We must try to stop manmade famine

AS our political discourse frets judicial appointments, as it tosses and turns about Brexit, as it tries to keep up with revelations about more unearthed Garda accounts and wallows in angst provoked by the gender balance of Taoiseach Leo Varadkar’s cabinet, 20m people in four East African countries face starvation. 

Fate’s simple randomness, its hand in how lives unfold is a mystery, but one with life-defining consequences for those who draw the short straw.

The people of East Africa, especially those in South Sudan, Somalia, north-east Nigeria and in the adjacent Arabian peninsula country of Yemen, have drawn more than their share of short straws and, tragically, they have done so again.