‘A Great Industrial Exhibition in the Shadow of a Great Famine.’

Liam Kennedy, Emeritus Professor of History, Queen’s University Belfast.

Our Great National Temple of Art and Industry

An initiative of the Royal Irish Academy’s Historical Studies Committee, consisting of a collaborative exhibition, plenary session and conference in collaboration with the RDS, and the National Gallery of Ireland across the month of November 2023.

Abstract: There is something of a shock value to the timing of the 1853 Great Industrial Exhibition in Dublin. The famine of the later 1840s had resulted in the abnormal death of about one million women, men and children, while emigration had denuded Ireland of another one million inhabitants. Some parts of the country, particularly in the West of Ireland, had barely begun to recover from the ravages of that catastrophe.

So why an industrial exhibition, great or otherwise, against this backdrop? Might one think of the venture as a giant folly, in the sense of structures, temples, towers and other decorative creations that adorned landed estates in England and Ireland in the period? Or, more constructively, might the holding of the exhibition be seen as a defiant cry against the forces of nature and poverty, with the longer-term vision of creating a more prosperous future for Ireland and its peoples?

Modelled on the Great Exhibition in London two years earlier, the Dublin Exhibition sought to showcase examples of Irish industry and arts, while also securing exhibits from other countries. The comparison is not a favourable one, yet the thrust of this paper is that the Dublin Exhibition tells us much about Irish society at the time, its class nature, its anxieties and its aspirations.