The links between Israel’s policy of starving people to death in Gaza and Ireland’s man-made famine of the mid-1800s were marked at a vigil held at the city’s Celia Griffin Famine Memorial last week. CIARAN TIERNEY spoke to participants from Ireland and Palestine about the horrors unfolding before our eyes in Gaza.

When a six-year-old Conamara girl called Celia Griffin collapsed and died of starvation in Galway City in March 1847, there were no television crews, cameras, or smartphones to record her appalling – and totally avoidable – death. People sitting down to dinner in France, Spain or Germany were not haunted by images of this starving Irish child on screens in the way in which the entire world should be by the distressing footage coming out of Gaza in August 2025.

Celia Griffin has come to symbolise an entire generation of Irish children who suffered terribly under a man-made famine, since a park dedicated to her memory was officially unveiled on the shores of Galway Bay in 2012. Before that, it was hard to find any trace of An Gorta Mór, the Great Famine, anywhere around the city.

It felt as though the memory of that terrible event, in which one million people starved to death and another million set sail for North America on ‘coffin ships’, was too painful for Galway people to grapple with or to acknowledge for generations.

How fitting then that Galway people came together for a quiet vigil to show solidarity with the starving people of Gaza on a dark, drizzly evening last week, at the place where people now stop to remember Celia and all the victims of the Irish Famine who died between 1845 and 1852.

Last Wednesday night’s vigil was organised at short notice by the Galway Palestine Solidarity Campaign, following the biggest ever rally in solidarity with the people of Palestine in Galway city centre the previous Saturday afternoon.

Pots and pans were banged on the route from Eyre Square to the Wolfe Tone Bridge, to remind tourists and passers-by that people are currently being starved to death in Gaza, and there were empty pots and pans on display at the Famine Ship monument which is the centrepiece of the park beside the beach at Grattan Road.

Pots and pans have become regular features at vigils and rallies across the globe over the past couple of weeks, since award-winning Palestinian journalist Bisan Owda called for them to be used to show solidarity with the victims of the man-made famine in Gaza.

With Palestinian and Irish flags fluttering in the breeze, a young man stepped forward to read out the names of 68 of the more than 150 Palestinians known to have starved to death at that stage of the Gaza genocide. The figure is rising alarmingly every day.

Just as the late Mark Kennedy had named this park in memory of Celia Griffin, just one victim of the Irish famine, those gathered at the memorial on Wednesday night were determined to give the victims of the Gaza genocide the dignity of being named. They were people, not just numbers.

Some of the victims, such as Yahya Fadi Al-Najjar, had not reached their first birthday. The oldest, Juduh Zidan Shakir Alagha, was 81 years old. It was striking, though, that most of the names read out were of very young children – their lives cut short while aid trucks have been held up for months at the border fences surrounding Gaza.

When little Celia collapsed and died on the street in March 1847, she and her family had walked 30 miles from their Conamara home, where they were tenants on the estate of Thomas Martin MP, to the city in search of food. By the time Celia was given sustenance at the Presentation Convent, it was too late to save her life. She was too exhausted to eat.

Pictured:  People attending the vigil held up the names of some of the people in Gaza who have died due to starvation, as Israel refuses to allow trucks with food aid into the area.