A group of about forty people marched from St Stephens¿ Green in Dublin to the Canadian embassy to protest at the failure of the IMF and the World Bank to cancel poorer countries' debts.
Demonstrators from the Debt and Development Coalition/Jubilee Ireland handed in a letter of protest to the embassy's Charge d'Affaires, Mr William Gusen, in the lead-up to a G8 summit in the Canadian Rocky Mountains later this week.
The letter calls on the Canadian government to take immediate action on extending debt-reduction programmes.
The group said the government had put the debt issue back on the agenda for the upcoming summit but despite many promises "the G8 have failed to tackle the debt crisis".
"They now admit that the main debt initiative, the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries Initiative (HIPC), is failing to deliver even the inadequate amount of debt reduction promised," Ms Angela Temple of the Debt and Development Coalition said.
Green Party TD, Mr John Gormley who attended the event said the structural causes of hunger and malnutrition were intensifying. He said countries' economic systems, including that of Ireland were "prejudicial at institutional level." He told ireland.comthat the government were "afraid of the G8" and that "Ireland's foreign policy is dictated to us by the US."
This morning, U2's Bono sent a message of support to the group describing his trip to Africa with US Treasurer Mr Paul O'Neill. "It was an intense 12 days, we visited four countries, met countless politicians, NGOs, doctors, teachers, economists, and ordinary people who took the time to tell us about their lives. . .and we certainly saw the problems up close."
He said the issue of debt came up "again and again," saying that in Ghana, economic conditions attached to IMF and World Bank loans had resulted in the demise of domestic rice production.
The U2 frontman and debt campaigner said that in Uganda, the Finance Minister "told us that falling coffee prices meant the impact of HIPC was being undermined ' because debt sustainability is not linked to a government's ability to pay, but to exports."
Describing his experiences in Ethiopia, he said the devastation of war and famine had been being replaced by the devastation of the AIDS pandemic ' "and still the government has to pay $100 million each year in debt."