President Michael D. Higgins delivered a landmark speech on Saturday about the background to, and the impact of the famine that ravaged Ireland in the middle of the 19th Century.

The President made the link to what is happening in Gaza at the moment, accusing the United Nations Security Council of failing "again and again" by neglecting the "forced starvation" of Gazans.

Making his address at the National Famine Commemoration in Kilmallock, Co. Limerick, the President described the denial of food by the Israeli government as “an instrument of war.”

"When the Security Council fails us, as it does again and again, in responding to what I have been describing as the current conditions, we must return to the exceptional measures that are available to us that I remember discussing at the time of the Iraq war, that are available from the General Assembly,” he said in remarks that were not in the original script for the speech. "The General Assembly must speak and act if in fact the Security Council refuses to deal with terrible famines that are now facing us."

He also addressed accusations of anti-semitism, urging listeners to question the actions of the Israeli government.

"How is it that anyone who criticises the actions of Netanyahu, his government and police, that they somehow or another, are anti-Semitic," he asked.

"I think, why should people be cowed into silence because they are critical of what's happening?” he added. "I think it is necessary, very necessary that people speak out very clearly about saying that Ireland is not an anti-Semitic country...

“...We're dealing with an extraordinary savage attack on people in the West Bank," he added.

Here is the full script of the speech, which explains how the famine cameabout in great and enormously revealing detail.

Read the President’s full speech below:

Today, designated as National Famine Commemoration Day, is a solemn opportunity for the people of this island to reflect on and recall those who perished, the suffering and loss experienced by our Irish people in that cataclysmic period in our history to which we refer as An Gorta Mór.

No other event in our history can be likened to the Great Famine, either for its immediate, tragic impact, or its legacy of involuntary emigration, cultural loss, increased decline of the Irish language, and demoralisation.

The founding of a commemorative event for the Great Famine was a significant milestone and owes a great deal to those activists who advocated for it, such as Pete St. John, Michael and Olivia Blanch, Kieran Tuohy, and many others who campaigned for it.

As we gather in the Famine Memorial Park within the historic Kilmallock Union Workhouse complex, this is the first time that the State Commemoration has taken place in County Limerick. May I say that it offers a most appropriate backdrop for reflecting on one of the most pivotal and painful chapters of our nation’s history.

The basic facts of An Gorta Mór are:
- The population of Ireland was reduced from 8.5 million in 1845 to 6.6 million by 1851;
- Over 1 million people died of starvation and disease;
- Over 2 million people emigrated on approximately 5,000 ship sailings;
- Life expectancy fell from over 38 years in 1845 to below 21 years in the second half of the decade.

We have, thanks to an ever-expanding historiography, a number of established and accepted facts pertaining to An Gorta Mór. It was a cataclysmic event experienced by the Irish people as then part of the British Empire. An apology for the British response has been issued on behalf of the British Government and was read at a commemoration event in Millstreet in 1997, the 150th anniversary of “Black ’47”.

Having given the keynote address at the National Famine Commemoration on six occasions, I do so in 2025 for what will be my final time as Uachtarán na hÉireann. Doing so presents me with the greatest difficulties. Famine is a horrific reality in so many parts of the world, repeated again and again, accepted with indifference. It is a great human failure.

We are now also seeing starvation being used as an instrument of war. As peoples in countries such as Yemen and Sudan suffer hunger and famine created by conflict, so many additional deaths are caused by blockages to food and medical aid. The consequences of a forced starvation in Gaza are daily on our television screens. In relation to Gaza, United Nations Secretary General António Guterres stated recently,

“As aid dries up, the floodgates of horror have re-opened. […] Gaza is a killing field – and civilians are in an endless death loop”.

The Secretary General went on to draw the world’s attention to the Fourth Geneva Convention, which outlines the duty of Occupying Powers to ensure food and medical supplies for the population, as well as ensuring and maintaining medical and hospital establishments and services, public health and hygiene.

The collapse in humanitarian aid and assistance across the globe has left a significantly reduced humanitarian capacity, and where it does exist, access to those affected is impacted by conflict and often civil strife. As I speak, trucks with food, medicine and water are blocked at three entry points to Gaza.

Hunger and displacement are among the greatest challenges facing the world. At their root, of course, is the impact of climate change, which is contributing not only to immediate conditions of famine, but also to the ability of breaking a limiting food dependence in the future.

