The artworks will make the journey across from Ireland’s Great Hunger Museum at Quinnipiac University in Connecticut and will be displayed in Ireland over a period of eight months.

The announcement was made at the Annual National Famine Commemoration in Ballingarry, Co Tipperary earlier today.

THE WORLD’S LARGEST exhibition of Famine-related art will come to Ireland next year, with works by some of the most eminent Irish and Irish-American artists of the past 170 years.

Sunset, (View of the Rock of Cashel from the Village) - Henry Mark Anthony. Source: (Autumn Driscoll / Quinnipiac University)

The first three months (March-June 2018), the exhibition will be on display at the Coach House in Dublin Castle and it will then be moved to the West Cork Arts Centre in Skibbereen in July, where it will remain until September.

Speaking at the commemoration today, Minister for Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht Heather Humphries said this will afford an opportunity for people in Ireland to “experience the world’s finest collection of Famine-related art firsthand”.

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Curator of the museum in Connecticut, Professor Niamh O’Sullivan, described it as a “momentous occasion”.

“It may have taken a century-and-a-half to look the Famine in the eye, let alone consider its long afterlife in Ireland, and around the world,” she said. ” But the art in Ireland’s Great Hunger Museum is far from merely illustrative; it stands proud as powerful, reflective and inspirational expressions about who we once were, and how we became whom we are today – each piece chosen for its quality as art.”