The Forgotten Famine

The Forgotten Famine is a film about the impact of An Gorta Mór (the Great Hunger) on a part of Co. Down where its remembrance is not always welcomed, largely because it presents a challenge to the dominant myth of the region’s exceptionalism, prosperity and providence.

At the heart of this history is a little patch of ground on the outskirts of Newtownards that has the appearance of a small public park. In the 1850s it served as a mass, unmarked grave. At that time, the inmates of the local workhouse were dying in such large numbers that the town’s graveyards were overflowing with corpses, so a “paupers’ graveyard” was purchased from a wealthy landowner and their bodies buried there without ceremony.

We made this film as a group of friends, comrades and neighbours who discovered and conceived of this ‘hidden history’ during a pandemic, when once again the ‘bodies piled high’, when economic imperatives trumped human costs.

The Forgotten Famine is a story told with brevity and clarity, with words and images, an old poem and a new song.

We, the friends, comrades and neighbours who made the film, wish to emphasise that it is not just about the past. In our minds what we have uncovered and presented is political and has contemporary resonance. It points to a shared past on this island, and it brings into focus an experience that connects this place – our place – to your place and other places.

The earth is pock-marked with the mass unmarked graves that hold the remains of populations considered a surplus or a nuisance or a threat. To discover one such burial site in your hometown is a salutary reminder that place and time is no safeguard against man-made catastrophe and malevolence.

The Forgotten Famine stands as a call to planetary humanism and global citizenship. We are building our new commons…

In solidarity,
Hearts of Down