Famine memory plays major role in Irish overseas aid, President says

Such was the devastating effect of the Famine on the Irish people that they have yet to find language to describe it, President Michael D Higgins said in Malawi this morning.

Mr Higgins believes memory of the Famine plays a major role in influencing Irish overseas aid. This was not “because we remember, but because we cannot forget,” he said.

In a keynote address at Lilongwe University of Agriculture and Natural Resources he said "the terrible vulnerability of hunger is something that reaches deep into our Irish psyche as our national history remains shadowed by the dark chapter that was the Irish Famine, An Gorta Mór or the Great Hunger in our native language." The Irish people "have found difficulty in even giving a title to what happened in those dark years."

“During a few short years in the 1840s, one million people died from starvation and disease, and a million more were forced to leave our shores forever in search of a better future,” he said.

“It was a famine originating from crop failure and sustained by a great failure of governance and humanity; a failure driven by a doctrinaire adherence to a flawed ideology which placed efficiency and economic gain ahead of compassion and empathy.

“Famine was decreed, by some authorities, perhaps, to be part of a divine plan to control growing populations. Much needed food continued to be exported while Irish people starved; and the removal of millions of tenant families led to the freeing up of estates for an investment in more profitable crops.”

The Famine and its consequences was why “issues of hunger and land ownership have had a deep resonance for the Irish ever since. This experience has echoed through the generations and has shaped the values and principles of the Irish people, motivating Ireland’s programme of overseas aid, Irish Aid, to focus on the poorest and most vulnerable.

Mr Higgins said this experience was why hunger was at the core of Ireland’s overseas aid programme. “We do this, not simply because we remember, but because we cannot forget,” he said.

Today, “more than one billion people remain undernourished, over two billion suffer nutritional deficiencies, and almost six million children die every year from malnutrition or related diseases.”

That the source of this was not lack of food but injustice and inequality represented “one of the greatest ethical failures of the current systems of global governance. It is an indictment of current structures.”

But he believed, “for the first time we have reason to be hopeful that solutions can be found.”Ireland was “committed to the building of a credible framework which can, we are hopeful, end extreme poverty and hunger in a generation.”

Recalling his own academic career and, addressing academics and aspirant academics in the audience, he said “we have a duty to seek opportunities in our own time to change the world.”