A Mayo farmer has donated his two-room stone birthplace towards a US$5 million famine memorial project in New York.
Work is already under way on dismantling the house, stone by stone, where Tom Slack, his brother and sister were born at Attymass, outside Ballina.
The 45x15-foot cottage, which has been in the Slack family for six generations, will be shipped across the Atlantic and reconstructed as part of an Irish Hunger Memorial in Battery Park City, Lower Manhattan.
The project is the brainchild of Governor George Pataki of New York State and the chairman of Battery Park City, Mr James Gill, and is supported by the authority's president and chief executive officer, Mr Timothy Carey.
A local FAS team has been numbering and baling the stones from the dwelling, which dates from the 1830s. Now derelict, it was last inhabited by Mr Tom Slack, his brother, sister and parents. Its core of rubble-stone, sandwiched between layers of fieldstone, will be replaced with concrete to comply with New York construction and seismic regulations.
Mr Slack, a small farmer at Corrimbla, near Bonniconlon, told The Irish Times that he was contacted several months ago by a relative, Mr Brian Clyne. Mr Clyne is a partner of the artist responsible for designing the Irish Hunger Memorial project, Brian Tolle. Mr Clyne had seen pictures of the house in a family photo album.
It matched the designers' description of the famine memorial as "an extraordinarily humble place, the interior of a ruined fieldstone cottage, now emptied of the family life that it once sheltered". Mr Slack was asked if he would donate it, free of charge, and agreed.
Mr Slack told The Irish Times that he doesn't feel too nostalgic. "It did its duty, it kept a roof over my head for 20 years, and I have my own place so I won't be left out in the cold."
