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After a 12-year planning stage and the work of dozens of people, Providence finally opened its version of a memorial to the Irish Famine this past fall. The project got its start in 1995 at a Mass held to commemorate the 150th anniversary of Black '45 - the year the first crops failed - when more than a thousand people showed up to lend their support for a dream that finally came true in November with the debut of the sculpture of a starving family. The Rhode Island Irish Famine Memorial Committee commissioned Robert Shure, the same man who designed Boston's well-received memorial, to design and shape their testament, a larger-than-life portrait of a mother, father, and their starving children. Shure's proposal was selected out of a total of 30 submitted, and with an overwhelmingly positive vote by the 25-member committee. The monument originally was meant to be placed inside a renovated Providence museum, but the group finally decided to set it in the open in the city's downtown River Walk area. After some problems with the selected site, the committee finally got the memorial in place for dedication on Nov. 17. Some 400 people attended the event and a celebratory Mass that was said at the city's Cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul. Accompanying the bronze statue is a walkway and a memorial wall on which is a description of the horrors of the famine, its estimated 1 million deaths, and the successes of the Irish in Rhode Island and America. The Famine Memorial Committee also made a donation to the Rhode Island Food Bank.