It is a pleasure to have this opportunity to address the Seanad, something I did not have the opportunity of doing as Minister for Defence. I am delighted to have the opportunity to speak on a subject which is dear to my heart and that of many Senators. It is a subject many of us have studied, especially over the past couple of years in light of the 150th commemoration of that terrible period in our history from 1846-50. The literature is wide and varied.
Over the past two years we have been assessing the impact the Great Famine has had on the contemporary and longer term structures of Irish society. As the House will know, the opportunity to do so has been spearheaded by the Famine Commemorative Committee, which was established in May 1994 by the then Minister, Deputy Tom Kitt, and developed by a Member of this House, Senator Doyle, in her capacity as a member of the last Government, and continued by the present Government by the Minister of State at the Department of the Taoiseach, Deputy Brennan. I pay tribute to these colleagues and to the work of the committee. As a result of this work, we have as a nation a new awareness of a great tragedy.
The facts and figures of the period suggest that during the late 1840s there were unprecedented levels of sickness, emigration, death and misery, what Mrs. Cecil Woodham-Smith called "the Great Hunger" when she published her study under that title in 1962. The Great Hunger and other literature provide a definitive collection of works on the famine. The Great Hunger is worth reading for those who want an unvarnished overview of the famine. Over the years the Great Famine also developed a unique folklore that passed from generation to generation and became embedded in our minds as a defining moment in our history. As it did so, the topic remained highly emotive, affecting our view of ourselves, our neighbours and our role in the world.
I pay tribute to the series of ongoing articles by Brendan Ó Cathaoir, "Famine Diary", which are published every Saturday in The Irish Times They are certainly very helpful to those of us interested in this subject and keep us mindful of that terrible time in our history. Other offerings on the famine include a compilation of a very interesting series of essays by Professor Dudley Edwards and Professor T. Desmond Williams. The Quakers, the Society of Friends, played an immense role in the famine outlined in a book entitled Transactions of the Society of Friends During the Famine in Ireland. This is in the nature of a reference book, which outlines the contribution the Quakers made to the relief of the terrible distress which afflicted the country at the time, but it is interesting to dip into and gives one a sense of the period.
Over the past 20 years or so, historians have been questioning the received wisdom on the Great Famine. Although this has created different schools of thought, the debate has encouraged a more multifaceted and "total history". It is no accident that this "revisionism" and "neo-revisionism" have been evolving as Ireland enters a new chapter in its history and development, as it is becoming more urbanised and industrialised and as it develops new relationships with Britain and the wider European Union.
However, there is no contradiction between learning from our own experience during the Great Famine and the development of these new relationships. Indeed, because of our own painful and relatively recent experience of famine, we are in a better position than most to develop an honourable and honest role to both comment on, and lead the campaign against, starvation and want in our late 20th century world, especially as this is manifest in North Korea.
This must surely be the most important legacy of our most recent review of our own Great Famine, all the more so in that most modern famines are not the result of socio-economic collapse. Instead, they are, more often than not, associated with civil wars, cold wars, a lack of democracy or, in some cases, with what are perhaps the unintended by-products of ideology, whether it be collectivisation, forced migration or some other form of social engineering. It is difficult, for example, to instance any recent African famine which has not been associated with, or greatly exacerbated by, warfare. Our own experience in Somalia is evidence of that. Tragically, while many thousands of lives were saved between 1992 and 1993, the position has again deteriorated with the flooding of the River Juniper. I hope the international community will re-examine these events.
However, not only does this make modern famines no less worthy of intervention, but, given our own history, it makes such intervention an even greater imperative. During our own Great Famine, the head of the Treasury, Sir Charles Trevelyn, opposed British assistance on the grounds that the Irish were "unworthy" of relief on the grounds that it was the nature of Irish society itself which had brought the famine about. Specifically, what Trevelyn had in mind were those small holdings which proliferated the countryside. Indeed, one result of the famine was to clear away such holdings and bring about a more commercialised farming during the second half of the 19th century.
In our own history Trevelyn's comments have been controversial, at times misused and taken out of context. However, the basic point remains as true for mid 19th century Ireland as it does for North Korea today; there is no such thing as a "no-fault" famine. As a nation, we are in a position to know and state as much.
