Sinead McCoole, curator of the Jackie Clarke Collection in County Mayo, Ireland, will discuss the private collection of Irish history material, when she lectures at Ireland’s Great Hunger Museum at Quinnipiac University, 3011 Whitney Ave., from 5:30-7 p.m. on Tuesday, Oct. 29. This event is free and open to the public.
The Jackie Clarke Collection includes more than 100,000 items spanning 400 years of Irish history. It includes artifacts associated with Theobald Wolfe Tone, a leading Irish revolutionary figure. It also features letters from nationalists Michael Collins, Michael Davitt, Douglas Hyde and Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa who, individually and collectively, helped to bring about Irish independence in the early twentieth century. It also contains rare books, proclamations, posters, political cartoons, pamphlets, handbills, works by Sir John Lavery, maps, hunger strike material and personal items from leaders of the 1916 Rising, an armed insurrection aimed at ending British rule in Ireland.
This event is free and open to the public, but reservations are required. Please call 203-582-6500.
Ireland’s Great Hunger Museum is home to the world’s largest collection of visual art, artifacts and printed materials relating to the Irish Famine. The museum preserves, builds and presents its art collection in order to stimulate reflection, inspire imagination and advance awareness of Ireland’s Great Hunger and its long aftermath on both sides of the Atlantic.
The collection focuses on the famine years from 1845-52, when blight destroyed virtually all of Ireland’s potato crops for consecutive years. The crop destruction, coupled with British governmental indifference to the plight of the Irish, who at the time were part of the United Kingdom, resulted in the deaths of more than 1 million Irish men, women and children and the emigration of more than 2 million to nations around the world. This tragedy occurred even though there was more than adequate food in the country to feed its starving populace. Exports of food and livestock from Ireland actually increased during the years of the Great Hunger.
Works by noted contemporary Irish artists are featured at the museum including internationally known sculptors John Behan, Rowan Gillespie and Eamonn O’Doherty; as well as contemporary visual artists, Robert Ballagh, Alanna O’Kelly Brian Maguire and Hughie O’Donoghue. Featured paintings include several important 19th and 20th‐century works by artists such as James Brenan, Daniel MacDonald, James Arthur O’Connor and Jack B. Yeats.
The museum is open Wednesdays 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Thursdays 10 a.m. to 7 p.m.; Fridays and Saturdays 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.; and Sundays 1-5 p.m.