On Thursday, 160 years on, at the official opening of the memorial site to famine victims at Ireland Park at the foot of Bathurst St., near where the fever sheds on the wharves once stood, there will be a remembering of that unspeakable human suffering - and of the failures and the heroism in dealing with it.

The memorial - a stone monument by architect Jonathan Kearns, four life-sized bronze figures by Rowan Gillespie depicting the Irish in all their misery, a wall carved with the names of 600 identified deceased - promises to be both stark and stirring. There is, after all, little more primal than hunger and thirst.