Rachel Corrie was a leading light in fight against hunger

On Tuesday last, Rachel Corrie’s family sat in an Israeli civil court to hear it deliver an absurd but unsurprising verdict on Israel’s own army. Rachel’s name is linked with peaceful courage: especially her own, but also that of a group of Irish people.

Rachel was 10 years old in 1990 when she made a speech, which included the words: “I’m here for other children. I’m here because I care. I’m here because children everywhere are suffering and because 40,000 people die each day from hunger. We have got to understand that the poor are all around us, and we are ignoring them. We have got to understand that these deaths are preventable. We have got to understand that people in Third World countries think and care and smile and cry just like us. We have got to understand that they are us, we are them. My dream is to stop hunger by the year 2000.” Thirteen years after she made her speech, she was killed in Gaza by the Israeli army on March 16. Rachel Corrie was a human rights defender. She was American. She was 23.

Seven years later in an attempt to break the illegal siege of Gaza, an Irish ship bearing her name shone that light she saw as a 10-year-old girl, for all the world to see, on one of the greatest injustices of our times.