Tag Archives: Strokestown House

March 22, 2026 · 5:55 pm

Global Irish Famine Way: The Vision

Honouring the Famine Diaspora and the Guardians of their Heritage at Home and Overseas

Following in the footsteps of the Famine emigrants, the main trail of the Global Irish Famine Way (GIFW) now stretches along the eastern seaboard of Canada, 15 locations and growing. The main spine runs from Newfoundland to Hamiliton and Niagara. It has been quick work since our launch in St John’s NL in May 2024, thanks to the passion and commitment of Irish and Irish Canadian leaders and communities.  

As International Co-Convenors based in Ireland, Caroilin Callery and I want to pay heartfelt tribute to the leadership of our Co-Convenors in Canada, Professor Mark McGowan and local Ottawa historian Michael McBane. Mark has been associated with the story of Strokestown for many years, diving deep into its rich archives and publishing, among many other books, two great and highly recommended books: Hunger and Hope: The Irish Famine Migration from Strokestown, Roscommon in 1847, and Finding Molly Johnson about what happened to the 1700 Irish famine orphans in Canada. Michael was my chief guide to the capital region’s rich Irish heritage, including the near-forgotten location of the common grave of over 300 Famine emigrants in the heart of the city, buried under Macdonald Gardens Park.

We have now taken another major step forward with the announcement of our Co-Convenors in the United States. Hilary Beirne is a proud son of Roscommon, long settled in New York and providing leadership on a range of Irish activities, notably the New York St Patrick’s Day Parade. With ancestors who died in the Famine, Hilary brings true personal commitment and passion to the rollout of the GIFW in the United States. Professor Christine Kinealy, based at Quinnipiac University in Connecticut, is a renowned historian of the Famine and a longtime supporter of the National Famine Museum. Her many renowned books on the Famine include Charity and the Great Hunger in Ireland: The Kindness of Strangers, a great and insightful read about the international response to the Famine, from Ireland and Britain to North America and India.

Local activists and Irish community groups drive the GIFW forward. They build it from the ground up, guided by the National Famine Museum, our convenors and experts.  

It may sound strange to say this given that a catastrophic famine is what draws us together but along with deeply moving moments of commemoration, working with everyone has been a joy. The GIFW from its inception has been based on volunteer efforts by those of us determined to commemorate the Famine and celebrate the heroism of the Irish who survived it and prospered.  

The GIFW has a vision for what the completed architecture will look like and what it will do: linking locations around Ireland with global sites associated with Famine emigration in both a physical and digital trail that will stretch over 40,000km.

The foundation of the GIFW is the National Famine Way, stretching from the National Famine Museum at Strokestown, Co. Roscommon, to the quays in Dublin. 

The GIFW continues that journey overseas, following the routes taken by Famine emigrants: to Liverpool and the Britain to Canada and the United States, to South Africa and Australia. The trail is marked by Bronze Shoes. Each site has a QR code telling the local story and providing National Famine Way website and its related projects.

The GIFW draws on the commitment of the guardians of the Famine Diaspora overseas and its connections with Ireland. This global community of activists and groups relies on its own acumen and energy to recover and curate our Famine heritage overseas, from ports of disembarkation and fever sheds to common graves and heroes whose compassion offered them solace and hope. We encourage local groups to develop heritage trails in and around each of the Bronze Shoes, to tell the story of the settlement, lives, and influence of the Irish arrivals fleeing the Famine, along with the help that they received.  

In addition to the trail, there is provision for Bronze Shoes to commemorate significant acts of compassion and courage in assisting the Famine refugees, the Famine Hero sites. This ranges from Indigenous assistance in Canada and the US to those who gave their lives helping the fever-stricken Irish, of whom there were over 80 fatalities in Canada alone. 

The third structural element is the Famine Ports of Embarkation Project in Ireland. We count over thirty ports around the Irish coast from which survivors of the Famine fled overseas. The role of many of these ports in the exodus has been forgotten, along with the historical significance of that role and how it reshaped their local economies and history. We plan to put Bronze Shoes and QR codes in each of these ports, allowing visitors to access ships’ manifests and information on the destinations to which the departing vessels were bound. Longer term, we envisage a coastal walking trail around Ireland linking these sites. In this way, the Famine Ports of Embarkation will create a dynamic link between Ireland and the GIFW by connecting embarkation and arrival. 

The Ports of Embarkation Project draws on the commitment of the guardians of Famine heritage in Ireland and its connections with the Diaspora. This community relies on its own acumen and energy to recover and curate our Famine heritage at home, from forgotten mass graves to the restoration of Work Houses and soup kitchens.

The architecture of the GIFW creates a complete experience of the Famine and its global impact. It facilitates our Diaspora to discover where they came from and encourages exploration of the local influence of their ancestors. It also encourages the descendants of Famine emigrants to return to Ireland, to touch the Bronze Shoes on the quaysides from where their forebears left, and potentially retrace their ancestors journey to their original homes. 