One of the more striking aspects of our own famine was that so many people should perish in an era associated with better communication, improved medicine and unprecedented wealth. It shocked many people at the time and has shocked many people since. Yet, we also need to remind ourselves that even the richest countries then were very poor by the standards of places such as the United States, Germany and even Ireland today. Therefore, whatever about the middle of the 19th century, a lack of resources is no reason why anyone should perish from famine in the late 20th century.
One of the greatest qualities of the Irish people is their generosity of thought and action. In keeping with this viewpoint, I regard humanitarian concerns as being central to Irish life, politics and foreign policy. It is perhaps one of the few positive legacies we gained from our terrible experiences during the Great Famine last century. As a people, we have always felt a strong solidarity with the peoples of other countries who are suffering similar catastrophes or disaster, whether natural or man-made. This Irish sense of solidarity is summed up succinctly and eloquently in the proverb "Ar scáth a chéile a mhaireann na daoine" which means that people live in each other's shadow. From our own experience we should realise that facing up to poverty and hunger in the world today is not just a question of charity but of justice as well. Next week I shall have the honour of visiting the Canadian disembarkation point in the last century for Irish emigrants fleeing the Great Famine. I know that when I reach the evocative island of Grosse Ile in the St. Lawrence River, I shall be thinking of the tragedies which are affecting people in the modern world, not least those who may be suffering from hunger and starvation. I will also be thinking of the one million people who died during the Famine and of the one million people who emigrated. We sometimes forget that the generation of people who emigrated lived in the most appalling and horrendous conditions in the countries in which they were generously received. It took a number of generations to bring them up to a relatively comfortable standard of living.
The holding of this debate today expresses the very deep concern felt by myself and the Government as a whole regarding the humanitarian situation in North Korea. There are in fact many comparisons which may be made between Ireland and Korea. The Korean peninsula, like the island of Ireland, has been fought in and fought over through the centuries. Like us, the Koreans have known many invaders and have struggled unrelentingly to maintain their national identity, culture and independence. Like us, their homeland has been partitioned in a manner which has done enormous damage to the development and progress of their nation.
For Korea as a whole, the 20th century has for the most part been a troubled and difficult one. For nearly all of the first half of the century, Imperial Japanese forces controlled the peninsula and created conditions whereby Koreans became second class citizens in their own country. At the end of the Second World War, Korea was finally liberated only to become a pawn in the ensuing superpower conflict as the Cold War quickly developed and expanded to touch almost all corners of the world.
The Korean War broke out on 25 June 1950 when Communist forces from the north crossed the 38th parallel into the south and overran the capital, Seoul. For three long years, the fortunes of war favoured first one side and then the other. China and the Soviet Union provided troops and equipment for the north while a United Nations force, led by the United States, helped to defend the south. In the end, an armistice was signed with the antagonists separated more or less along the 38th parallel, which was where they had started out from in the first place. The war devastated the Korean peninsula causing enormous damage to industry and agriculture. More than a million soldiers and civilians were killed, not to mention the many thousands of foreign troops who perished.
The Korean War was a true catastrophe for all the people of Korea destroying factories and farms alike. It separated families from each other and created an enmity between the two halves of Korea which has remained to the present day and which has ensured that the armistice line running across the Korean peninsula is one of the few remaining hot spots of international tension in the modern world. It is consequently greatly to the credit of the Republic of Korea, which comprises the southern half of the peninsula, that its economy is today the eleventh largest in the world. It has created huge industries whose products are sold and highly appreciated throughout the world. It has exported its technology and its capital so that even countries as far away as Ireland have benefited from its industrial and financial investment. Our direct trading relationship with South Korea is particularly robust with more than £200 million being exported in each direction in 1996 alone. Our overall bilateral relationship is now so important that in the past few years full residential embassies have been established in each country's capital.
Sadly, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea in the northern half of the peninsula has followed a very different socio-economic path. Hidebound by rigid Stalinist social policies and political repression, the breakdown of the Soviet bloc lost it what few friends it had left in the world; its economy has stagnated to such an extent that it is now clearly no longer even able to feed its own people. It has suffered natural disasters through flooding and drought in recent times. Two successive years of floods in 1995 and 1996 were followed this year by a devastating drought throughout the country and a destructive typhoon last August which damaged crops in the west of the country. It has to be admitted, however, that the intrinsic root of the problem has been North Korea's stubborn inability as a society to adapt itself to the economic and technological realities of the modern world.
