The victims of the Great Famine were remembered at a solemn St Patrick's Day ceremony here yesterday organised by the Wales Famine Forum.
After a Mass at St Joseph's Church, the Irish Consul General in Wales, Mr Conor O'Riordan, and the Welsh Office Minister Mr Jon Owen Jones unveiled a memorial in the cemetery - a Celtic Cross - dedicated "to the memory of all the victims of the Great Irish Famine and all the Irish people who died in Wales".
After prayers led by Bishop Regan of Wrexham, and the dedication, representatives of the Quakers and Rosminians joined the celebrants.
The Quakers represented their Irish brethren "who at the time of the Great Famine fed up to 300,000 hungry victims a day", while the Rosminians included Father David Myers, representing the Irish Father General of the order in Rome. The Lord Mayor of Cardiff, Councillor Marion Drake, and the Lord Lieutenant, Capt Norman Lloyd Edwards, jointly placed a wreath at the base of the memorial. The readings included one in Irish by the Consul General - The Song of the Black Potatoes composed by Maire Ni Dhroma, who lived in Ring, near Dungarvan, Co Waterford, during the Famine.
This selection of verses (from the longer original, and translated by the Wales Famine Forum) was driven underground for many years because the writer had challenged the contemporary view that the Famine was an act of Providence.
The black potatoes did our neighbours scatter from us,
Did put them in the poorhouse and off over the sea,
In the Graveyard of the Mountain hundreds are laid low
And may the nobility of Heaven their support be . . .
These poor people of Ireland are dealing with misery,
Sorrow and hardship and the pains of death,
Poor children are bawling and screeching each morning,
A long hunger is on them and there's nothing to get.
It was not God who ever planned this travesty,
To condemn poor people to cold and wandering:
To put them in the poorhouse to mourn in captivity
Where married couples are kept apart until they die.
The young children they would have raised with gladness
Were snatched from them without pity or regard:
Their meagre fare just the soup of sadness
With no mother to answer them if they died.