Donors Worry About Fate of Artifacts as Museum on Irish Famine Closes

In the mid-1990s John L. Lahey, the president of Quinnipiac College (CT), read a book about the 19th-century potato famine in Ireland and decided that its causes and consequences, its death toll and resulting diaspora, warranted broader exposure. The college Lahey led began collecting artworks and documents related to the famine and in 2012 opened Ireland’s Great Hunger Museum inside a former public library building in Hamden, Conn., near the school’s campus. But Lahey retired in 2018 and the institution, now known as Quinnipiac University, has decided to close the museum, citing financial pressures that made it a burden to sustain.