I found this little piece of ancient history on the outskirts of Donegal Town. I was walking out past the Catholic Church just to see what there might be out there. I saw a sign for a Famine Graveyard and decided to follow where it pointed. But all there was there was a big open field with a small walled enclosure. In the center of the enclosure was a tall wooden cross. Outside the enclosure set into a gap in the wall was this plaque.
In some ways it reminded me of the plaques I saw all over Paris commemorating the Jews who were deported and murdered by the Nazis with the aid of the Vichy government: the crime is boldly stated without any context for later generations to make sense of how it came to pass. In another way, though it was very different. The field is not really a graveyard – there is nothing else there that you would expect to find in a graveyard, no headstones, no marked plots, no well tended paths between burial sites. Only this marble slab reminds us of the pain and suffering that many people endured, but even that is almost forgotten as this little corner of a painful history is itself pushed to the margins of consciousness. Next time I come through here I expect there will be a holiday bungalow village on this site.
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