Letters to the Editor: Millions face starvation in Sudan

People who fled the Zamzam refugee camp after was attacked by paramilitaries. Estimates suggest as many as 150,000 people have been killed, 14m people displaced, and 21m people face high levels of acute food insecurity, with growing numbers on the brink of starvation. File picture: AFP/Getty

In Darfur last year, I woke up every morning to security alerts on my phone telling me where the latest fighting was taking place — a daily reminder of the risks faced by the Concern Sudan team in its relentless drive to support communities caught up in conflict.

Back then, we thought the situation couldn’t get much worse — yet it has.

More than two and a half years of conflict have left the country in ruins. Estimates suggest as many as 150,000 people have been killed, 14m people displaced, and 21m people face high levels of acute food insecurity, with growing numbers on the brink of starvation.

El Fasher and the surrounding areas in North Darfur have become the epicentre of suffering. Hundreds of thousands of civilians are in desperate and deadly conditions, trapped in a city with no access to food, medicine, or relief supplies.

In a war that is “spiralling out of control”, the United Nations secretary general last week called for an immediate ceasefire and urged “the international community and all those that have leverage in relation to Sudan to stop the fighting”.

At the same time, when humanitarian agencies should be scaling up, critical life-saving operations have been closed as a result of drastic funding cuts.

As of today, only 28% of Sudan’s $4.16bn (€3.6bn) humanitarian plan for 2025 has been funded.

Without a halt to the fighting and a massive scale-up of aid, millions more could face starvation in the months ahead.

Never in the history of the UN has there been such sustained levels of intense violence and human suffering being played out in front of the eyes of the world in places such as Sudan, Gaza, and Ukraine.

Yet, the successful resolution of conflicts is now lower than at any point in the last 50 years.

Expenditure on peacekeeping has dropped to an all-time low, and currently stands at just 0.52% of total military spend. The hard work of diplomacy is increasingly replaced by an over-reliance on sanctions, with limited effectiveness and often negative humanitarian consequences.

History has shown that when nations and leaders unite with a shared purpose, anything is possible.

In a world that is more brutalised, we must remind ourselves that wars can be stopped, people can be protected, and hunger can be eradicated, if the political will is there to make it happen.

What is happening in Sudan today, demands an urgent diplomatic and financial response. Their humanity and our own should demand nothing less.

Dominic MacSorley, Humanitarian Ambassador, Concern Worldwide, Dublin 2

Divisive politics drives social cohesion breakdown

Ireland ranks very high in the global wealth of nations according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) but, like many of these wealthy nations, also in inequality among its population.

Recent data (from www.ourworldindata.org) shows that wealthy nations are responsible for more than 80% of global emissions against less than 1% of emissions attributed to the poorest nations.

Yet, it is these poorest of nations which increasingly bear the brunt of the impact of climate change.

In these regions, the severe impacts of climate change — including drought, extreme weather events, and soil erosion — have led to conflict, famine, and the breakdown of social cohesion.

This is a key driver of mass migration, and will continue to be going forward unless there is a global pivot in economic orthodoxy.

The recent comments of Simon Harris and other politicians on immigration mirror those of centre right and right-wing politicians in many Western nations, and smack of entitlement.

They do nothing to reflect the impact of their policies in driving wealth inequality in their own nations, the erosion of social infrastructure necessary to provide a robust safety net for their own citizens, and also to deal with the inward migration from those aforementioned regions of the world.

It is totally understandable that there is frustration and anger in neglected parts of this country, when they correctly perceive their neglect, while the Government pushes a policy of corporate welfare. These areas also appear to be taking a disproportionate load of caring for asylum seekers when compared to more affluent areas, and this adds to the frustration.

The blaming of immigrants is an easy yet cynical tool of political deflection from the fact that successive centre-right governments have failed in their duty to provide adequate housing, health care systems, and public transport for a huge cohort of workers and communities in this country.

That our politicians don’t have the integrity to accept that their acquiescence to market-driven economics is a significant factor in driving this social inequality smacks of arrogance and ignorance.

With Cop30 kicking off in Brazil, we get yet another reminder that this economic model is failing globally to address the existential threat to humanity.

Climate change will continue to drive global migration and, unless there is a pivot to an economic model that pushes sustainability with a greater social dividend, we risk the ongoing breakdown of social cohesion through the rise of divisive politics.

Barry Walsh, Blackrock, Cork

Crisis continues in hospital care in Mid-West

Regarding the article on hospital care in Limerick, I recently spent a Friday, from 9.30am to 1.30am, in the emergency department of University Hospital Limerick with my mam.

I did not see waves of patients coming into the department. In fact, we were staring at the same faces all day. The communication to patients was non-existent.

Staff were walking past with their heads down, avoiding eye contact, for fear of engaging in conversation.

I thought the management of the room, in terms of keeping patients informed of a process or plan of action, was also non-existent.

After numerous blood pressure tests and a drip (all without a rationale for the tests or treatment being explained), mam was told they were looking for a bed or trolley for her as the battery of tests they had in mind could only be run on the Monday.

So patients are put in a holding pattern until the hospital becomes operational again after the weekend.

The solutions to the issues in the article are pretty obvious, I think.

Alan Ryan, Castletroy, Limerick

Government’s far-right rhetoric on immigration

Throughout the recent presidential campaign, government parties continuously subjected voters to the ridiculous assertion that Catherine Connolly was pro-Russian and unsympathetic to our friends from Ukraine.

Thankfully, the electorate saw through this ridiculous smear.

It did not take long for that same Government to throw Ukrainian refugees to the wolves with their proposal to cut State-provided accommodation to just 30 days.

For Jim O’Callaghan, the justice minister, to argue that Ireland is more generous than our European counterparts in this regard is deeply disingenuous considering the chronic lack of accommodation available outside of those state supports.

I cannot imagine the anguish of fleeing the horrors of war only to be subjected to the additional horror of navigating Ireland’s housing shortage.

The Government is cynically using the homelessness crisis — that it has overseen — as a deterrent to incoming refugees.

It is difficult to decouple this news from the Government’s rhetorical swing towards far-right talking points on immigration in the immediate aftermath of their humiliating defeat in the presidential election.

Following the election, the Government had a clear choice to make.

Pivot its policies to the large swathe of the electorate that chose the politics of hope, or pander to a growing minority who engage in the politics of hate.

The fact that it chose the latter tells us everything we need to know about its true values.

Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael do not represent an imagined centrist “middle of the road” voter. They are an undeniably right-wing minority who, in their panic, have cast aside a cloak of civility that allowed them to pass as centrists to date.

It is unfortunately incumbent on all of us now to safeguard our communities from rising xenophobia as the Government seeks to scapegoat immigrants for their myriad failures. We must lean into the very hope we voted for and choose to be better than those that lead us.

Rob O’Sullivan, Kilrush, Co Clare

Resourcing the most disadvantaged in society

There are countless pieces of research restating the blatantly obvious that family and social factors seriously impact life chances from, and even before, birth.

How do we persuade politicians to direct interventional and supportive resources to the most disadvantaged in society?

How do we persuade would-be politicians to campaign on these issues?

Unfortunately, the policies that win the most votes centre on reducing taxation — which negatively impacts on spending on public services.

The cycle of deprivation will not be sorted until we face these dilemmas.

Bob Wallace, Trim, Co Meath

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