At long last, the southern Irish government has set up a committee to devise an annual commemoration for one of the greatest injustices ever to be visited on the island of Ireland. The Irish Famine of the 1840s, which saw 1.5 million people either die from starvation or forced to emigrate to escape the hunger caused by a series of devastating potato blights, is known in Gaelic as "An Gort Mor", "the Great Pain", and has been commemorated annually in Montreal since 1859, where many of the migrants fled to in its aftermath.
Hopefully the government of the north will follow suit, as the famine there affected both Protestants and Catholics, and was as much as a national tragedy there as it was in the south.
For more information, visit http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/7415927.stm
Chris
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