Some people used to call John Garrahy "the professor of Irish dancing.” This 1942 photo shows him with his students and their parents. He is the farthest left of the three men in the front-row center. His 11-year-old son, J. Joseph Garrahy, who would become governor, is at the end of the top row in the right corner.

Courtesy of J. Joseph Garrahy

When I recently strolled with former Gov. J. Joseph Garrahy through the Irish Famine Memorial that is nearing completion on Providence’s Riverwalk, the morning was damp and foggy.

“In Ireland,” Garrahy smiled, “they say it’s just a little mist.”

The polished granite benches at the memorial, which is to be dedicated on Nov. 17, bear inscriptions like, “THEY WILL NEVER BE FORGOTTEN,” and “WHAT IF THEY HAD NOT DARED….”The hunger and disease wrought by the 1845-1851 potato famine claimed a million or more lives. Even more people fled to the United States and elsewhere.

Garrahy suggests the memorial should be a reminder of the Irish experience — and a lesson on the need to take humanitarian action wherever it is required.

The weather during our visit reminded me of some lines from a play, A State of Hope, that captures the horror of the famine.

Tom Roberts, who comes from a prominent Irish family here, put the production together from letters and other firsthand accounts. A character says of the arrival of the blight that destroyed the staple food of the common folk:

“A mist rose up out of the sea, and you could hear a voice talking near a mile across the stillness of the earth, for three days or more.”

Another adds, “Then, when the fog lifted, you could see the tops of the potato stalks lying over as if the life was gone out of them.”

Roberts teaches cultural history at the Rhode Island School of Design. His wife, Elizabeth, is lieutenant governor. His late father, Thomas Roberts, was Supreme Court chief justice. His late uncle, Dennis J. Roberts, was governor. His brother, Dennis J. Roberts II, was attorney general.

A reading of the play was presented earlier this year at Trinity Repertory Co. as a fundraiser for the memorial. I caught a reading in Barrington.

Roberts wanted to put the famine in perspective. He says many Irish-Americans romanticize it and say, “The famine was horrible but they were brave, noble people and they came through thick and thin and by God they made it.” Roberts says, “I wanted to show them that many of them were extremely depressed when they got here; some of them went back.”

Of course, many perished in Ireland or aboard ship.

The memorial, planned by a committee whose president is Warwick’s Raymond J. McKenna, a social worker and Irish enthusiast, honors famine victims and celebrates those who made it out and their descendants.

Historian Don Deignan, a retired professor active in the project, tells me most Irish-Americans know relatively little or nothing about the famine: “For many Irish people, the process of assimilation into American life has been so complete and successful that they have forgotten their roots and all but entirely lost their distinct cultural identity.”

Garrahy, 76, is an honorary chairman of the committee and has helped raise money for the memorial, which will include a sculpture, a narrative wall, and donor bricks and flagstones.

His is a dramatic Irish success story.

Allusions to the famine were part of his growing up on Smith Hill as the son of immigrants, John and Margaret (Neylon) Garrahy. They died before he was elected governor in 1976.

“My father and my mother both came from Clare, which is in the west of Ireland, which is where it hit the hardest, one of the areas … My father lived on a farm and my mother lived on a farm and they were dairy farmers.”

They wed in Ireland. John came here in 1927, to get established. Margaret arrived in 1929 with their two small children, Ed and Mary. Joe — the governor — and his brother Vincent were born here.

References to people in Ireland dotted household dialogue. “My mother and father talked about this family, that family, always talked about different families in Ireland they knew.”

Garrahy says his father’s first job here was working for the gas company. “He put gas lines in the ground.” Garrahy quips, “It’s better than saying he dug a ditch!” But, “I think it is the same thing.”

He went on to do construction for FDR’s Works Progress Administration and toiled in a brewery bottling shop.

They had brogues — hers especially strong — and every day, she made Irish bread. Oatmeal was a breakfast staple. Most meals included potatoes.

Did the parents obsess about making sure the kids ate all the food on their plate? “We didn’t have a lot of food in the house,” Garrahy says.

For the most part, the response to the famine by Britain, which ruled Ireland, was a mixture of indifference and incompetence. Indeed, Deignan writes, “The Government believed so strongly in the economic principle of noninterference in trade that it allowed the export from Ireland of abundant supplies of meat and grain during all the Famine years.”

And the Irish had another resentment: Britain forced them to speak English instead of Gaelic.

Garrahy says, “My father was always, always upset about the British taking their language away from them.… My father would say his prayers in Gaelic.”

He also reports, “My father was an Irish step dancer, and very good at it. As a matter of fact, some of the Irishmen would call him the professor of Irish dancing.” He’d teach classes at, say, an American Legion hall.

Faith, of course, was important to the Irish culture. Garrahy says the expression “God bless you” was a constant. “A lot of Irish used to come visit my mother and father. We had a man that used to come nearly every Sunday morning.… He’d come into the house. First thing he’d say was ‘God bless.’ When he left he’d say, ‘God bless.’ Never failed. We even nicknamed him God Bless.”

