Kinealy To Speak About Irish Famine

HAMDEN — Christine Kinealy, an authority on the Irish Famine, will speak at the dedication of the Lender Family Special Collection Room at 7 pm on Thursday, September 21, in the new Arnold Bernhard Library at Quinnipiac University.

“An Gorta Mor, The Great Hunger,” a permanent collection featuring the most extensive collection of art and literature in America devoted to Ireland’s Great Hunger, will be exhibited in the Lender Family Special Collection Room.

Ireland’s Great Famine or the Great Hunger, as it is more commonly referred to today, was one of the worst tragedies in human history. From 1845 to 1850, approximately 1.5 million Irish men, women, and children either starved to death or died from complications caused by the Great Hunger. More than two million others left Ireland between 1845 and 1855 to avoid death, disease, and destitution. As a result, Ireland’s population was cut in half, from eight million to four million, and by the end of the Nineteenth Century, the population was reduced to approximately two million. This dramatic drop in Ireland’s population makes the Great Hunger not only the worst chapter in that country’s history, but arguably the single worst catastrophe in Nineteenth Century Europe.

Ms Kinealy, a senior lecturer in history in the Department of Historical and Critical Studies at the University of Central Lancashire in Preston, England, has written several books, including A Death-Dealing Famine: The Great Hunger in Ireland; A Disunited Kingdom: England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales 1800-1939; and This Great Calamity: The Irish Famine 1845-52.

This event is free and open to the public. For more information, call 203/582-8652.