A society or nation State anywhere in the world can only achieve its full potential and function for the betterment of the individual and society in general in an atmosphere of freedom: freedom of belief, freedom of speech and freedom of association. Economically, I believe there is no alternative to a system of free enterprise linked with co-operative endeavour. Nobody can claim that these freedoms exist in North Korea. Even with the end of the Cold War and the demise of the former Soviet Union, it would appear that North Korea remains impervious to change. With few friends anywhere in the world, it has attempted to maintain a policy of juche or self-reliance based on outdated Marxist ideology. Not only has this policy brought economic ruin to the country but it has failed the most basic self-sufficiency requirement of all, which is the ability to feed one's own people.
Whatever the cause or causes of the current crisis in North Korea, let us turn to the facts. Only 18 per cent of the country is suitable for agricultural use and food production has been in decline since 1990, mainly due to a high dependence on agro-chemical inputs, soil exhaustion, lack of agricultural investment and poor farming practices. The annual cereal requirement to meet the needs of the North Korean population is believed to be five million tonnes. It is estimated by the World Food Programme — WFP — and by the Food and Agriculture Organisation — FAO — that the 1997 harvest yield has amounted to only 2.6 million tonnes, creating a deficit which will have to be met by humanitarian aid and barter exchange arrangements. The WFP alone has shipped and distributed over 650,000 tonnes of cereals this year already. The various UN agencies have appealed for and received to date a total of US$178.5 million for distribution as food aid. This emergency aid has been focused on the following priority sectors: approximately 2.6 million children aged six and under have received food rations at nurseries and kindergartens throughout the country — almost three quarters of the food provisions under the emergency programme was directed at this group; 250,000 farmers, farm workers and 850,000 dependants in flood-affected areas have received assistance for work involving clearing of agricultural land, rehabilitation of rural infrastructure and participation in disaster mitigation schemes; and up to one million patients received food supplies during short term hospital stays.
In addition, UNICEF is undertaking a massive immunisation programme for all children. The European Commission has donated at total of 56.5 million ECUs in emergency humanitarian assistance, most of which has been disbursed through the WFP.
The immediate crisis has probably passed, and there now appear to be sufficient supplies to carry the population through the winter. There is general agreement, however, that the poor harvest gathered this year means that without further assistance, a new crisis may arise by next April.
I am proud that Ireland has been to the forefront of international donors in its response. The Government has so far given £815,000 in emergency humanitarian assistance to North Korea since June 1996; this represents a sizeable portion of Irish Aid's emergency budget in this period. Irish Aid's assistance has been channelled through the WFP, Trócaire and Concern.
Many Members will be aware that Irish NGOs have been very active in the humanitarian assistance effort for North Korea. In addition to the Government's contribution, Trócaire has raised almost £2.3 million from their public appeal. I pay particular tribute to Trócaire's director, Mr. Justin Kilcullen. He has given an immense lead in this regard, and he has done his organisation and his country proud. Concern has also donated US$150,000 to the WFP and is now running a winterisation programme involving the production of heavy clothing for distribution during the coming winter. No words can express the admiration I feel for these Irish agencies which, in North Korea and elsewhere, are maintaining the proud tradition of helping those who are most in need.
I also wish to express my appreciation to the group of parliamentarians who visited North Korea in September at the invitation of Mr. Kilcullen. The group comprised Deputy Eamon Gilmore, Bernie Malone, MEP, and Dr. Joe Hendron, the former MP for West Belfast. I wish to express again my appreciation to Dr. Hendron who gave me more literature on the North Korean situation when I visited Belfast. The report of their visit provided many useful insights into the internal situation in North Korea and was brought to the attention of our partners in the EU who expressed considerable interest in it.
