The events of 1845–52 in Ireland known as the ‘Great Famine’ constituted a cataclysm unequalled in Irish history. With more than a million dead from starvation and disease, and more than a million in exodus from Ireland to Britain, North America and Australia, today Ireland remains one of the only European nations whose population is smaller than during the nineteenth century. Precipitated by the potato blight, the Famine was exacerbated by a colonial administration whose failure to alleviate the crisis proved disastrous: the impact of the Famine devastated Irish culture, language, and social demographics, formed the basis for the massive Irish diaspora and paved the eventual road to revolution and Irish independence. And yet, for nearly 150 years any sense of a public or collective ‘memory’ of this period has proved elusive: ill–suited to the teleology of Irish nationalism, which posited the Easter Rising as the nation's supreme moment of self–realization, the horrors and shame associated with the Famine period relegated its representation to the margins of Irish history and remembrance.

What changed, then, in the mid–1990s, to occasion the remarkable outpouring of public commemoration and sentiment (described in the Irish media as ‘Famine fever’) that swept across Ireland and the nations of its diaspora during the Famine's 150th anniversary and reversed the trope of Famine ‘silence’? How and why has the Famine moved from an ‘unspeakable’ event to perhaps the most visualized cultural experience of the Irish across the globe? This book seeks to chart the complex history of the Famine's place in visual representation and memory, mapped against its inexorable rise as a cultural reference point in Ireland and its diaspora since the 1990s: to explain why the Famine past has come to matter so much in our present, and how its commemorative visualizations reveal a conflicted struggle for local, national and diasporic ethnic self–definitions within the crowded global marketplace of memory and heritage.

Within the short space of two decades the number of permanent monuments to the Famine has risen from a small handful to more than one hundred.