It is when we acknowledge the assumptions, and the indifference that stands behind the facts that are the experience of those we see dying on our television screens, and speculate on the full impact of the ideological context that is coming to dominate and its influence on policy that we are best prepared to understand and to use our own Famine experience in such a way as might generate an appropriately ethical response to the obscenity of recurring famines in our own time in different parts of our shared, vulnerable planet and the assumptions guiding an insufficiency of response.

The historiography of the Irish Famine, like that of the War of Independence and the Civil War, is one for which there was, for a period, pressure to pass over to contemporary constitutional issues – indeed it was marginalised until the mid-1990s when scholars such as James Donnelly, Kerby Miller, Patrick O’Sullivan, Cormac Ó Gráda, Christine Kinealy, Gearóid Ó Tuathaigh, Thomas Keneally and others helped to give the Famine its thorough and appropriate treatment in Irish historiography.

The most serious scholarship on the Irish Famine has now agreed that the primary contextual features on the response to the Famine were based on ideological and political assumptions, assumptions that carried a particular view of modernity and rationality, a view which was perceived as being beyond the Irish people and on which they needed instruction. This is reflected not just in the writings, but, for example, in the campaigns of Archbishop Richard Whately and Nassau Senior.

We are all indebted to scholars such as Professor Tom Boylan and Dr Ciara Boylan who have produced invaluable work on the Whately project. The ideological assumptions of Whately and those such as Nassau Senior have also been critiqued in the excellent entry to the Famine Folios series, Death by Discourse? Political Economy and the Great Irish Famine, by Tadhg Foley, who offered us examples of Whately’s Easy Lessons on Money Matters for the Use of Young People.

Such work exposes the iron fist barely concealed by the invisible hand of the market. For example, the economist Nassau Senior, speculating on whether the act of Providence he saw in the Famine would be sufficient to change the Irish in the direction of a necessary and altered rationality that accepted the marketplace, stated that,

“the death of only one million people in Ireland […] would scarcely be enough to do much good”.

As Tadhg Foley puts it, English establishment during the time of the Famine attributed the catastrophe it constituted to moral flaws in the Irish character such as “improvidence”, “backwardness”, “indolence”, “a tendency towards disorder and lawlessness”, “over-population”, factors considered to be barriers to economic progress, modernisation – “in effect to Anglicisation” –, the causes and effects of a “flawed people”. It demonstrated a perceived widespread ignorance of laissez faire economics, which by the mid-19th century had attained a scientific supremacy in the hegemonic discourse.

In 1847 William Neilson Hancock offered Three Lectures on the Questions, Should the Principles of Political Economy Be Disregarded at the Present Crisis? The answer was an unequivocal ‘no’. In fact, reading the early contributions to Journal of the Statistical Society, it becomes obvious that the Society was founded, not so much as a humanitarian response to the Famine, but in order to defend the laws of economics then seen as under unprecedented attack.

Perhaps the most insightful quotation that helps to explain the prevailing ideology of the time, one that combined Providentialism with free-market economics, is that of Edmund Burke who spoke of,

“the laws of commerce, which are the laws of nature, and consequently the laws of God”.

Philanthropic donations during the Famine continue to be ever better-documented. They came from, among others, the convicts on the prison hulks, the Choctaw and Cherokee Peoples on their reservations, the newly freed slaves in the Caribbean, the Quakers, and the Anishinaabee, Haudenosaunee and Huron-Wendat indigenous communities in Canada.

Recent research from Dr Jason King and Professor Mark McGowan of the University of Toronto has unearthed writings from individuals in the First Nations in West Canada which included handwritten notes from the mid-1840s in which they write of how very sorry they are that the children of the Great Mother, who they consider their brothers and sisters in Ireland, are suffering.

Universally, they are distressed and empathetic, writing of how they would have given more money but they themselves are poor. These are people who had virtually nothing and yet were willing to forgo what little they had, having borne similar pain themselves in their own past. They share a sense of the collective, of a shared ancient hospitality in their culture.

This research unearths evidence that had been suppressed by Governments and by the Church, both of whom feared the consequences of such acts of hospitality and generosity becoming public knowledge, an ideology for action, especially by marginalised groups who would continue to suffer from policies of ‘Othering’ that stigmatise for decades.

The Famine in Ireland, and indeed those famines elsewhere, including India, can therefore be seen as a collision between the assumptions of an ancient hospitality and a late 19th-century extreme individualism. It is a contest of the universalising ambitions, of an individualism versus diverse version of a shared humanistic collective.

