Ahern in €5m pledge to township trust
On the first day of his visit to the country, Mr Ahern praised the work of the Niall Mellon Trust which has housed more than 5,000 families in the past six years.
Irish businessman Mr Mellon, who set up the project after visiting a shanty town during a vacation in 2002, welcomed the backing as key to lifting people out of despair as the Taoiseach handed over one of the homes built by volunteers two months ago to a local family at the Freedom Park township.
With HIV rates in the township running at between 26%-40%, Mr Mellon said he was relieved the need for decent housing was being realised as a key weapon in the fight against the disease.
“The main areas of Irish support are health, education and famine relief and I respect that it has taken us a bit of time to make the point that a house is essential to people’s health and education.
“A number of people have come up to me over the years and told me they could not see the point of taking HIV retro-viral drugs while they lived in a shack. When they moved into a real home, it gave them new purpose,” he said.
Mr Ahern said he had been impressed by the sense of community in the township and the way people had worked together for a common aim.
“Housing is fundamental to our wellbeing, it guards our health and banishes the drudgery of collecting and carrying water,” he added.
The trust brought 1,300 volunteers to the township last November to complete a week of volunteer building work after raising at least €4,000 for the scheme.
The organisation is South Africa’s biggest provider of charity housing and hopes to bring 2,008 Irish helpers to the shack slums of Cape Town and Johannesburg for this year’s ‘building blitz’ in November.
Mr Mellon described the project, which has gripped the imagination of the Irish building trade, as creating a generation of new missionaries who literally are building on that old tradition of positive intervention.
Mr Ahern later launched the Chello Foundation, an educational charity that aims to provide an education for children who have been orphaned by HIV/Aids.
The Taoiseach also looked-in on an inner city regeneration project in Cape Town which is part of the Dublin-based Howard Eurocape group.
The Eurocape development also houses the Amawele School Twinning Project and the St Patrick’s Charitable Trust.
Mr Ahern then flew to Johannesburg for a meeting today with South African president Thabo Mbeki.
Mr Ahern will then fly north for a two-day visit to see Irish aid projects in Tanzania which will take him close to the border with strife-torn Kenya.
