Disaster Response
Dail Éireann — 2022-11-22
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Brendan Howlin (LAB), Wexford

Few of us who witnessed it at the time will forget the visit of then President Mary Robinson to Somalia in 1992. After three days of visiting camps and meeting starving people, she broke down and wept at a press conference in neighbouring Kenya. People will remember that.
Thirty years later it is happening again, only on an even greater scale. In a year of unprecedented hunger, according to the World Food Programme, 828 million people will go to bed hungry tonight. In the Horn of Africa, four consecutive failed rainy seasons with the potential failure of the fifth means that 22 million people are at risk of starvation.
The three decades of civil war combined with climate change has brought an unprecedented catastrophe. I welcome the allocations of money but we need to do more to ensure that the conflict that has existed for 30 years ends too.

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2022-11-22/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:51:19+00:00
Sitting date: 2022-11-22