Digitally, the GIFW will recover and collate the stories of the Famine Irish as they traversed the Atlantic and Indian Oceans and settled in far distant lands.  

Already the GIFW is connecting disparate individuals and groups who are actively involved. We are only beginning. We eventually will have a very active network literally around the world. To spur this along, we are organizing the inaugural GIFW Conference in May-June 2027, with delegates from each of the countries involved.  

The National Famine Museum, an initiative of the Callery family and now cared for jointly with the Irish Heritage Trust, is at the heart of the GIFW. Its focus is on the story of the Strokestown residents, sent off at great peril in 1847 to Liverpool and then Canada, some 1490 men, women, and children. The central research project at Strokestown is to find out what happened to all of them and to trace their descendants. 

On one of the ships that took them across the North Atlantic, of the 470 passengers on board the Virginius, half of them died from typhus, leading to international headlines and the term coffin-ship.  

The GIFW traces the fate of all Famine emigrants so it would seem appropriate to locate a museum dedicated to them as part of the Strokestown complex, a beacon at home for our Diaspora. This should be a campus not just for visits and exhibitions but of research and learning. So we have begun discussing the establishment of a purpose-built Global Irish Famine Way Museum at Strokestown.  

The GIFW began in earnest with the arrival of the Bronze Shoes on board the Irish Research Vessel Celtic Explorer at St John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador in May 2024. From the outset, we were determined to demonstrate that understanding the Famine was not just a study of history. It was a case study of a humanitarian disaster in which decisions determined the lives and deaths of millions of Irish: decisions by British government ministers and senior officials, Westminster, and the crown. They were, after all, governing Ireland under direct rule for the previous five decades and made critical decisions in response to the disaster.  

Famines are the results of decisions, usually by governments, sometimes by armies. The causation and decisions of the Famine in Ireland are common to many such humanitarian disasters then and since. So is the compassionate response at home and overseas. That is why we dedicate the GIFW to all those who show hope through compassion and success through opportunity to the stranger on your shore. That message is as relevant today as it was to the Famine refugees whose exodus created our Diaspora. 

If you want to find out more, or submit an expression of interest in establishing Bronze Shoes, click here https://nationalfamineway.ie/global-irish-famine-way/

As the GIFW is developed by local volunteer efforts, please share this blog and link.

Eamonn

Dr. Eamonn McKee

26 March 2026

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June 25, 2023 · 6:04 pm

Colonial Twins: Ireland, Canada, and the Great Irish Famine

Address to the Famine Summer School at Strokestown Park House, 24 June 2023

Four Propositions

First, that the Ireland, England’s first island colony, played a key role in the development of its first continental colony, North America, and its later colonies in Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong and elsewhere.  That role continued in British North America even more forcefully during and after the American Revolution.

  • Anglo-Irish from late 1700s (Guy and Thomas Carlton, John Parr, Walter Patterson, George Hamilton and his brothers, John Caldwell, Richard Bulkeley et al) to the Three Governor Generals (Monck, Young and Blackwood) before, during and after Canadian Confederation.  Wellington played a decisive role in the development of Canada after 1812 with his project which I call ‘Fortress Canada’.
  • Irish Protestant tenant farmers leaving Ireland after 1800, notably from Ulster and Wicklow/Wexford.
  • Irish Catholic tenant farmers, soldiers, and labourers, drawn by opportunities in the building of canals, jobs in the lumber industry, and the prospect of land owning.
  • Middle class Influencers: Thomas D’Arcy McGee, Nicolas Flood Davin, Ogle and James Robert Gowan, George Arthur French, explorers, missionaries, educators, journalists, and leading business figures.

Second, that local national government is a key factor in social and economic success and destiny. Conversely, its absence is a key determinant.  Ireland and its capital city prospered in the 18th century with a strong (Protestant but indigenous) Parliament.  Both collapsed into extreme poverty, urban decay, and economic malaise in the 19th century (Belfast excepted).  The abolition of the Irish parliament in 1800 combined with the nature of Britain’s direct rule, are the key determining factors influencing the development of Ireland socially, economically, culturally, politically and demographically.  The origins of the Famine and the authorities’ response to it lies in the Act of Union of 1800.  The abolition of the national government and its role in the Famine does not feature as it deserves to in the historical narrative.  The Anglo-Irish Ascendancy that agreed to the abolition of their parliament signed their own death warrant by handing power to London (e.g. the Encumbered Estates Act).  The fate of Denis Mahon perfectly illustrates that the fate of the Anglo-Irish when disempowered in the face of a great calamity.

Third, that Canada was the future that Ireland never had: The Rising of 1916, the executions, the War of Independence and partition dramatically shifted the paradigm from the consensus of Irish nationalism that reigned from 1870 and earlier.  What the Fenians failed to achieve in 1848, 1866, 1867, and 1870, they achieved spectacularly with the Rising, against the backdrop of fifty years of refusal by London to grant Home Rule.  The official narrative of the new nation state offered no room for the role of the Irish of the Empire, nor even of Redmond’s National Volunteers, ten thousand of whom fought and died in WWI to validate Ireland’s claim to nationhood.  It also therefore obliterated three centuries of Irish involvement in Canada.

