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Kindred Spirits

The Municipal District of East Cork, Italy

Kindred Spirits

Kindred Spirits is a large stainless steel outdoor sculpture in Bailick Park in Midleton, County Cork, Ireland. Created by artist Alex Pentek, Kindred Spirits commemorates the 1847 donation by the Native American Choctaw people to Irish famine relief during the Great Famine, despite the Choctaw them

selves living in hardship and poverty and having recently endured the Trail of Tears. While records of the exact amount of the donation vary, the figure usually given is US$170 (about $5,900 in 2025 inflation-adjusted dollars, though some methods indicate it could have been as high as $20,000 in 2015 dollars). In the U.S. coinage of the time, U.S.$170 meant 8.22 troy ounces of physical gold, or about US$14,000 in 2020 prices. The sculpture consists of nine 20-foot (6.1 m) stainless steel eagle feathers arranged in a circle, no two feathers being identical, forming a bowl shape to represent an empty bowl of food. With over 20,000 welds and taking a year to make, it was created by Alex Pentek at the National Sculpture Factory in Cork, with assistance to polish the finished work from students of the city's Crawford College of Art and Design, and installed in Bailick Park in 2015. The memorial...

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