One way to honor St. Patrick's Day is to think about the event that drove so many people to move from Ireland to the United States: hunger. In fact, one of the great contributions to American culture from Irish Americans is the challenge of ending hunger they keep present in our collective hearts and minds. It is an ongoing challenge, and one worth considering in this time of deep crisis, anxiety, and fear that so many people have in the America, today. It is a fear that many of us will be faced again with the most basic challenge of all: finding food for our families.
To think about this tremendous and important challenge, join me on a brief tour of the Irish Hunger Memorial in New York--a little known place that is one of my favorite places to wander through in my city.
The Irish Hunger Memorial (IHM) was designed by Brian Tolle and opened to the public in 2002. It sits at the end of Vessey Street in lower Manhattan, buried in the canyon-like developments around Battery Park City and the World Financial Center.
The best way to describe the IHM is to say it is a piece of an Irish farm--hillside and all--reconstructed on the streets of New York City. It is astounding to come upon this place for the first time, and to wonder how on Earth a giant pie slice of Ireland managed to find itself to this street corner.
The wonder of the monument, however, is that the entrance brings the visitor up from under the hill itself, through a entrance way of striped stone and lights.
Inside this hallway--which is both above ground and under the hill--visitors are introduced to the theme of the memorial:
Some Facts About the Great Irish Famine
* The Irish potato crop was destroyed by blight four times in five years: 1845, 1846, 1848 and 1849.
* The official population of Ireland in 1841 was 8,175,124; in 1851, it had declined to 6,552,385. The loss of over 1.6 million people to famine-related deaths and to emigration means that one in four people disappeared between 1841 and 1851.
* Unable to pay their rents, many small tenant farmers were evicted. 188,346 families, an estimated 974,930 people were served with eviction notices (1846-48) or actually evicted (1849-54). (Teachers Guide to the IHM)
We so rarely think about those facts, those staggering facts. Hunger compounded by eviction is a nightmare beyond imagining for so many, but it was the force that drove so many Irish to emigrate to this country.
The purpose of this memorial, the recorded voice explains, is to do more than remember the suffering of Irish tenant farmers. This is a memorial designed to anchor the fight against hunger in the American mind, and to do so by putting that remind just a short walk from the biggest center of global wealth ever known.
As we continue down the entrance, we see up ahead the shift from the start modernist striped walls, to the rough stone of the farm:
Walking up, we pass through another archway. Suddenly, we are in an hollowed out ruin.
It is a garden and a ghost town, alive and also not alive.
Slowly, we walk up and stop. The hill expands to a cobble stone wall.
This place is not ordinary hill, no ordinary stone. It is the Slack Cottage from County Mayo:
Approaching the Irish Hunger Memorial from the east, the visitor crosses the limestone quarried in County Kilkenny that is 300 million years old to view a roofless Irish cottage in a landscaped setting. The two-room cottage, a gift of the Slack family of Attymass, Co. Mayo who occupied the cottage till the 1960s. The Slacks trace their occupancy of a cottage on the Attymass site to 1820.
The Slack Cottage was taken apart stone by stone and reassembled on the site where it meets the requirements of the Irish Historic Trust and the New York City Building Code.
The project landscape architect Gail Wittwer-Laird selected 62 species of Irish flora grown from native seeds for the half-acre landscaped site, an authentic western Irish bogland ecosystem. One-quarter acre of the site is planted with clover in fallow potato ridges that symbolize the empty potato harvests of 1845,1846, 1848 and 1849. The quarter-acre size is significant because of the Gregory Clause added to the Poor Law of 1847 which stipulated that any person occupying more than one-quarter acre was not eligible for any form of government relief. The result was wide-spread eviction and homelessness. The county stones identified in the landscape, a stone from each of Ireland's thirty-two counties, were placed randomly in the field. A map of the location of the county stones can be found in the Irish Memorial brochure.
Visitors can choose to walk to the cottage or to follow the path past the pilgrim stone. Cross-decorated standing stones are found in the west of Ireland and are associated with sites that are considered sacred. The Irish Hunger Memorial pilgrim stone is inscribed with a cross of arcs, a motif of great antiquity that is associated with County Kerry's St. Brendan. Continuing to the cantilevered overlook twenty-five above the ground, the visitor looking south has a panoramic view of the Hudson River that includes Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty. Turning east, the visitor looks across the site of the World Trade Center to St. Paul's Church, the respite center for 9/11 rescue workers. (Teachers Guide to the IHM)
I am certainly no expert on Irish or Irish-American culture, nor an expert on the history of hunger. I am simply one person struck by the profoundness of this place in my city.
