Irish leadership over Somalia urged

Ireland had a leadership role to play in demanding others “step up to the plate” to address the humanitarian crisis in the Horn of Africa, an Oireachtas committee was told this afternoon.

Speaking at an emergency meeting of the Oireachtas Committee on Foreign Affairs and Trade, Justin Kilcullen, director of Trócaire, criticised the US contribution of $15 million (€9.6 million) to the famine relief effort. The time for treating Somalia as “a failed state and a source of terrorism” had passed, he said.

“It is time for people to be put before politics,” Mr Kilcullen told the committee.

Tom Arnold, chief executive of overseas aid charity Concern, said Middle Eastern countries could do more to help and pointed out that Gulf States earned an additional $234 billion last year from fluctuations in the price of oil. “A small bit of that could solve the problem,” he said.

He said if lives were to be saved there needed to be more access to starving people. But he reiterated his criticism of suggestions by John O’Shea of overseas aid charity Goal, that a UN peacekeeping force should be deployed in the area. He said it would stir conflict and achieve the opposite of its aim. Mr Kilcullen agreed.

Jim Clarken, chief executive of Oxfam, said the world was facing the worst food crisis of the 21st century.

“Across East Africa, almost 12 million people are in dire need of food, clean water, and basic sanitation,” he said. He told the committee the loss of life would be staggering if we do not act quickly and estimated a fifth of the population could be dead within a year.

Mr Clarken also told the committee that facts and figures did not show the human tragedy unfolding. He described how women had travelled for hundreds of kilometres with weak children and no food in the hope of reaching a camp, and how elderly people and the weakest children were left behind. The figures didn’t show "the unbearable pain of hunger and the massive toll this is taking on so many thousands of innocent people," he said.

Deputies and senators present praised the Government response to the crisis. But Independent deputy Stephen Donnelly described the €7 million pledged by the Government as “a pittance”, given the scale of the problem.

“If we had mothers leaving their children on the roads of Kerry to walk to Dublin for food there would be more,” he said.