Conference explores impact of Ireland’s Great Hunger – at home and abroad

The Irish Workhouse Museum in Portumna is organising a conference,  Black ’47, to mark the 175th year anniversary of 1847, the worst year of Ireland’s Great Hunger.

It’s on Saturday next, May 21,  from 9am-5pm, and will include six lectures from leading researchers in the field.

Dr Gerard Moran will speak on Sending back Ireland’s Paupers: The Repatriation of the Irish from Britain During the Great Hunger.

A retired academic who lectured at NUIG and Maynooth University, Gerard is a researcher at NUIG’s Social Science Research Centre. His  specialist areas include Irish emigration and the diaspora, the Great Famine, landlord-tenant relations and local history.

Kathleen Villiers-Tuthill will explore Patient Endurance: The Great Famine in Connemara.

From Clifden, Kathleen has written several books and many articles on the  history of West Galway. Her work draws mostly on primary sources, from public archives and private collections. She has received two Heritage Awards from Galway County Council and an honorary Master of  Arts degree from NUIG for her contribution to the county’s heritage.

Dr John Cunningham’s talk is ‘We won’t allow one grain of corn to leave the country’. Protest and resistance, 1846-47.

John lectures in History at NUIG, where he is Director of the MA History programme. A former editor of Saothar: Journal of Irish Labour History, he has published on subjects including the moral economy of pre-Famine Ireland, Irish local history  and global labour history.

Dr Regina Donlon will deal with The Famine Irish in Toledo, Ohio: An Exploration of ‘Mutative Ethnicity.

For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.

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