In case you are wondering the people did apologise for intruding into my photographs but as my interest is street photography I decided to leave the images as they were.
The memorial was created by Rowan Gillespie and presented to the city of Dublin in 1997. The sculpture features six lifesize figures dressed in rags, clutching onto their belongings and children. In 2007, similar figures were unveiled in Toronto, Canada’s Ireland Park. The two memorials to show emigrants leaving famished Ireland for a new life.
The Great Famine, also known as the Great Hunger, the Famine (mostly within Ireland) or the Irish Potato Famine (mostly outside Ireland) was a period of mass starvation and disease in Ireland from 1845 to 1849, which constituted a historical social crisis which had a major impact on Irish society and history as a whole. With the most severely affected areas in the west and south of Ireland, where the Irish language was dominant, the period was contemporaneously known in Irish as an Drochshaol, loosely translated as “the hard times” (or literally “the bad life”). The worst year of the period was 1847, known as “Black ’47”.
During the Great Hunger, roughly a million people died and more than a million fled the country, causing the country’s population to fall by 20–25%, in some towns falling as much as 67% between 1841 and 1871. Between 1845 and 1855, no fewer than 2.1 million people left Ireland, primarily on packet ships but also steamboats and barque—one of the greatest exoduses from a single island in history.
The Custom House in Dublin is regarded as one of the jewels in the city’s architectural crown. A masterpiece of European neo-classicism, it took 10 years to build and was completed in 1791. It cost the then not inconsiderable sum of 200,000 sterling.
It was the greatest achievement of James Gandon who had been brought over from England to carry out the work. Gandon had been chosen by John Beresford, Chief Revenue Commissioner and a small coterie of the Irish ascendency who were then in the process of enhancing the streets and public buildings of Dublin.
The sculptures which are located in various parts of the building were by the famous Irish sculptor, Edward Smyth.
Initially the building was exclusively the headquarters of the Commissioners of Custom and Excise; however by the beginning of the twentieth century, the dominant role of the Custom House was in relation to local government. The building was burnt to the ground on 25 May, 1921 during the Irish War of Independence; restoration work was competed by 1928.
A second programme of restoration began in the 1980s and was completed in time for the bi-centenary of the Custom House in 1991.
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