John Garrahy came from a town called Lahinch, Margaret from nearby Ennistymon. Ennistymon has a famine memorial.

Roberts’ play conveys the horror of the times. Consider these lines drawn from a letter Mary Rush in County Sligo sent to her parents in Quebec in 1846:

“The scourge of God fell down on Ireland in taking away the potatoes, they being the only support of the people…. Dear father and mother, if you don’t take us out of it, the first news you will hear will be of me and my little family lost by hunger.”

Nicholas Cummins, a British official in Ireland, took it upon himself to visit Skibbereen in County Cork. A letter he wrote to the Duke of Wellington, with a copy to The Times of London, provides some of the play’s most vivid lines. In a hovel:

“Six famished and ghastly skeletons, to all appearances dead, were huddled in a corner on some filthy straw…. I approached with horror and found by a low moaning they were alive ... in fever, four children, a woman and what once had been a man.”

In another house were seven “wretches” under a cloak. “One had been dead many hours, but the others were unable to move either themselves or the corpse.”

The letter was read in the United States at Quaker-organized events to raise relief funds.

An especially striking passage in the play comes from an 1850 letter sent to Patt Nolan in Providence by his mother back in Kilkenny:

“I received your letter with the thirty shillings. God will reward you for it. The day it come, I was without one bite to eat … [W]e’ve no place to lay our heads. We were lodging under James Street arch, but were put out of it. We’d be dead long ago, only for two neighbors that often gives me a bite…. I’ve not had a penny.… For the love of God, dear Patt, bring me and little Dickey out of this.”

Roberts, 63, tells me that when he came upon that letter he cried.

Roberts’ grandparents — his late mother, Florence, was a McCabe — arrived in America in the mid-1880s to the early 1890s.

He says his older relatives didn’t talk much about life in the old country. “I think it was that what they came from was so abject and was just awful and that what they were looking for was something better. They came and they actually found something better.”

He traveled to Ireland and developed an intense interest in genealogy. His Uncle Denny, who was born in Providence, twitted him. “He said, ‘What the hell are you trying to find? What do you think, you’re going to find some pot of gold?’ I said, ‘No, I just want to find out who we were.’ ”

Roberts says his maternal grandfather, Henry McCabe, from County Monaghan, spoke of having lived in a “manor,” as if it were grand. But Roberts visited it in 1992 and found it no bigger than the small conference room in which we chatted. The grandfather, he said, was “reinventing.”

Roberts says that when his father, the chief justice, talked about Irish history, it really was the history of the Irish over here.

Roberts reflected in an e-mail, “I think my parents’ generation, first-generation children of immigrants, looked on their origins in Ireland as something their parents had risen above. From dirt floors to parquet in one generation. Why look back? One oft-quoted family story is about my Irish cousin Kitty, the one who died just a few years ago in her 90s, coming to visit RI in the 1950s. My two McCabe aunts went to pick her up at the train station, but hid behind a pillar to check her out and make sure she was presentable before deciding to greet her. To them, Ireland was still the dirt-floored world from which their parents had escaped.”

Joe Garrahy says he was impressed by Roberts’ play. For Garrahy, the Irish heritage is very tangible. “We still have relatives in Ireland. My mother’s niece was here last week.… My brother Ed has been to Ireland 30 times.”

The former governor has been there several times himself. “My mother’s house had a thatched roof until a few years ago.… My father’s house … it was sort of small and in the middle of a dairy farm, with a cow barn next to it and almost attached to it. And my mother’s area was across a couple of farm fields over from where my father lived. So I saw both of those and they were both sort of these whitewashed houses — you know, masonry.” A cousin still lives in his mother’s house. “They’ve got chickens and cows and pigs.”

When you hear the word “Garrahy,” you might think of the J. Joseph Garrahy Judicial Complex or a new University of Rhode Island dormitory, Garrahy Hall, whose simpler name, just the family name, carries for him an added meaning.

His wife, Margherite, their children and grandchildren attended the dorm’s dedication. The former governor spoke that day of what the event would have meant to his father and mother.

He tells me, “They were immigrants .… I don’t think they were poor, because they had a very strong family and they both had jobs. Both worked very hard. My mother worked all the time.… To think that my immigrant parents came here to America and I ended up being governor and we have a building named after them as well as me, it makes me feel proud.”

And he says his parents would be thrilled that he helped out with the famine memorial. “Their Irish heritage was strong for them.… They brought that culture here with them and we blended pretty well, I would say, in the Rhode Island culture. My mother lived to see me elected lieutenant governor [in 1968] but my father did not. But he would certainly be in awe, absolutely in awe, that I became governor.”

M. Charles Bakst is The Journal’s political columnist.

mbakst@projo.com