Public likely to donate €20m to Somalia

THE IRISH public are likely to give €20 million in personal donations toward the humanitarian crisis in the Horn of Africa, an Oireachtas committee was told yesterday.

Justin Kilcullen, director of Trócaire, said together with the €7 million pledged by the Government, it was a “significant response” to the disaster.

Last week, the United Nations declared famine in two regions of southern Somalia and said it could spread if action was not taken quickly.

Mr Kilcullen told an emergency meeting of the Oireachtas Committee on Foreign Affairs that Ireland had a leadership role to play in demanding others “step up to the plate”. He criticised the US contribution of $15 million (€10.3 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.”

Tom Arnold, chief executive of Concern, said Middle Eastern countries could do more to help and said 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 Goal that a UN peacekeeping force should be deployed in the area, saying it would stir conflict.

Jim Clarken, chief executive of Oxfam, said across East Africa almost 12 million people were in dire need of food, clean water and basic sanitation. A fifth of the population could be dead within a year, he said.

Most of the 14 deputies and Senators at the meeting praised the Government response to the crisis. But Independent deputy Stephen Donnelly described the €7 million pledged as “a pittance”.