Yesterday was a special day for the Irish in Scotland.
A shameful omission has been put right, and all of those involved should be rightly proud of their efforts.
Glasgow was shamefully atypical of cities that had received the desperate multitudes fleeing An Gorta Mór in the 1840s.
That is because Scotland’s largest city had no dedicated memorial in the public place commemorating those awful events.
A decade ago, I wrote this piece in the Celtic View about why there was a need for a Famine Memorial in Glasgow.
A month later, this was in the Mayo News.
It seemed to be a glaring omission from the public space in the city of my birth.
The story of how the memorial was finally unveiled yesterday is best told by those at the centre of that mighty achievement.
Coiste Cuimhneachain An Gorta Mór has been faithful to their word.
Here is a statement from them in May 2016.
Jeanette Findlay of the committee was pitch-perfect in her speech yesterday when she laid out the importance of the memorial.
This piece today by Kevin McKenna in the Herald is worth your time.
He more than hints at the unimpressive role of the local authorities in blocking a site in Glasgow for the memorial.
However, the choice of headline (not Kevin’s role in the process) suggests that the sub-editor might not be completely with the programme.
This headline in the National was much more acceptable.
The report stated that Ms Alison Thewliss, the area’s MP, attended the ceremony.
Perhaps the SNP politician will want to ascertain why her party colleagues on the City Council could not find a single suitable site in Glasgow for the memorial.
In the same year that I was writing about the Famine memorial, Kevin wrote this in the Guardian.
Here was my reply in the same newspaper a few days later.
I put the same question to an audience in Ullapool later that year at the ChangeIn Scotland conference.
“Is it ok to be second-generation Irish in modern Scotland?”
My lived experience, born there in the 1950s, certainly suggested that it wasn’t.
The same week that I replied to Kevin in the Guardian, I wrote this for the Scottish Review.
Not only could I not find any trace of my community in the public space in Glasgow, but we also seemed to be absent from the literature of Fair Caledonia.
One of the comments at the time put it up to me:
“What are YOU doing about it? You’re a writer, after all!”
As I was already a published playwright here in Ireland, it was a very fair point, and I took it on board.
Since then, I’ve written two stage plays about the Glasgow Irish experience, and they have been performed in the city.
My debut novel partly explored that worldview, and the sequel (out later this year) is set entirely in Scotland.
I watched the unveiling ceremony on a live stream under an Irish sky. In this parish, you cannot assume that someone of a certain age with a local cent didn’t first see the light of day in Glasgow.
Similarly, someone with Clydeside phonetics might have been born here.
I messaged a local Dáil Deputy as the ceremony was ongoing, and he got right back to me.
He told me that he was watching it and that the sculptor John McCarron, a Donegal man, was his bestie!
It was the sort of vignette that would be too contrived for a novel.
Yesterday was a day to remember immortal words that emerged from another disregarded community:
Everyone, Republican or otherwise, has their own particular part to play. No part is too great or too small, no one is too old or too young to do something.
Modern Scotland owes much to her own Irish, and the story of this memorial would suggest that it is something yet to be fully acknowledged by the wider society.
That is a task that has yet to be fully completed.
However, yesterday was an important achievement.
Of course, Laura is entirely correct in her observation.
My hope is that the global Gaeltacht will see the significance of this achievement by the Irish community in Scotland.
Míle Buíochas to all of those who made this wonderful memorial happen.
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Sadly the Scottish press have let themselves down yet again, to be more accurate, the people who profess to be the press and frequent the columns of the Glasgow Times. It now seems that any mention of a memorial has vanished from their website and can only be found because of an earlier copied urll Do you think it would be worth asking those at the Glasgow Times, why is it that “Mrs Hinch fans share genius hacks to prevent flies invading your home” seems to be a more worthy article to promote on their website https://www.glasgowtimes.co.uk/news/19467836.glasgows-st-marys-calton-church-sees-irish-famine-memorial/
They’ve had plenty of practice in George’s Square
Firstly bravo to those who made the memorial in all its glory happen, not an easy task in an “inclusive Scotland”. I see the usual loyalist rhetoric in the “Glasgow Times” asking why this monument is required as “We” already have one, and “Is that not enough” and why do “Catholics” need their own monument. It’s a strange situation in Glasgow, they have a paper that switches off the right to reply or comment on matters relating to the SNP and whoever they feel like protecting, but on this matter they have left the comments open and pretty much unfettered in regards to loyalist hate comments.
The funny thing in it all is they are happy to delete any constructive reply or attempt to educate the “dearly distressed” even if it is within their guidelines of behaviour and they have like usual not properly explained the purpose of the memorial but did manage to get in Celtic were formed at St Marys. I look forward to visiting the memorial on my return to Glasgow..
we can only hope now that the memorial is not defaced.
we will have the klan mentality out to besmirch it at any given opportunity.
I was about to ask when Ra Peepol will get around to some redecorating it.