In the mid 19c, we learn, millions of poor tenant farmers had their lives destroyed by a combination of environmental disaster, financial cruelty, and legislated destruction. The result was widespread hunger, migration, and death. Less than a century later, the same thing happened in the United States when the winds blew, the dust destroyed the crops, the farms failed, the banks kicked the tenants off the land, and families headed west.
Less than a century later, the crisis is not with tenant farm families, but hunger has again become a growing problem in America. And it is a problem in deep crisis as a result of the economic crisis.
Even before the stock markets tanked, the housing markets collapsed, and the banks pulled back all their capital and refused to lend, Bill Moyers reported on the growing crisis amongst the vast network of organizations set up to help fight hunger in America. From an April 2008 Bill Moyers Journal:
The news at the grocery store is grim for many. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, food prices rose by 4% last year, the largest increase in 17 years. And, the USDA predicts they will rise another 4% this year. Eggs are up 40% in the past year; milk up 26% a gallon; a loaf of standard bread, 20%.
All across the nation families, government agencies and food banks are feeling the pinch. So many people are in precarious straits our government figures 28 million Americans will be using food stamps this year, the highest level since the program began in the 1960s. Almost one in l0 people in Ohio get food stamps; one in eight in Michigan, and one in six West Virginians. The rising food prices make that assistance worth less and less and food banks and pantries are facing increased need and those same higher prices.
The government has specific terms to quantify the nation's access to food — recently removing "hunger" from its designations.
(link)
President Bush, apparently, removed 'hunger' from the policy language and replaced it with the phrase 'food security,' breaking the population affected by hunger into more, less, and even less 'food secure.' The reason is pretty obvious: to rig the statistics to show progress on fighting hunger at a time when hunger in American was on the rise.
According to the study from Hunger in America 2006, 4.5 million Americans receive some kind of emergency food relief every week. To give a sense of how many people that is, half the states in America have less than 4.5 residents. 4.5 million is more than the total number of people living in all of South Carolina.
And so we move from the memory of hunger in Ireland a century and half ago and what happened as a result, to the reality of hunger in America and what to do about it right now.
One place to start is to visit a site called Feeding America, which lists all kinds of resources for volunteering, donating, and learning. They even have a page for people who need relief from hunger--and need to get help now.
Feeding America also has a great feature where they spotlight a particular organization fighting to end hunger. Currently, they have a spotlight on Philabundance:
As economists fastidiously search for a solution to the recession, consumers are constantly rearranging their budgets. Bills are deferred to pay for rent and mortgages, a family’s food costs are cut in lieu of utilities. It’s a common observation that during times of economic duress, fresh produce is usually one of the first commodities to go. Consumers turn to the goods they can stock up and hold on to, leaving little or no room for nutritious fruits and vegetables.
It’s a problem the staff of Philadelphia’s food bank, Philabundance, recognized among their food recipients. A remedy to the problem started last December when PhilAbundance launched its Fresh for All program. Through this campaign, food recipients in and around Pennsylvania’s and New Jersey’s Delaware Valley can receive five pounds of fresh produce each week. Individuals bring their own boxes or bags to one of six sites established within the region PhilAbundance serves, and leave with parcels of the healthy foods their families need. The program has grown to an extent that each site, within the course of one hour, distributes enough food to serve 250 families.
Philabundance plans to open at least two more sites within the next year, and hopes that soon they will be able to increase distribution to all 10 of the counties they serve. At the current moment, this program has already served nearly 1 million pounds of fresh produce to their families in need. It’s Philadelphia’s way of ensuring that in these stressful times, everyone has a chance for a healthy meal.
Hunger, we learn, is not just a one-day-your-eating-the-next-day-you're-not problem. Hunger is a slippery slope that begins with a sudden shift towards non-fresh food, leading to lack of nutrition that compounds. Philabundance enters into the cycle at the beginning, keeping as many people from slipping into bad nutrition as possible to break the cycle before it begins.
There are many things we can do. I am not writing to berate, but simply to begin by walking through a wondrous place--a piece of a hill that embodies the memory of an oft-forgotten people.