Before the Famine, and for long after, land and its use was a basic issue. It needs to be recognised that large-scale evictions preceded the Famine, continued during the Famine, and succeeded it. In The Great Famine: Ireland’s Agony, Ciarán Ó Murchadha gives us an example appropriate for the setting in which I give this paper.

Giving evidence later to a British parliament select committee inquiring into the Famine, Francis Spaight a Limerick merchant and ship owner stated:

“I found so great an advantage of getting rid of the pauper population upon my own property that I made every possible exertion to remove them. [...] I consider the failure of the potato crop to be the greatest possible value in one respect in enabling us to carry out the emigration system”.

Spaight, who had purchased a 4,200-acre North Tipperary estate called Derrycastle, was the owner of six small vessels which would carry a high proportion of those sent out of Ireland on the high seas. Spaight was a well-known proponent of so-called ‘landlord-sponsored emigration’, attracted by the large profits to be made “by replacing the ballast on the outward journey with paying emigrants”, as Ciaran Ó Murchadha has written. During 1847, 85,000 were recorded as having emigrated in this fashion.

There is of course a deeper layer of history associated with the contest for land and what it might produce.

Spaight was one of about 10,000 landlords whose ancestors had been the beneficiaries of a 17th-century confiscation of lands that transferred almost the entire land-stock of Ireland from Irish Catholics to British Protestants.

A great gulf divided the wealthiest 50 or so landlords, mostly titled English absentees, from those such as Spaight with more relatively modest holdings, typically about 2,000 acres, who found themselves obliged to supplement their rental income from other sources in order to sustain a lifestyle that would not have otherwise been possible.

As to the response to the conditions of An Gorta Mór, the development of workhouses and institutions related to them, and the conditions associated with entry to them, which were required to be worse than the worst conditions outside, have also been the subject of work such as that of the late Dr Frances Finnegan who has shone a light on the assumptions of the workhouses as a project of poverty, and there is now very substantial accounts of the dying impoverished Irish response to the workhouse.

For those who sought to avoid the workhouse, very many of them found the requirements of the public works schemes beyond their capacity owing to hunger. Those involved in public works reflect, Ó Murchadha tells us, the varying levels of destitution. At the height of their operation in March 1847, public works were crucial for the survival of 734,000 labourers who toiled on them daily, and to their families, who together comprised a total dependency of over 3 million persons.

As Ó Murchadha has written, public works employment was skewed towards counties in the west and south, reflecting the regional imbalances of suffering. The daily average numbers of persons employed in Counties Cork, Galway and Limerick stood at 42,000, 33,000 and 26,000 respectively, whereas Down and Antrim had figures of 335 and 270, reflecting a far lesser extent of destitution.

Scholars such as James Donnelly, Cormac Ó Gráda, Christine Kinealy, and Patrick O’Sullivan are among those whose works have stayed with the Famine and new research into the modern period.

Among the more recent publications is that of Padraic Scanlan, who has placed the Irish Famine historiographically in a context which includes conquest, colonisation and dispossession.

Scanlan writes of how the socioeconomic and political system was one shaped by conquest and colonialism and, fatally for the poor, by a conviction that austerity and the market would deliver “progress”. The legacies of conquest and colonialism collided with a deep imperial faith in markets, commerce and capitalism as the only remedies for social problems, even amid catastrophic ecological and economic collapse. It was that “collision”, he suggests, that produced the most “rotten” policies.

When we assess the causes of the Famine, the word “rotten” is one that is omnipresent – the rotten potatoes that resulted fromphytophthora infestans, the blight that ravaged Europe’s potatoes from 1845, starting in Belgium, having been imported in 1843 from the United States as tubers for planting as seed in 1844; the rotten policies that, as far as Ireland was concerned, were Westminster’s disastrous response to it; and the rot before the rot – the socio-economic, political and ideological systems that, by the 1840s, had made the poor vulnerable to disaster.

The Irish Famine was but one of the 19th-century British Empire’s many famines. Imperialism itself – imposing demands upon a society, disrupting the natural indigenous development of that society, expanding beyond its strength and understanding – is inextricably linked with famine around the colonised world, perhaps most notably in India and Ireland.

