Monuments to the Irish Famine can be found in communities across three continents; while the majority remain relatively unseen, unknown affairs, a small proportion has attained widespread recognition and attention. These memorials are the products of sustained, well–funded, and organized commemorative efforts, usually supported by an infrastructure of official and/or national bodies, and present an embodiment of Famine memory explicitly intended for wider viewership. As a consequence, many bear the scars of protracted civic negotiation and politicized appropriation, of artistic vision and compromise, and of struggles between competing versions of Irish history and identity. They are, in every sense, ‘monumental’ memorials: grand in conception and execution, and tied to an acute sense of historical self–consciousness in their constructions of the past for present consumption. All significant public art commissions (several exceeding €1 million in cost) these works constitute some of the most visible public engagements with Famine memory, and in most cases have defined the careers of the artists charged with their execution. The political agency of their construction and the pressures evinced through patronage have made an indelible impact on their formal approaches and subsequent public reception, and a contrast and comparison between them reiterates the congruencies and divergences of national contexts of remembrance as outlined in previous chapters.

The first four monuments (in Dublin, Boston, Murrisk, Co. Mayo, and Philadelphia) are conservative (even regressive) in their aesthetic design. Dublin's Famine (1997) and Boston's Irish Famine Memorial (1998) revisit the oft–visualized dramatic moment of departure and arrival, yet both have been dogged by controversies related to their sponsorship and the mechanics of their making. Murrisk's National Famine Memorial (1997) and Philadelphia's Irish Memorial (2003) centre on the emblematic image of the coffin ship and Atlantic passage, although to different extremes: in Mayo, expressionistic horror steeped in the Irish modernist tradition; in Philadelphia, aggressive sentimentalism and racial fantasy. The final pair of memorials (in Sydney and New York) is exemplary for unusual aesthetic approaches drawn from international models of the counter–monumental and other postmodern and conceptual visual strategies. Sydney's Australian Monument to the Great Irish Famine (1999) is most exceptional as the only memorial dedicated to the experience of emigrant women, namely that of 4,000 orphan girls shipped from Ireland to Australia between 1848 and 1850.