Shuttered Irish famine museum at Quinnipiac University under investigation amid effort to reopen museum, protect collection

An investigation is underway into the shuttered Ireland’s Great Hunger Museum at Quinnipiac University after a group fighting for its reopening raised questions with the state about the future of the museum’s collection.

Michael McCabe, a member of the Irish Heritage Society of Milford, sent a letter to Connecticut Attorney General William Tong asking him to investigate the closure as it might involve “selling or disbursing Ireland’s Great Hunger Collection, the property of non-profit, 501(c)(3) institution.

“Furthermore,” the letter stated, “donors want to know what happens to their gifts of artwork and money to a museum that is now closed.”

An email to The Courant from Elizabeth Benton, Tong’s media spokeswoman, stated “I can confirm we have an open and ongoing inquiry into this matter, but cannot comment beyond that.”

The school’s board of trustees unanimously voted in August to permanently close the Hamden museum. In a virtual town hall that month, Quinnipiac University President Judy Olian blamed the closure on three consecutive years of low attendance and insufficient fundraising.

The plan, Olian said at that town hall, is to distribute the museum’s collection to other museums.

Fighting to keep open

The college opened the hunger museum in 2012, its establishment spearheaded by former university President John L. Lahey. It boasts the world’s largest collection of art and artifacts pertaining to the 1845-1852 Great Hunger, usually referred to in the United States as the “Irish potato famine,” which killed 1 million Irish citizens and forced the emigration of more than 2 million others.

The museum closed in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic as the state shut down, but never reopened.

Museum supporters, who are lobbying for the museum’s reopening and are planning a public event Oct. 30, now fear that the collection could be dispersed or sold. They are taking actions to stop that possibility, including asking Tong to intervene.

“It is in the public interest to stop any sale or breakup of the collection,” their letter said.

Olian said at the August town hall that the collection was, in fact, in the process of being distributed to other museums. “We are now in conversations with some very important museums in the country to make sure that the collection is visible in more urban environments,” she said.

On Tuesday, university spokesman John Morgan said in an email to The Courant that Olian was not available for an interview, but said the museum does not plan to sell the collection.

“We are committed to finding a solution for display of the collection that will ensure it remains publicly accessible, advances the museum’s original mission and preserves the story of the Great Hunger,” Morgan wrote. “That is why the university is in active conversations with potential partners who are interested in displaying the collection; Quinnipiac is not selling the IGHM collection.”

In the red

IRS 990 forms for the museum’s most recent years of operation show it operated deeply in the red pre-pandemic.

In the fiscal year ending June 30, 2019, the museum expenses totaled $550,177 and revenue totaled $184,903. In the previous fiscal year, expenses totaled $919,669 and revenue totaled $277,393. In the fiscal year ending June 30, 2017, expenses were $589,564 and revenue was $81,099. The fiscal year ending three months after the pandemic began showed $356,873 in expenses and $145,721 in revenue.

In Tuesday’s email, Morgan elaborated on the reasons for the museum’s permanent closure.

“Three years ago, a public call of support was made to help turn the museum into a self-sustaining operation. IGHM and university staff invested significant time and resources pursuing philanthropic support from the community and from museum patrons,” Morgan wrote.

“Despite these efforts, the museum only generated enough support and revenue to cover one-quarter of its operating budget, averaging fewer than 20 visitors a day in the full year before COVID.”

Turlough McConnell, spokesman for The Committee to Save Ireland’s Great Hunger Museum, said the museum “was never intended as a money-making enterprise but as an educational enterprise,” but he called Morgan’s statement “a bunch of baloney.” An open letter by the committee to the Quinnipiac board, released on Sept. 21, reflected that skepticism.

“We are completely unaware of any fundraising campaigns that may have taken place since 2019; surely, we would have known of a major fundraising drive by the university or the museum,” the letter stated. “It is unreasonable to count the year-and-a-half of the pandemic as part of an ‘unsuccessful fundraising effort.’ "

Reopen or relocate

McConnell said the committee wants the university to reconsider the closure of the museum. Barring that, they want the museum collection moved, in its entirety, to another location.

