Glasgow is in denial over monument to Great Famine | Kevin McKenna

More than 150 years after starving Irish people first sought sanctuary in Glasgow, it seems the city’s acceptance of them remains a qualified one. The bulk of those who settled here had fled the horrors of the Great Famine (An Gorta Mór) in Ireland between 1845 and 1852. During this period, a million of Ireland’s poorest people starved to death and a million more were forced to flee to other countries to ensure that their families survived.

The potato blight at its heart had also occurred throughout north-west Europe but no other people suffered anywhere near as much as the Irish. In 19th-century Ireland, repression of the indigenous Catholic population and the cruelty of English absentee landlords exacerbated the effects of the famine.

Since then, the Irish have settled all over the world and, not unlike the Scots, have made massive contributions in many of the countries that gave them succour and sanctuary. These countries acknowledged how much the immigrant Irish had given them and were delighted to grant permanent memorials to those who suffered in An Gorta Mór. It was this event, after all, which had brought the Irish with all their economic and cultural gifts eventually to their shores. Great Famine memorials now stand in more than 100 cities, testaments to the endurance and courage of a sovereign people and a reminder of the inhumanity, cruelty and greed upon which the British empire was built.

Yet in Glasgow, where the descendants of those who fled famine and persecution in Ireland now represent anything between one-fifth and a third of the population, there has been no permanent memorial – until now.

Last week, it was revealed in the Irish Voice, the newspaper for the Irish in Scotland, that a permanent memorial will be built in the grounds of St Mary’s church in the Calton district of Glasgow’s East End. On several levels, this is a most appropriate location for the memorial. The Calton, historically one of the poorest areas of the city, is where the Irish settled in very large numbers. And it was in St Mary’s church hall that Celtic FC, the other great cultural expression of Irish identity in Scotland, was founded.

This, though, does not tell the full story behind the struggle to secure Glasgow city council’s agreement to erect any sort of memorial to the Great Famine. When the memorial to the horrors of An Gorta Mór is finally unveiled it will be in spite of Glasgow city council rather than because of it.

The vast majority of those killed in the Great Famine were Irish Catholics but a significant number of poor Protestants suffered too. This was why Glasgow city council was asked to provide a site, preferably on Clydeside, that didn’t have exclusively Catholic connotations.

After almost 18 months of negotiations and contact at all levels Glasgow city council has been evasive, duplicitous and unco-operative. Worse than this, it stands accused of cynically adding on a memorial to victims of the potato blight that occurred in the Highlands of Scotland at around the same time.

The council is going ahead with a memorial that lumps the two disasters together. It seems that some people on the council, both Labour and SNP, will go to extraordinary lengths to ensure that no specific memorial to the Great Famine, which shaped modern Glasgow, will ever be built on ground that it owns.

Tom Devine, Scotland’s foremost historian, has written extensively on the effect of Irish immigration into Scotland. Next year will see the publication of his latest book, Dispossession, which for the first time deals with the clearances in both Highland and Lowland Scotland.

He said: “Despite the prejudice and hostility the Irish faced when they came to Scotland – especially in the 1920s and 1930s – the third and fourth generations have gone on to make a massive contribution to the development of the modern Glasgow and to Scotland as a whole. The Irish and their descendants have brought an essential colour to the Scottish landscape. The Great Famine stands alone in terms of death, suffering and the movement of people to Scotland, especially to Glasgow.”

It’s difficult to understand why Glasgow city council has gone to such great lengths not to have a specific memorial to the Irish Famine when one exists in so many other cities around the world. Does it fear that it will be vandalised or that it will attract opprobrium from the banjo-playing faction of the Scottish Tories?

The modern Orange Order in Scotland has repeatedly stated that it is not an anti-Catholic organisation. Indeed, the grand master of the Orange Order gave a very witty and statesmanlike interview to the Scottish Catholic Observer a few years ago that underscored the point. So just what is it about a permanent memorial to An Gorta Mór that has caused so much nervousness within successive Labour and SNP council administrations?

The Great Hunger Memorial Committee expressed its frustration at the conduct of the local authority in the Irish Voice. “It seemed to us that Glasgow city council added on the Highland element because they knew, or believed, that there were forces in Glasgow even today who would not accept a memorial which involved the Irish alone. The scale and extent of what happened to our people —one million dead and one million forced to emigrate out of a population of eight million made the notion of a ‘Highland and Irish famine memorial’ completely unacceptable to us and offensive in its very concept.”

In recent months, senior politicians from every party in Scotland have been falling over each other in their haste to sign up to the very commendable TIE campaign (Time for Inclusive Education), which seeks to address issues around homophobic bullying and LGBT awareness in Scottish schools.

Since devolution, both Labour-led and SNP governments at Holyrood have made massive progress in making Scotland a country where minority communities are accorded equal rights and parity of esteem in Scotland.

The Irish in Scotland, after those first teething decades, have settled well here and are now making valuable contributions in every area of Scottish life. It seems very strange that Scotland’s biggest city and the one where their contribution and influence has been most telling, still refuses to recognise that awful event that brought most of us here.