Ireland's Great Hunger Museum: The World's Largest Famine Art Collection
Near New Haven, Connecticut
On the campus of Quinnipiac University, in the Hamden suburb just north of New Haven, a small museum once housed the largest collection of art relating to the Irish Great Famine anywhere in the world. It was an unusual thing to find in a Connecticut suburb, and its story says something about who built New England and what they carried with them.
The Irish Famine of eighteen forty-five to eighteen fifty-two killed approximately one million people and forced another million to emigrate in those years alone. Over the following decades, another four million left Ireland, many of them coming to the cities of the northeastern United States. Connecticut absorbed a significant Irish immigrant population, and by the early twenty-first century, Irish American heritage was woven deeply into the region's Catholic parishes, labor unions, and political organizations.
Ireland's Great Hunger Museum was founded in twenty twelve through the vision of Quinnipiac University's president John Lahey and funded substantially by Murray and Marvin Lender, sons of Jewish immigrant parents from Poland, who saw in the Famine's history a resonance with their own community's experience of catastrophe and displacement. The collection they assembled included work by contemporary Irish sculptors John Behan and Rowan Gillespie, whose haunting bronze figures of emaciated emigrants have become iconic images of the Famine era, as well as nineteenth and twentieth century paintings depicting the suffering and the flight.
The museum operated for nearly a decade before Quinnipiac made the difficult decision to close it in twenty twenty-one. The collection, which had represented the Famine experience to tens of thousands of visitors, moved into storage. Plans emerged to relocate it to Fairfield, Connecticut, in partnership with the Gaelic-American Club, and it now operates as Ireland's Great Hunger Museum of Fairfield.
The museum's short life, and the community effort to save its collection, is itself a piece of the story: an Irish American diaspora in a New England state still reckoning with what the Famine meant, and what it cost.