We must acknowledge, as Gearoid Ó Tuathaigh’s seminal contribution Ireland Before the Famine does, the imperialist forces predating the Famine which gave rise to economic catastrophe, over-dependence on potatoes, poor living standards, land tenure insecurity – all of which helped precipitate the calamity that is the Famine.

When we examine the factors that led up to the Famine, Scanlan reminds us that the issue of land concentration and property rights is absolutely central. In the Victorian era, land ownership was highly concentrated among a wealthy few landlords. Just under 4,000 people owned nearly 80 percent of Irish land. Under 2,000 owned 93 percent of Scotland, approximately 5,000 owned more than half of England, and just 700 owned 60 percent of Wales.

In Britain large landlords rented their land to wealthier farmers who, in turn, rented hundreds of acres and employed labourers. In Ireland the average farm was very much smaller – a large farm was 50 to 100 acres –, with rent often equal to the entire value of saleable produce.

Thus, land was subdivided into ever-decreasing plots by a few thousand often absentee landlords. In 1845, 505,000 farmers (almost a third of all farmers), accounting for 1.75 million people when dependents are included, leased plots of less than ten acres. The poorest of all were the 650,000 landless labourers and their dependents, accounting for a total of 2.7 million people (over a quarter of the population) seeking conacre when they could.

The poorer the province, the more intense the subdivision. Here in Munster, in counties Limerick and Clare, one third of the rural population lived on a half-acre plot, or less, of potato-growing land. In Connaught, 44,000 farms out of a total of 46,000 (95 percent) were under 15 acres.

The consequences of the Famine fell most severely on the landless labourers as a class. The class of cottier and conacre farmer shrank from 134,000 in 1841 to 36,000 a decade later, and the number of holdings of under five acres fell from 440,000 to 124,000.

A land model, dominated by landlords, moneylenders and speculators, epitomised an extractive capitalism with its aversion to communal welfare.

Land hunger would remain a constant in Irish rural society. As late as 1917, of the 572,574 holdings in Ireland, 112,787 were less than 1 acre, while 123,129 holdings were between 15 and 30 acres.

By the time of the Famine, the Irish economy was overwhelmingly agricultural. By 1850, 14 million acres were under cultivation out of a total land area of 20.2 million acres. The Census of 1841 indicated that only 32 percent of males were engaged in non-agricultural employment.

With the exception of the linen industry in Ulster, all industrial employment had been in decline in the decades prior to the Famine, thus such employment was an unlikely option for rural labourers.

The changes in agricultural practice that were taking place in Ireland in the 19th century – for example, those in response to external demand for agricultural products, the crash in commodity prices, with agricultural produce falling by two-thirds, the move from labour-intensive tillage to grazing which was less labour intensive – many of these changes were brought about by clearances and evictions which had a devastating effect on the poorest who experienced an enforced dependence on a single food source.

The number of evictions proceedings grew during the Famine years: 11,166 in 1847, 16,349 in 1848, and 16,979 in 1849. It is estimated that as many as 500,000 people were evicted between 1845 and 1850, while many others were ‘unroofed’ and Martial law imposed.

Some four decades after the Famine, this theme of land ownership would be addressed by Reverend Dr Thomas Nulty, Bishop of Meath, in his contribution, Back to the Land, published in the United States in 1887 and which sold over a million copies.

According to Nulty, Irish landlordism of the 19th century was based on a claim to absolute property, according to which tenants were dependent

“for the right of earning their bread on the farms which their forefathers enriched with their toil, on the arbitrary and irresponsible will of their landlords who perceived not even the most basic obligation to keep them from dying of want”.

For this reason, Nulty was resolute in his opposition:

“I infer, therefore, that no individual or class of individuals can hold a right of private property in the land of a country; that the people of that country, in their public corporate capacity, are, and always must be, the real owners of the land of their country”.

Nulty was giving voice to the indigenous land-ownership model informed by a recollection of conquest, the clash and interplay of traditional practice, historical perception and myth, the impact of contemporary socio-political forces, a widespread Irish view that entitlement to land derived from prescriptive historical claims but carried a fundamental right to subsistence of food and shelter. Property may be devoted by its owner to any purpose that is not inconsistent with the public good.

As Luke Gibbons has written of Nulty,

“In the shrill discourse of the period, it is not surprising that Nulty’s essay drew charges of being ‘Communistic’ from the LondonTimes, and its international publication in Patrick Ford’s Irish World newspaper even attracted the attention of Karl Marx who noted wryly, the ‘declaration against [private] landownership by an Irish bishop’”.

