Famine Field

This photograph tells a story. The potato was once the staple food of the people of the West of Ireland. A terrible tragedy unfolded when in 1845 the crop failed, destroyed by blight. About three million people - half of the population at that time - died from starvation or emigrated to the USA. One can sense the terrrible anguish the father of this little farm must have felt as he watched helplessly as his wife and children starved. He and his family were possibly evicted and the walls and roof knocked down for non-payment of rent.

"The bones of the mountains showing through the scanty earth, as the bones of the last people here showed through their flesh (dead...or fled before the holocaust) The near destruction of a race is plainly shown through the never harvested potato drills, with their last bitter crop of rotten fruit which spelt death to the Irish. Had I been born on some desert island, far removed from here, it is my belief that I would have known, in some glimmering race memory, that an unimaginable disaster had befallen my tribe. I would have known from the melancholy moods that sometimes possess me, and still afflict my people".          Lar Redmond, Irish Poet