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"A memorial to the Great Hunger is to be unveiled"

 

The superior virtue of the oppressed raises its emaciated form again.

 

 

Monument to the Irish famine will ‘heighten tensions’

Fears raised over statue to be unveiled at the church where Celtic Football Club was born

John Boothman

Sunday July 11 2021, 12.01am, The Sunday Times

 

 

A memorial to the Great Hunger is to be unveiled

 

A memorial to the Great Hunger is to be unveiled

 

A Catholic church in an area of Glasgow which has been a flashpoint for sectarian tensions is to install a prominent monument to the Irish famine, which saw an estimated 100,000 leave Ireland for refuge in the city.

A five-metre high artwork named The Tower of Silence will be unveiled during the Orange marching season this month at the front of St Mary’s Church in Calton, where the story of Celtic Football Club began.

Depicting emaciated figures, the steel sculpture is intended to chart the story of Irish people who made new lives in Glasgow after the potato blight of the 19th century claimed the lives of about one million in Ireland.

After recent clashes in the area alleged to have involved Orange marchers, some local politicians regard the move as provocative and likely to lead to further trouble.

In 2018 St Mary’s parish priest Canon Tom White told how he was spat on, verbally abused and threatened with a baton as an Orange Walk passed a nearby church where he had just said mass. He and worshippers at St Alphonsus’ Church came under attack from several people who he said were connected to a parade. The Order insisted its members were not responsible.

Jeanette Findlay, chairwoman of Coiste Cuimhneachain An Gorta Mór which is behind the project, was criticised in 2007 after defending the singing of IRA songs by Celtic fans. Sir Tom Devine, the historian, called the organisation’s approach “brazen” and questioned whether the project was aimed at commemorating the tragedy of all families who were devastated by the tragedy, and not just some.

He highlighted the unveiling in 2001 by the Irish Taoiseach Bertie Ahearn of a famine monument at the Carfin Grotto in Lanarkshire, while a memorial installed in Glasgow Green in 2018 is dedicated to all those who died or suffered in the Irish and Highland famines, “be they Catholic Irish, Protestant Irish or Protestant Gaels”.

He said: “It was an explicitly inclusive commemoration of dreadful times and struck an emotional chord with people of all faiths and none. Now one organisation brazenly announces a plan to soon establish, unhistorically, the ‘first’ memorial to the tragedy in the grounds of a Catholic church in Glasgow.”

One West of Scotland MSP warned: “This project will do nothing other than foster division between communities in Glasgow and become a magnet for controversy. Its unveiling during the marching season in the West of Scotland will only heighten tension.”

However, memorial organisers defended the initiative financed by public donations of £80,000 as a fitting memorial. They said the artwork, a collaboration between artist John McCarron and sculptor Maurice Harron, marked the end of a long campaign to commemorate the famine.

Findlay said: “Some would regard as controversial anything that commemorates the plight of the Irish but getting our community involved, raising money for the project has been a positive experience for us.”

White said the church, where Brother Walfrid convened the first meeting of Celtic football club, was a fitting site as its history was intimately bound up from its inception with the history of the Irish community in Scotland. He said it would be hard for anyone to find controversy in the memorial.

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Maybe one day they'll stick up a memorial to all those kids whose lives were ruined by the club "intimately bound up from its inception with the history of the Irish community in Scotland.".

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We had one in Scotland, if memory serves, but......the CofS rallied round, collected monies for relief, and 'encouraged' the lairds, landowners, and factors, to help out.

As a result the outcomes were far less devastating. 

 

And not a Nationalist in sight. 

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