“The collection could go to a home that would deal with the bigger vision of the collection in terms of telling the story, for using it as an educational and public resource, so that it continues to grow and continues to attract artists,” McConnell said.

McConnell said the museum’s mission is important because it tells “Ireland’s most important story in the last couple hundred years.” He added that it has contemporary American relevance.

“The Great Hunger is Ireland’s definitive national story. It also is an American story because of the consequence of the Great Hunger. So many Americans trace their stories to famine refugees,” he said. “This museum is a living memorial that speaks directly to the crises in the world today: refugees, food insecurity and rotten government policy and attitude.”

The Great Hunger began with potato blight, which destroyed Ireland’s dominant crop. The suffering was compounded by governmental policies of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland that ranged from ineffectual to indifferent to the suffering of the Irish.

The aftermath of the Great Hunger strained Irish-British relations for a century and a half. In 1997, the office of U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair released a statement, read at a commemoration of the famine, that “Those who governed in London at the time failed their people through standing by while a crop failure turned into a massive human tragedy.”

McConnell said that statement “opened up the conversation” about the Great Hunger.

“Before then there were mixed emotions talking about the Great Hunger and Ireland’s relationship with Great Britain. The Irish had to be very careful talking about it,” he said.

Around that time, Lahey, who had been president of Quinnipiac since 1987, began to consider turning the famine-related art collection that he had accumulated on the university’s behalf into a museum.

In a statement released by the committee, Lahey said “I am perplexed why anyone in this day and time would even consider closing a museum dedicated to educating people about the evils of discrimination and bigotry.

“In the case of Ireland’s Great Hunger Museum, whose mission is educating people about one of the worst cases of state-sponsored discrimination and bigotry in 19th century Europe and the worst case of anti-Irish and anti-Catholic discrimination and bigotry in all of history,” said Lahey, who retired in 2018.

Broad opposition

The decision to shutter the museum is sparking anger well beyond the borders of both Connecticut and the United States. The Irish and Irish-American press have expressed outrage at the closure of the museum.

In an Oct. 17 editorial in the New York-based Irish Echo, Joseph P. McDonough wrote “It is too simplistic to view Ireland’s Great Hunger Museum as an art museum; it is — as was intended, from the outset, by donor and benefactor Murray Lender and President Lahey — a memorial. A unique memorial, no doubt, but a memorial all the same, no different than a statue or a park or a monument to some fallen hero, or some tragic event. Is the museum’s destruction, then, so different from a financial decision to remove a memorial to Sept. 11? The outrage that would ensue, were that done, would be massive, and justified. The university’s decision to destroy the IGHM memorial is no different.”

A Facebook group dedicated to the reopening of the museum was created by McConnell in September and has grown to 1,300 members.

Larry Kirwan, co-founder of the American Celtic rock band Black 47 — named after 1847, the worst year of the famine — is a member of the committee and is working on a musical, “Paradise Square,” about the lives of Irish people who fled to New York during the famine years.

Kirwan said “The Great Hunger was the Irish Holocaust, no two ways about it. It’s no small thing to us that the museum is being closed.”

He said the university should have found a new home for the museum before announcing its closure. “If I was going to throw someone or something out on the street, the first thing I would do is try to find an alternative place for it,” he said.

“There is for sure somewhere else in the academic community where this whole museum and this whole project could be transferred to,” Kirwan said. “I think whoever takes this in will get an upsurge in Irish-American students. It could become a bigger part of the curriculum of that college. There is a search for roots in every community in the U.S.”

The committee will host a salute to the museum on Oct. 30 from 1 to 5 p.m. at Woodruff Street at Whitney Avenue in Hamden, the intersection where the museum is located. The event is free and open to the public. It will feature street art, live music, dancing, food and family activities. The committee will hold a nonperishable food drive, to draw attention to the ongoing struggle with food insecurity.

Susan Dunne can be reached at sdunne@courant.com.