In case you are wondering the people did apologise for intruding into my photographs but as my interest is street photography I decide to leave the images as they were.
The memorial was created by Rowan Gillespie and presented to the city of Dublin in 1997. The sculpture features six lifesize figures dressed in rags, clutching onto their belongings and children. In 2007, similar figures were unveiled in Toronto, Canada's Ireland Park. The two memorials to show emigrants leaving famished Ireland for a new life.
The Great Famine, also known as the Great Hunger, the Famine (mostly within Ireland) or the Irish Potato Famine (mostly outside Ireland) was a period of mass starvation and disease in Ireland from 1845 to 1849, which constituted a historical social crisis which had a major impact on Irish society and history as a whole. With the most severely affected areas in the west and south of Ireland, where the Irish language was dominant, the period was contemporaneously known in Irish as an Drochshaol, loosely translated as "the hard times" (or literally "the bad life"). The worst year of the period was 1847, known as "Black '47".
During the Great Hunger, roughly a million people died and more than a million fled the country, causing the country's population to fall by 20–25%, in some towns falling as much as 67% between 1841 and 1871. Between 1845 and 1855, no fewer than 2.1 million people left Ireland, primarily on packet ships but also steamboats and barque—one of the greatest exoduses from a single island in history.