Such an emphasis, as argued by Nulty, decades after An Gorta Mór, on subsistence and socio-economic rights offered a defiant challenge to the prevailing hegemonic political economy of the period that had continued, one enthralled in large part by the legacy of Thomas Malthus who welcomed famine as nature’s providential way of thinning populations to ensure that they do not outgrow the availability of food.

Malthus himself, and his followers, considered the Irish situation of the 1840’s as “hopeless”, believing that fixed laws of nature constituted the only means by which God’s progressive purpose could be achieved on earth. With such a theology in mind, the arrival of famine was seen as evidence of over-population and, thus, necessary to annihilate ‘surplus’ population.

That sense of Providentialism and the need to instil a self-reliance, regardless of the human consequences, guided the policies of the Government of the time. Charles Trevelyan, the senior British Treasury official in charge of Famine relief, in his 1848 book, The Irish Crisis, offered the following justification for it all:

“With a direct stroke of an all-wise and all-merciful Providence […], the sharp but effectual remedy by which the cure is likely to be effected, [... one which lays bare] the deep and inveterate root of social evil. God grant that the generation to which this great opportunity has been offered may rightly perform its part”.

Yet, in reality, both Ireland’s poverty and the Famine itself were a consequence of the island’s place in an ideologically driven, very modern, extractive, imperialist capitalism, an imposed ‘modernity’.

The role of laissez-faire economics is critical in any description of the causes of An Gorta Mór. Crucially, in response to an escalating loss of life, Britain could have prohibited the export of grain from Ireland, especially during the winter of 1846-47 and early in the following spring, when there was little food in the country.

Agricultural exports from Ireland to Britain had been increasing for decades. Wheat exports increased from 749 quarters in 1800 to 661,776 quarters on the eve of the Famine. Oats rose from 2,411 quarters in 1800 to over two million quarters in 1840. Ireland exported annually 250,000 cattle, 90 million eggs and enough grain to feed two million people, supplying Britain with over 85 percent of its imported grain, meat, butter and livestock during the 1840s.

By the winter of 1846-47, the situation in rural Ireland had become apocalyptic. An estimated 400,000 people died of starvation and disease. The bonds of social life dissolved. Parents watched their children die and were too weak to mourn them properly. Children watched their parents die and were too weak to move their bodies. An exodus began for those who could afford to leave.

As well as those who starved, others died of malnutrition having attempted to survive on a diet of imported American maize, the main ingredient distributed in food aid presented as a “gift” from Britain, and used for most workhouse meals.

The government could have continued its soup-kitchen scheme for more than the six months of March to September 1847. Despite the fact that it was providing food for up to three million people, proving to be both effective and inexpensive, that decision to end it prematurely was a policy of non-interventionism, supporting the Whigs’ beliefs as to how government and society should function.

Under £8m was provided as relief by the British government during the period 1845-50, representing 0.01 percent of Britain’s gross national product during the period to contrast with the £20 million allocated for compensation to owners of slaves on the abolition of slavery legislation of the period.

These policies – most particularly the failure to close ports to food exports with a view to bringing down prices and giving hope, the winding-up of soup kitchens when hunger and disease were still widespread, and the Quarter Acre Clause which required people to surrender all but a quarter acre of ground to obtain relief without entering the workhouse – were borne from a “collision” of colonialism and Victorian capitalism.

Ideological assumptions as to essence and practices of the Irish as inferior are at the root of the economic theory and policies that allowed An Gorta Mór to have the final impacts it had. Ireland was “a nation perishing of political economy” to quote Church of Ireland Clergyman, Richard Townsend, who devoted his time in Skibbereen and Schull to the care of the poor and the sick, where the death rate was over 50 percent.

Where we stand today, the Kilmallock Famine Memorial Park, the site for this year’s National Famine Commemoration, is built on the burial ground where many Famine victims, mostly undocumented, were laid to rest in mass graves.

The Memorial Park contains the Kilmallock Union Workhouse, erected in 1839-40, one of 163 workhouses that once operated across Ireland. Conditions in Kilmallock Workhouse were typical of so many across the country. It was designed by the Poor Law Commissioners to house 800 people, yet contained up to 1,397 people at the peak of the Famine in ‘Black 1847’, operating at 75 percent above capacity.

Overcrowding in the workhouses allowed fast transmission of disease. In the final 12 weeks of 1848, 230 people died in the workhouse.