The Government has taken a keen interest in this situation and has been anxious to be as well informed as possible and to take the most effective action in the circumstances. I am pleased to inform Members that a technical mission comprising a technical expert from the development co-operation division of my Department and an officer from the Irish Embassy in Beijing visited North Korea last week. Their brief was to assess the humanitarian situation there in order to determine the precise needs of the population and to ensure that the assistance provided by Ireland is being used to the best possible advantage and distributed to those most in need. During their stay, the members of the technical mission visited a number of centres under the supervision of the Korean authorities. They also had an opportunity for a range of consultations and meetings with several agencies and others who are closely involved in the effort. They formed the view that there continues to be a food deficit and that there is some evidence of malnutrition, but in so far as it can be determined from the available evidence, the situation cannot be described as a famine in the conventional understanding of the term. The technical mission was informed by the international agencies that reports that as many as 1 million people may have died earlier this year from starvation were exaggerated. It was clear, however, that a potential disaster could certainly have occurred earlier this year had timely international assistance not proved adequate to cope with the crisis. The leader of the technical mission is highly skilled and very knowledgeable in this area, and we were glad to have his expertise to lead this mission.
Most of the UN agencies consulted by the technical mission stated the basic problem in North Korea was not just one of food security. They stressed that a short-term response would be no substitute for the political and economic reforms which would be needed if North Korea were to achieve stability. Many believed furthermore that the economy was operating at as little as 20 per cent of capacity. They reported indications of extreme infrastructural neglect everywhere, with rail, port and secondary road systems in decay. The health sector appears to have fallen apart even before the latest set of natural disasters, and the main water/sanitation systems have collapsed. Electricity and motor fuel are in short supply and water chlorination plants have shut down due to lack of resources for repair and maintenance.
It seems that no matter how much aid is distributed now, and there is no denying that it will be urgently needed in coming months, the root problems of North Korea will not be solved unless the politico-economic structures on the Korean peninsula are changed. For this reason we have always held, and will continue to hold, that the two parts of Korea must be willing to co-operate together and to discuss their shared concerns. It has to be made clear in this regard that it has been the North Korean Government which time and again has refused to negotiate in good faith and on an equal basis with its counterpart in Seoul.
Quadripartite talks involving the two parts of Korea, China and the US, have finally been put in place to be held in Geneva, starting on 9 December. Last week's announcement came after months of negotiations between the parties involved. Earlier attempts at setting up talks had failed due to North Korea's insistence that the question of US troop reductions in South Korea be specifically included on the agenda. It has now been agreed that the aim of the Geneva conference will be to discuss the "establishment of a peace regime on the Korean peninsula and issues concerning tension reduction there". This is not dissimilar to our situation. It would appear that the US has assured the North Koreans that they can raise the issue of troop reductions at Geneva along with any other issue which they feel might help to achieve the two aims of the conference as announced. It seems most unlikely, however, that US troop reductions will take place in the absence of a comprehensive peace agreement on the peninsula.
Ireland does not have diplomatic relations with North Korea. The only North Korean representative in the EU is accredited to Denmark and lives in Copenhagen. Despite this, we are contributing significantly at present to the alleviation of malnutrition in North Korea and we shall continue to do so for as long as is necessary. It is clear, however, that the economic problems of North Korea are not solely, or even principally, due to natural disasters or events outside the control of the Pyongyang Government. There is no doubt that socio-economic reform is required in North Korea but there is little indication of a willingness on the part of the regime to follow that route.
Likewise, in relation to human rights and association with terrorism, very serious charges have been raised about the regime. There is a complete absence in North Korea of political freedom as we know it; it is widely believed furthermore that the number of political prisoners held under extremely harsh conditions by the regime is very high — perhaps as many as 200,000.
On the international front, North Korea's record is far from spotless. It seems to have given up even the pretence of adhering to international standards and is currently attempting to withdraw from the UN Covenant of Civil and Political Rights — an action which is not even provided for under the terms of the covenant. The export of missiles and other military equipment to areas of international high tension also presents the international community with serious worries. While these circumstances continue, Ireland will have to be cautious about drawing any nearer politically to the regime in Pyongyang.
The people of North Korea nevertheless cannot and must not be held responsible for the sins of their Government. What matters more than anything else in the present circumstances is that innocent men, women and children in North Korea, or anywhere else, should die from starvation simply because the outside world is unwilling to do what is necessary to save them. It behoves us all in today's independent world to ensure that the global economy provides adequate food security for the entire population. We in Ireland will continue to work with the rest of the international community to play our full part in preventing further crises. Ours is a proud record, both in peacekeeping so ably conducted by our Defence Forces and in the continuous response of the people to appeals for aid for less well-off parts of the world. This relates to the national psyche and the fact that our ancestors were the victims of a famine for which they had no responsibility. The memory of the suffering of our own people 150 years ago will allow us to do no less.
