There is a curious irony surrounding Schindler’s List and the part that the Irish have played in bringing the movie to fruition. Thomas
Keneally, an Australian of Irish Catholic background, wrote the book, and Liam Neeson, from the North of Ireland, was nominated for an Academy Award for his portrayal of the man who saved some 1,100 Jews.
As Keneally wrote in a recent column for the Los Angeles Times, “the Holocaust should be talked about again and again, and should not be forgotten.” And it won’t be. Some 50 years after the horrific event, the Jews have their Holocaust Museum to make sure that today’s children will remember, and they have, what is becoming an increasingly important learning tool, the movie, Schindler’s List.
But what of the Irish? It is 150 years next year since our own Irish Holocaust, which tossed up the dead, and the barely alive on the shores of America, some 1.5 million of them. Left 1 million dead in Ireland and another million scattered throughout the world. Where is our memorial to the famine? Our museum? Our movie?
There is a curious reaction that I have often found in talking about the Famine, as I’m sure many Jews have found in talking about the Holocaust to non-Jews — a feeling that they are making too much of it, that the past is best left alone. Revisionist historians will say it didn’t happen or make light of it. That remembering the Famine is too damn Irish.
For many it’s perhaps shameful to acknowledge that our ancestors depended on the lowly potato for their very survival. The history of why that was so, would take more space than I have in this column. The fact is that it was so. And the fact is also that the then guardians of the island didn’t see fit to provide supplementary food. In British government circles, it was found that there was no need to offer incentives to emigrate. As Lord Grey of the Colonial Office wrote as early as 1846 …some 150,000 pounds would have to be spent in doing that which if we do not interfere will be done for nothing.
Curiously there is a ready-made Famine Memorial, that many in Ireland and America may not have heard about, and maybe if we all get involved it is not too late to preserve. A place we can visit and bring our children, not out of any morbid whining but because our dead deserve their place in history. They deserve to be talked about as the Jews are talking about the Holocaust.
That place is Grosse Ile. A tiny island in the St. Lawrence river that is the burial place of between 15,000 and 25,000 Irish people. Also known as L’Ile des Irlandais, the Isle of the Irish, Grosse Ile was opened as a quarantine station for the colony of Canada in 1832 when a cholera epidemic was sweeping Europe. Some 3,000 Irish never made it past the quarantine station that year and are buried on the island. But 1832 was only a glimpse of the tragedy that was to come. The potato blight that hit Ireland in 1845 and peaked in 1847 would add thousands to the mass graves in Grosse Ile. Their story is horrifying, is tragic, is perhaps unbearable to speak about. Yet we must, before it is forever lost.
Today only 20 percent of those graves are visible, the rest have been claimed by the bush. And now the Canadian government is planning a theme park for the island called “Canada: Land of Welcome and Hope.” A theme park in which officials have said, “there should not be too much emphasis on the tragic aspects of the history of Grosse Ile …the painful events of 1832 and 1847, which have often been over emphasized in the past….” Try telling the Jews that the painful events of the Holocaust have often been over-emphasized in the past and see where you get.
Thankfully there is a group of dedicated people who are doing their best to see that Grosse Ile is is properly preserved. Read about them on page 60 of this issue. We cannot leave them to fight this fight alone. The Irish of Grosse Ile belong to the Irish diaspora of the world, we must all join in the fight.
As Michael Quigley, the historian for the Action Grosse Ile committee, said: “They have no right to blur our history.”
Write to President Clinton, whose ancestors on his mother’s side were famine immigrants and ask him to stress to the Canadian government that Grosse Ile is a sacred burial ground to the Irish. And take a lesson from the Jews if told to shut up about it.
Editor’s Note: This article was originally published in the March / April 1994 issue of Irish America. ♦
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