The arrival of the Jeanie Johnston in Belfast last week attracted around 3,500 visitors to tour the triple-masted vessel which is an exact replica of the famine ships which sailed the Atlantic in the 19th century.
The original Jeanie Johnston was built in the 1847 and during the next seven years carried more than 2,500 Irish emigrants fleeing the Great Famine across the Atlantic to north America.
Although it is more than 150 years since the Great Famine it is an event which is still imprinted on the Irish psyche.
While many thousands starved to death or died from disease between 1846 and 1851 the great hunger also had the impact of forcing millions of people to abandon their homeland.
There had been famines before in Ireland, but never on such a scale. A combination of over-population, widespread poverty and total dependence on a single crop, the potato, brought about the conditions for the disaster.
When the potato crop failed for the first time in 1845, it left millions of people without food or the means to earn an income to pay their rent.
Subsequent years saw further crop failures and the spread of disease causing the deaths of many thousands.
The misery was compounded as unscrupulous landlords used the situation to evict smallholders unable to pay rent from their land.
Entire families were left with a stark choice – to either emigrate or die homeless in Ireland.
In 1841 the population of Ireland was around 8,000,000, but just 20 years later, because of the mass emigration brought about by the famine, it had dropped to below 6,000,000.
The decline continued for the next 100 years and by 1961 the population of the island of Ireland was around 4.2 million, almost half the figure of 1841.
In the last 40 years the population has started to grow again to its current level of about 6,000,000, but that is still 25% lower than the 1841 figure.
As the population of the rest of the world has mushroomed over the last 150 years, Ireland is almost unique in that its population has fallen, while around 50 million people across the world claim Irish descent.
It was in north America that the Irish immigrants made the greatest impact, settling in Boston, Chicago, New York and Philadelphia, a legacy that is still evident today among the huge Irish-American communities along the east coast of United States and Canada.
Among those who sailed across the Atlantic were the young Henry Ford who would found the Ford motor company and 26-year-old Patrick Kennedy, the great-grandfather of future president John F Kennedy.
The journey to America was hazardous and the ships that carried the Irish immigrants were known as coffin ships because of the high numbers of fatalities on board.
Contemporary reports told of an overwhelming stench of urine and vomit on board, rotting food and stagnant water used for both cooking and cleaning.
Overcrowding and poor sanitation was a natural breeding ground for disease and many did not survive the two-month journey across the Atlantic.
In an editorial of 1846 The Times newspaper described the ships that took “more than a 100,000 souls flying from the very midst of the calamity” as “insufficient vessels”.
It told how passengers had to “(scramble) for a footing on a deck and a berth in a hold, committing themselves to these worse than prisons, while their frames were wasted with ill-fare and their blood infected with disease, fighting for months of unutterable wretchedness against the elements without and pestilence within, giving almost hourly victims to the deep…”.
The original Jeanie Johnston was built in Canada and was almost unique in that none of the estimated 2,500 passengers it carried from Tralee in Co Kerry to north America between 1848 and 1855 died on board.
The decision to recreate an exact replica of the ship was first taken by the Republic’s government in 1993 and was funded as part of a series of millennium projects.
More than 300 young people from the north and south of Ireland were joined by groups from the US and Canada and other parts of the world to help build the vessel.
However, the project was dogged by financial difficulties and on several occasions came close to collapse. The original budget was EUR5.5m and a number of sponsors were lined up to help provide funding. However, as costs spiralled far beyond the original estimate the project seemed in danger of floundering.
The replica vessel, which was built at Blennerville, near Tralee, was launched in May 2000, but the following month the government was forced to provide an additional EUR2.5m grant to finish it off.
Despite this the costs continued to mount and some of the sponsors voiced concern about funding additional rescue packages.
By April 2001 the state was forced to dig into its coffers again and provide a further EUR2.5m, but by June of the same year the vessel failed a Department of Marine inspection for the second time.
In February 2002 the High Court in Dublin ordered the ship to be impounded and the state announced that it would no longer back the project. However, a last minute about-face saw work continue.
By June 2002 the Jeanie Johnston had successfully completed its sea trials and Kerry County Council, backed by Kerry Group plc, agreed to continue to support the project.
However, the Irish government has ordered an investigation into how the vessel ended up costing e14m, as opposed to EUR5.5m.
The ship is now sailing from Belfast to Waterford and from there will travel back to Tralee to prepare for its first trans-Atlantic voyage that will retrace the journey made by hundreds of thousands of Irish people 150 years ago.
You can follow the Jeanie Johnston’s progress by visiting the website.
