Overview
The centrepiece of the An Gorta Mór memorial is a four-year-old boy. Michael Rice was left at the gate of the Kilmanaheen workhouse in February 1848 with a pleading note pinned to his shirt, and the sculpture on Lahinch Road puts him back at that gate in stone. Across the road, the head of an anguished mother faces him. It is a Famine memorial, free and open dawn to dusk, sitting about a mile outside Ennistymon on the grounds of that old workhouse, across from Ennistymon Hospital.
The memorial was dedicated on 20 August 1995, the 150th anniversary of the Famine, and designed by the artist Allan F. Ryan Halls of Valentia Island in County Kerry. It was raised by the Ancient Order of Hibernians, its American and Irish boards, and Clare County Council. There is no building and no ticket desk: the setting is deliberately open and rural, the kind of countryside that once held the communities it remembers. The name carries a weight the English translation only hints at – an Gorta Mór, ‘the Great Hunger’.
The Great Hunger
The Great Hunger was never only a failed potato crop; it was a slow social and economic collapse. Ireland’s population stood at roughly eight million in 1841. By the census of 1851, about 1.5 million people had died or emigrated, and the western and southern districts – where Irish was the everyday language – took the heaviest losses. The worst single year, 1847, is still known as ‘Black ‘47’, when starvation and the diseases that travel with it, typhus and cholera, did most of the killing.
The memory of those years hardened into politics, feeding the long campaigns for Home Rule and independence, and it emptied townlands whose ruined cottages still mark the fields around Clare. That is the point the memorial makes by standing where it does, rather than behind glass: this happened here, in this landscape.
What to see
Give it half an hour and read the plaques – that is the whole visit, and the reason it works. The stone figures land the human scale in a second; the interpretive panels around the perimeter do the slower work, walking you from the first blight through the relief decisions that failed and the emigrant ships to America and Britain. Some of the panels have weathered and the lettering has softened, but the accounts are still legible.
One practical note on timing: the memorial faces open sky, so the light changes it completely. Morning and evening throw long shadows across the boy and the mother’s face; a flat midday does them no favours. If you can choose, come early or late.
Getting there and practical information
- Opening hours: Year-round, dawn to dusk. No formal opening times.
- Admission: Free.
- Parking: A small free car park sits directly off Lahinch Road. It fills in high summer, so an early arrival helps.
- Accessibility: Level ground and wide paths make it manageable for wheelchair users and prams.
- Public transport: Bus Éireann routes 333 and 350 serve the area; the nearest stop is ‘Lahinch Rd (Ennistymon)’, a short walk away.
- Facilities: None on site – no toilets, no café. Ennistymon, about 1.5 km away, has cafés, shops and public toilets.
- Contact: For group visits or historical enquiries, contact Clare County Council at customerservices@clarecoco.ie.
Nearby
- Cliffs of Moher – The Atlantic sea cliffs and visitor centre, about a 30-minute drive west.
- Burren Way – A long-distance walking route through the limestone country to the north.
- Ennis – Medieval streets, the Clare Museum and a strong trad scene, roughly 25 km south-east.
- Clare Abbey – Ruins of a 12th-century Augustinian house near Ennis, about 25 minutes south.
Read every plaque, walk the perimeter once, and time it for morning or evening light if you can – the difference in how the figures read is the difference between a photo stop and the thing this memorial was built to do.