vigorously and passionately by successive generations of women.”
Christine Quinn, the speaker of the New York City Council, is living proof.
“I was lucky enough to have two Irish grandmothers, Nelly Shine and Nelly Lancer,” Quinn recounted. One was a maid, the other a nanny.
“They were the toughest, smartest women I ever met.”
Nelly Shine told Quinn how she survived the sinking of the Titanic. “When the other girls dropped to their knees to pray, I took a run for it.”
Most of the men in Quinn’s family were New York policemen. At gatherings, Grandma Nelly ordered them to place their guns in a drawer, which she locked with a key, returning the weapons when the men were sober.
“There was never an incident at a Quinn-Callaghan barbecue,” Quinn laughed.
At City Hall this week, the Taoiseach presented Quinn with a gift: a copy of Nelly Shine’s name, entered by hand in the 1911 census in Cork.
Two things about the Irish diaspora in America have surprised me: how close the bond remains after more than a century and a half and how different Irish-Americans are from their Irish cousins.
It was the Taoiseach who brought the Irish diaspora together for the first time last year at Farmleigh.
Cowen paid homage to that bond here this week, saying: “The need to look upon the diaspora as a tremendous resource has only come to be understood lately.”
Elizabeth Frawley Bagley is one of the 67 women who were honoured by the Irish Voice. Bagley was Bill Clinton's ambassador to Portugal, and now serves as secretary of state Hillary Clinton's special representative.
Bagley’s grandmother Elizabeth Vaughan “lived with us from the day I was born”, she said.
“She brought live shamrock. She sang all the songs.”
Bagley and her seven brothers and sisters “were imbued with the love of Ireland from the beginning.”
Bagley has served on the board of the American Ireland Fund for two decades. The fund produced an “amazing” report on diasporas, including not just the Irish, but Jews, Indians and others.
“Kieran McLoughlin [the president of the AIF] asked us to sponsor a diaspora conference,” Bagley continued. Hillary Clinton, who often cites the positive role of the Irish diaspora, loved the idea.
Each of the state department’s six regional bureaux is contacting diasporas from their area, and the department will convene the conference early next winter.
“It’s going to transform the way we see foreign policy,” Bagley predicted.
In the future, she envisions the many diasporas that comprise America “working from within to help their homeland”.