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Musician launches project to mark Famine grave pits

The scheme was launched by Pete St John the musician who penned the famous Fields of Athenry song about the exile of a father on a prison ship after being caught taking corn from a landowner to save his children from starvation 
The scheme was launched by Pete St John the musician who penned the famous Fields of Athenry song about the exile of a father on a prison ship after being caught taking corn from a landowner to save his children from starvation  The scheme was launched by Pete St John the musician who penned the famous Fields of Athenry song about the exile of a father on a prison ship after being caught taking corn from a landowner to save his children from starvation 

FAMINE grave pits that became the final resting places of hundreds of thousands of Irish men, women and children are to be mapped out across Ireland in a new initiative that began in Newry yesterday.

Funded by an American benefactor, the project will see the erection of a commemoration and interpretive markers at Famine graveyards across Ireland.

The scheme was launched by Pete St John the musician who penned the famous Fields of Athenry song about the exile of a father on a prison ship after being caught taking corn from a landowner to save his children from starvation.

The songwriter who is helping to spearhead the initiative, was in Newry yesterday along with the project's funder Bill Fahey for its launch.

The Paupers' Graveyard on the Camlough Road, also saw Newry and Mourne Mayor, Michael Ruane, and local clergymen commemorate the Famine.

The first marker - standing 4ft high with an oval and a black inscription - was installed at the event.

According to those behind the project, including Famine historian and writer Anthony Russell, it is intended that identical markers will be sited on every famine graveyard across Ireland, north and south.

"The first annual Great Famine commemoration in Newry and Mourne was held to begin the process of remembering those who died of starvation during the Great Hunger of 1845-51 and who were dispatched into pits, mostly too poor to leave any record of their death and burial," Mr Russell said.

Mr Russell, author of Mitchel's Town and the Famine said the Great Famine devastated town and townlands.

"In Newry the winter of 1846/1847 was bitter. On the 12 January 1847 the Baronial session for Upper Orier, which was south Armagh, heard that two thirds of the people were in a state of destitution," he said.

Drawing from official records Mr Russell said: "On January 23 1847 Captain Brereton inspecting officer, Co Down reported that the amount of misery in the town portion of the Barony [Newry] 'arising from scarcity of food and want of employment is now perfectly frightful'."

Mr Russell said some 800 families were destitute in the Barony of Newry, with the 'New Street soup kitchen committee' feeding 1,100 people. If it had not been for such efforts, 'the destitution in the town would have been much worse,' the inspecting officer reports.

"Newry and Mourne suffered with the rest of Ulster, with the rest of Ireland and it is fitting that we remember the cottiers and labourers, those with one insecure acre or less, those who lived in mud cabins that have melted back into the landscape, those who bore the brunt of the famine," Mr Russell said.

"It is fitting we remember the once prosperous small tenant farmers and weavers who suffered as star-varion and disease climbed [up] the social scale," he said.

"The short reflection remembers those who perished - believed to be one million - and a further one million who emigrated during the Great Famine."