Reports from doctors in various parts of Limerick, which were published in the Limerick Chronicle on 21st March 1846, make clear that the people, left with no other food, were, in their extreme hunger, forced to eat diseased and rancid potatoes with calamitous results, including small pox.

The local impact of the Great Famine on Irish rural communities is well worthy of documentation. Every parish, every townland has a Famine graveyard.

The population of County Limerick declined from 330,000 in 1841 to 262,000 a decade later, and just 146,000 by the time of the 1901 Census. The drop in the rural population was particularly brutal – Kilmallock experienced a fall of almost a quarter of its 1841 population.

During this time of blight and hunger, the Limerick City quaysides were used to transport produce from one of the most fertile parts of Ireland, the Golden Vale, to the English ports. Francis Spaight, the Limerick merchant, landlord and ship owner to whom I referred earlier, recorded 386,909 barrels of oats and 46,288 barrels of wheat being shipped out of Limerick between June 1846 and May 1847.

These same Limerick quaysides were the departure point for many who attempted to flee the Famine, sailing across the Atlantic. One week in April 1850 saw four ships, the Marie Brennan, the Congress, the Triumph, and Hannah, the smallest emigrant ship, sail down the Shannon towards the Americas, mostly comprising young people, depriving Ireland of their vigour and contribution which they would bring to other nations instead. The Hannah, at 18 metres long, could barely hold 60 passengers and eight crew, yet made eight trans-Atlantic voyages.

Many of those sailing to the New World were desperately sick. As many as 40,000 people – 20 percent of all emigrants during 1847 – died on the voyage.

We should recall too that some 5,500 of those leaving were political activists forced into exile, many to Australia’s penal colonies, leaving behind families and wives – the “transportation-widowed women” – who developed often desperate survival methods, as depicted in Thomas Keneally’s The Great Shame.

Remittances were crucial in establishing a pattern of chain emigration, a defining element of Irish emigration over a period of 150 years. Letters home from the period give us rich insights.

In September 1850, Margaret McCarthy sent $20 to her father in Kanturk, which she hoped “might be some acquisition to you until you might be clearing away from that place altogether”. Later in her letter she expressed happiness at being away from where the county rates-man would have the satisfaction of impounding her cow or other possessions.

As to our contemporary circumstances, there is a need for a global commitment to end hunger and malnutrition. Voices must be raised to address this as the best assurance of security and international law.

Of all the challenges that we face in our contemporary world, responding to global hunger and the vindication of the right to food security is one that is of paramount importance, a project under which we can all unite and work together to achieve.

Surely we, the descendants of Famine survivors, should demand and work with others to ensure that no other people anywhere in the world shall ever experience such a calamity.

Yet today we find ourselves in times of great global hunger and famine, despite our knowledge that hunger and famine are preventable. With the use of hunger as a weapon of siege and war, are we not at a moral nadir?

The Horn of Africa has endured devastating hunger three times in the three decades since the famine that I witnessed first-hand in Somalia in 1992. On each occasion, the world said “never again” when details of the famine were reported to the United Nations. Yet, each time, famine has returned.

Hunger is at the heart of the involuntary mass migration which we now see, one which leads to contested space. It is incumbent on the international community and our multilateral system to work to resolve this crisis. Yet, we are challenged by a failing multilateralism that is being undermined, rendered impotent by an impunity that grows in so many breaches of previously agreed international law.

We are witnessing dangerous breaches and challenges to human rights around the world – be it in the plight of those enduring the horrific consequences of avoidable war and conflict, including food insecurity, the reappearance of old hatreds and the arrival of new forms of the scourges of hatred, racism and intolerance.

If responding to violence with violence came to be viewed as the natural condition of humanity, that surely constitutes little less than a great species failure.

The existential challenges that face us today – global hunger, malnutrition, poverty, sustainability, war and preparations for wars – require us to accept the challenge of seeking a new enhanced consciousness, a new point of balance, resonance, agreement as to giving primacy, managing and sustaining the means to survival itself. Such any new beginning must be one that seeks to build the mind and the experience of peace, recognises the interdependence of a shared humanity, aspires towards achieving a recognition that war must never be an option that a global peaceful co-existence is our best expression of our shared humanity.

This is my final Famine Commemoration address as President of Ireland. In memory of all those who died during An Gorta Mór, may I repeat my plea that we all work together for lasting peace and for an end to global hunger and famine.