In February 2024, I stood along the windswept quays of the River Liffey in Dublin and came face-to-face with the haunting figures of The Famine Memorial. These gaunt sculptures, raised in remembrance of the Great Hunger of the 1840s, capture the despair of a nation starved amidst plenty.

Ireland’s potato crop – staple food for the majority of its people – failed under a blight that spiraled into catastrophe, worsened by the mismanagement of English colonial occupation. More than a million people perished, and another million fled across the globe. Gazing at the statues’ sharp, hollow faces, you can feel the weight of those harrowing years that shaped modern Ireland and its people.

Among these figures, my thoughts drifted to the countless Irish immigrants who found new beginnings in Pennsylvania.

In the 1840s, Northeastern Pennsylvania’s mining towns and villages became a haven for those escaping famine and English repression. Many arrived with little beyond their own resolve, determined to build new lives in America. They strengthened the state’s cultural fabric, laboring in railroads, canals, and collieries – engines of the American Industrial Revolution – yet still faced suspicion and outright fear because of their language, culture, and religion.

To cope, they wove together tight communities of family and regional affiliations from the home country and created new lives in the mining patches of Pennsylvania. Together, those communities faced down the discrimination, hatred, and even violence they faced at nearly every turn and built themselves into the marrow of a growing nation.

For me, the stark monument in Ireland’s capital a haunting record of past sorrows in that island nation. It serves as a bridge, linking Ireland’s tragic 19th-century history to Pennsylvania’s long tradition of welcoming immigrants from around the world. Monuments here in the United States, at sites of disembarkation like Philadelphia, pick up the story of Irish tragedy and resilience on this side of the ocean.

I’ll end on a quote from journalist and historian Mark Bulik, from his 2015 book Sons of Molly Maguire: The Irish Roots of America’s First Labor War. In the book, Bulik writes about the arrival of Irish immigrants in Schuylkill County, especially western Schuylkill County, during the famine years. This surge of Irish immigration forever altered the societal landscape of the Coal Region and planted seeds of ethnic conflict that raged during the Civil War and into the 1870s:

In the sixteen years from the start of the great famine to the opening of the Civil War, Schuylkill County’s Irish population soared.

In 1840, the county had 29,053 residents. By 1850, that had doubled to 60,713, 15 percent of home were Irish.

In 1860, there were 89,510 residents, a quarter of them Irish…

Irish labor helped transform Schuylkill County into a flourishing bastion of American free enterprise, even as the laborers’ lifestyle, language, religion, and customs turned the hills outside Minersville into something entirely different – a small slice of Ireland with a culture and a consciousness all its own.

---

More stories of the Irish diaspora in the Coal Region

“Something more than a river” – The West Branch in “Sons of Molly Maguire”

“Revolutionary Disloyalty” – A coal miners’ rebellion in Schuylkill County during the Civil War

A Schuylkill County mine superintendent reveals discomfort and fear of Irish mineworkers in rural mining village | 1864

---