Today we visited the Kilmainham Jail. I have had never experienced something so eerie before. Especially, since we were right on the grounds of the jail and not in a replica of it I could feel more of a connection to the tragic events.

When I was in middle school I visited the Holocaust museum in Washington DC and thought I was extremely informative and heart wrenching there was still a detachment because it was not in Germany. We were viewing items from the Holocaust preserved in cases from Germany. In this tour, we saw and stood in the very place where hundreds of people died and were killed. Walking through those hallways and belong able to stand in those jail cells in tandem with seeing personal items that belonged to the inmates made such a huge impact on me.

This experience also made me think of the Francis Bacon exhibit and how that was moved from England to Dublin. In the case of the Holocaust museum, the sense of place and belong information was removed once it was removed from Germany. The impact is not lost but there is still a sense of detachment. But in the case of Francis Bacon, a sense of place was restored by moving the studio to Francis Bacon’s home.

Overall, I really enjoyed the tour and appreciated all that I learned. I learned that the owners of the Irish famine were caused by the absentee landowners sending away all the food.