Thousands of US Marines were expected off the shore of Port-au-Prince today to help relief organisations get supplies to Haitian earthquake survivors.

ANDREW GRENE, the UN worker with dual Irish and US citizenship, was in a meeting at the UN headquarters in Port-au-Prince that collapsed in the quake.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon arrived in Haiti today to support relief efforts in the earthquake-hit nation.

Drumbeats called the faithful to a Sunday Mass behind mounds of rubble and amid the few remaining walls of Port-au-Prince’s destroyed Roman Catholic cathedral to listen to a sermon in a scene resembling the Apocalypse.

Rescuers pulled a dehydrated but otherwise uninjured woman from the ruins of a luxury hotel in the Haitian capital early today, an event greeted with applause from onlookers witnessing rare good news in a city otherwise filled with corpses, rubble and desperation.

PRESIDENT Mary McAleese yesterday told Haiti’s head of state that Ireland was praying for his country as the Government prepared to send a team of specialists to the earthquake-hit region.

President Mary McAleese today told Haiti’s head of state Ireland was praying for his country after the devastating earthquake thought to have killed tens of thousands of people.

The UN chief said 16 UN personnel were confirmed dead in the earthquake that shook Haiti's capital Port-au-Prince, with 100-150 UN workers still unaccounted for, including the mission chief and his deputy.

THOUSANDS died in a major earthquake that destroyed the presidential palace, schools, hospitals and hillside shanties in Haiti, the country’s president said yesterday as nations across the world geared up for a big relief operation.

Troop commitments from France, Italy and several other European nations mean the United Nations will be able to deploy an initial force of 3,500 peacekeepers to south Lebanon in the coming days as it had hoped, a senior UN official said.

Foreign ministers from France, Turkey, Pakistan and Malaysia were today due to arrive in Beirut to work out details on assembling a 15,000-strong international force to oversee peacekeeping efforts in Lebanon.