The Famine has a poignancy that endures. It is more than a folk memory and in my family I can remember a great-grandmother who told the younger ones at her knees stories of grim times.
The Famine memories are to be found everywhere throughout the country. The south-west is a particularly rich font of Famine memorabilia. There are local historians, signposts and friendly pathfinders wherever you go to light the way to that time.
In this newspaper, for some 120 weeks, Brendan O Cathaoir has chronicled the Famine from 1845 onwards. He used diverse historical sources, such as Dr Christine Kinealy's This Great Calamity, and A Nation of Beggars? by Dr Donal Kerr, besides his own original research.
Next December, the O Cathaoir series will come to a close. In its way, it will mark the end of a national remembrance but it also brings something remembered to mind.
I have previously had reason to mention Voices from the Tower, a slim volume published last year through which I recently browsed again.
In 1841, the population of Cork City was about 81,000. A decade later, it was almost 86,000 due to the influx of destitute people who fled from more rural parts thinking that the city would offer them some relief. But overcrowding and dire poverty ensured that they met with further privation, tenements, disease and hopelessness.
Voices from the Tower was the child of a community arts development project on Cork's northside. The title was chosen to reflect the geographical location of those who contributed to it - the people who live in a part of Cork where a water tower dominates the skyline and where unemployment is as widespread as infrastructure is rare.
These people often feel that their voices, like the forlorn voices of 150 years ago, are not being heard. One local poet wrote:
The juice of the grass
Stains my children's mouths
The fever hit my family bad,
Yesterday, we buried Frank.
Another wrote:
Lord, why have you forsaken us?
We have walked the roads in our bare feet
And you do not hear our pleas.
A poem entitled Walking the Roads put it this way:
We have no food but we can see grain guarded by soldiers to keep us at bay.
This one I found particularly moving:
Poor Peig, my eldest child,
I left her by a small brick wall with nothing to cover her only a black shawl.
I lie back, close my eyes, too tired to go further,
My last thoughts: `What is America?