CANADA:When President Mary McAleese opens the Ireland Park memorial on Toronto's waterfront tomorrow, she will commemorate one of the most remarkable acts of heroism and generosity of the Famine years - and one that almost nobody knows about.
"It's the greatest story never told," says Robert Kearns, who has been planning the memorial for more than a decade.
Between May and October 1847, more than 38,000 Irish immigrants - filthy, famished and often infected with typhus - arrived in Toronto at a time when the city's population was just 20,000. Toronto's civic authorities knew the Famine victims were coming and almost bankrupted the city in receiving them and offering medical care to the frailest.
"What city today would do that, knowing that they were carrying an incurable, life-threatening disease?" Mr Kearns asks.
More than 1,100 people died in Toronto that summer, most of them immigrants but also local people from all stations in life who caught typhus while caring for the Irish refugees. The dead included the Catholic bishop of Toronto, Michael Power, and a young doctor who had lobbied his brother, the Anglican dean of St James's Cathedral, to be allowed to oversee the immigrants' medical care.
The generosity Toronto showed is all the more striking in view of the fact that, although 450,000 Irish people, most of them Protestants from the North, had moved to Canada over the previous 30 years, only 10 per cent of Toronto's population was Irish. Of these, most were Protestant but they joined with their Catholic neighbours in welcoming the immigrants, most - but not all - of whom were Catholics.
Built at a cost of $3.5 million on a patch of the waterfront Mr Kearns persuaded the city to grant, Ireland Park is built around five sculptures by Rowan Gillespie that mirror those on the Dublin quays near the Custom House. Behind the sculptures, on a 20ft wall of Kilkenny limestone, the names of more than 600 of the victims of the summer of 1847 are carved. A glass tower stands as a beacon, with interactive computer screens telling the story of Toronto's reception of the Famine victims. "It's a commemoration of those who were lost but it's also a celebration of the fact that this was an amazing effort by this small, 20,000-person town on the edge of the Canadian wilderness," Mr Kearns says.
It is, however, a story that has remained all but untold until now, not only in Ireland but in Canada itself, where the descendants of the immigrants who survived preferred to forget their traumatic arrival in Toronto.
"The Irish immigrants who arrived didn't want to be known and be referred to as "Famine Irish" and the Irish who were here weren't particularly proud. They were actually horrified by the plight of their fellow men and women arriving in filth and rags. Then you had the political issue of the Fenian raids 20 years later and then of course you had the Orange Lodge," Mr Kearns said.
Ireland Park researchers pieced together the story from newspaper reports, municipal records and clergymen's diaries and the papers of a British official named Hawke who made detailed reports to London every week about the arrival of Famine victims.Mrs McAleese will lay a wreath on one of the very few Irish Protestant communal graves outside Ireland in St James's Cemetery.