Wherever Green is Worn by Tim Pat Coogan

Author:Tim Pat Coogan [Coogan, Tim Pat]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781784975395
Publisher: Head of Zeus Ltd.

FOUR

CANADA

If we are spectators then we will choose the view that there are inevitable human victims and inevitable survivors. And from that view I believe comes a distancing which is unacceptable and immoral. If we are participants then we realise there are no inevitable victims. We refuse the temptation to distance ourselves from the suffering around us – whether it comes through history books or contemporary television images. And then, although we cannot turn the clock back and change the deaths that happened here, at least we do justice to the reality of the people who died here, taking the meaning of their suffering and connecting it to the present day challenges to our compassion and involvement. If we are participants we engage with the past in terms of the present. If we are spectators then we close these people into a prison of statistics and memories from which they can never escape to challenge our conscience and compassion.

Mary Robinson, President of Ireland,

at Grosse Ile, 21 August 1994

DESPITE THE melody’s Irish associations, no one thought it appropriate to sing Tom Moore’s Canadian Boat Song as we headed out of Quebec, and down the St Lawrence. For we were on our way to visit GrosseIl which, outside of Ireland itself, is probably the single most sacred famine site in the world. Significantly, in 1994 President Mary Robinson made a visit to Grosse Ile her first official engagement in Canada. Now, three years later, on a misty August morning two large ferries were bearing some 1,800 members of the Ancient Order of Hibernians – scholars, clergy, people interested in the Irish Famine from all walks of life and all parts of the North American continent – towards one of the black holes of Irish folk memory. We were commemorating the 150th anniversary of the ‘Irish Summer’ in which thousands of the starving terrified victims of the potato blight made it across the Atlantic, only to die of ‘famine fever’ (typhus) in their own excrement on Grosse Ile a quarantine island, at the gateway to the New World.

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