The outcome in terms of public history has been to generate a misleading narrative of rebellious nationalists – read Catholics – and loyal unionists.  In fact, the historical record suggests that reversing the polarity would be a more accurate reading.  This has implications for all-Ireland reconciliation and greater mutual understanding.

Fourth, that Irish settlement overseas is the product primarily of colonialism not immigration, though immigration takes place of course, the search for economic opportunities abroad.  However, colonialism provides the only coherent narrative for the Irish abroad over three centuries.

Transatlantic colonialism is also necessary to understanding the creation of the North Atlantic axis between Western Europe and North America, and indeed the fate of the Indigenous of the Americas.  This relationship has been globally consequential: victory in two world wars, the Cold War and now reshaping global geopolitics. 

Ireland and Canada wrested our destinies into our hands in 1867 and 1922. Had we done so more contemporaneously our bilateral relationship would have been very different. With this new autonomy, new official narratives were required about what we stood for in terms of values and ambitions.  In the early formative period, this rendered inconvenient the degree to which Ireland was involved in the Empire: 30% of the British Army in the 19th century, 70% of Wellington’s Peninsular Army, innumerable administrative positions, and participation in settler projects. 

However in recent decades, just as Canada has wrestled with the colonial impact on the Indigenous, Ireland has begun to recover the complexity of its past, and the many strands of Irish identity that have varied by social position and over time. I have often said that Yeats’ line about 1916 as a terrible beauty is born, is really the birth of a terrible simplicity. Our history is complicated as is our role overseas. Not for nothing is this motto of our project Fifty Irish Lives in Canada 1632-2016: “It’s complicated!”

The Famine in Canada and Ireland:

In 1847, Canada learned the lesson of not controlling its immigration laws.  For many Irish in Canada, the Famine has created a false origin story.  As Prof Mark McGowan has stressed throughout his research, Irish settlement patterns in Canada were established in the generations before the Famine.

For Canadians today, we have to remind them of the heroic and compassionate story of their response to the arrival of Famine refugees.  Their assistance, often at the cost of their own lives, is a universal story with a moral lesson about helping the stranger on your shore.

The Famine created the iron triangle of the farm, the church, and the pub.  The farm had to be passed on to one son intact. Sexuality had to be policed. The Church was there to do that. The pub was the social life of men waiting for their parents to retire so he could inherit the farm, the necessary condition for marriage. The pub was the place you went not to meet someone. The land clearances and consolidation of farms enabled by the Famine generated the strong farming class that dominated the politics of Ireland.  The vacuum of direct rule empowered the Catholic Church not just in its partnership with the strong farming class but in the provision of health and education.  Famine enabled the Catholic Church to rise as the pre-eminent national organization for the mass of the population. That Ireland of the second-half of the 19th century owed so much to the formative influence of the catastrophe of Famine, rendered memorialization problematic until recent years. To remember the Famine was to revive guilt, loss, gain at the expense of the victims and helplessness. Best forgotten because it was too traumatising to remember. 

It is only in recent decades and the efforts of Jim and Caroilin Callery, and a new generation of historians, that the Famine is taking its rightful place. I would to pay tribute to Jim and Caroilin for what they have achieved here at Strokestown House.  The establishment of the National Famine Museum and the mobilisation of historians like Jason King, Christine Kinealy and Mark McGowan has focused new attention on this seminal event. Their efforts have not only deepened our understanding but altered our perception of the Famine.  It has done so by putting the tenants and the tragic fate of Denis Mahon at the heart of the story, based on the rigorous use of the archives here.  The many creative ways in which this Museum tells this story have influenced both academic and public history. It is a wonderful achievement that has yet to offer much much more.

We are now graced with the next iteration of the story of Strokestown House and its tenants. Hunger and Hope, The Irish Famine Migration from Strokestown, Roscommon in 1847. The book is a brilliant addition to the history of Famine, edited by Christine Kenealy, Jason King and Mark McGowan. Through great sleuthing and research, they uncover and retrace the journey of the tenants from Roscommon to Canada. The title Hunger and Hope eloquently sums of a human story of trauma and resilience.

If we are now through post-revisionism grappling with the Famine in our collective understanding, we have yet to approach the role of colonialism in Ireland and the role of the Irish in colonialism.  I would argue that the role of the Act of Union must be considered as a formative event in the unfolding narrative of the Famine and its ramifications, for example. Yet the role of colonialism in Ireland is much wider than the Famine, its ripples reaching to issues of the present day. This deserves analysis and understanding, well worth the dangers of navigating the shoals of counter-factual history. We cannot understand the role of the Irish in Canada over three centuries, nor arguably in many parts of the former British Empire, without the framework provided by colonization in Ireland and transatlantic colonialism. That is a topic for another day.

Eamonn McKee

Strokestown House

24 June 2023

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