If the visual record of the Famine from the nineteenth century awaits wider recognition and exposition, there is no doubt its visual representation fell sharply from the public eye with the onset of the twentieth. As the Famine moved from direct experience to received memory, a consistent and defined space within the public sphere of memory, Irish visual culture and commemoration failed to coalesce until the 1990s. Although this chapter is largely concerned with the historical, social and political circumstances of Famine memory's revival during its sesquicentenary and beyond, some initial reflections on its public memorialization prior to the 1990s are warranted.

Given the Famine's catastrophic impact on Irish society, its relatively minor early role within Irish historical studies, popular commemoration and public discourse has contributed to widespread proclamations of ‘silence’ as a prevailing cultural response. However, much recent scholarship has refuted notions that Famine memory lay dormant prior to the sesquicentennial, identifying strong undercurrents of Famine memory within Irish folklore records, popular literature and both native and diasporic political activity, from the 1850s through to the present. Certainly the copious recollections recorded by the Irish Folklore Commission (collected in the 1930s and 40s) provide evidence of extensive private memories of the Famine; furthermore, as Mary Daly has noted, the Famine never wholly disappeared as a point of reference within Irish political rhetoric, suggesting that ‘a common knowledge and understanding of that event among Irish people’ remained active at least until the 1960s. The Famine's consequences for the emergent Irish state and Irish communities abroad at the dawn of the twentieth century have been widely examined from the standpoint of social, economic and political change; and its manifestations within myriad forms of popular and official memory from the 1850s to the 1940s – though at times fragmented, partial and oblique – have drawn increasing attention: