In Ireland, unlike so many previous epochs of historical commemorations where local efforts piggy–backed onto or modified narratives enshrined at the national level (as with the 1798 rebellion, Easter Rising, or the First World War), the Famine was an intensely local experience, not one which occurred at a remove from daily life. Today the remnants of that experience pervade the depopulated Irish landscape: abandoned stone cottages, crumbling workhouses and overgrown mass graves, and the endlessly stonewalled and subdivided smallholdings that are testament to the meagre acreage allotted to the Famine poor existing at the very margins of society. At many of these sites, now transformed from no–places to new loci of memory through the act of monumental intervention, the relationship between memory and locality is often intensely direct, performative and territorial: a localized variant of Jan Assmann's ‘cultural memory’, objectified through the form of the Famine monument placed in spaces highly charged with local meaning and significance. Admittedly, local and rural projects suffered many obstacles to a successful realization: poor levels of funding for public art, lack of awareness of best practice for commissioning and construction, and artistic conservatism have all led to numerous uninspired and insipid public sculptural commemorations. Yet it is not sufficient to describe local memorialization as the poor country relation to sophisticated urban cousins, despite the temptation to do so on artistic grounds.

As Jay Winter has noted in his study of the memorialization of the First World War:

Although it is prominent monuments (particularly in the diaspora) which have most frequently attracted public response and scholarly analysis, Irish community–level commemorative activity offers unique insights into the prosaic ‘business’ of commemoration and its outcomes: the functioning of commemorative committees, range of fundraising activities, commissioning of artists, physical construction of the works and their ongoing maintenance reveal much about the significance of the Famine past for agents in the present.