Sir Bob hands over Live Aid archive

A YOUNG married couple from Scotland sold their house and tried to give the proceeds to the Band Aid famine relief effort, Bob Geldof said.

Old women donated their wedding rings as part of an unprecedented outpouring of Western support for millions starving in Ethiopia in 1984 and 1985, the musician and songwriter said.

Geldof is giving the Irish state a Band Aid archive of hundreds of letters, artwork, poetry and musical recordings after it was accumulated in a warehouse in London.

Much of it will be digitalised and put on display for the world to see at the National Library of Ireland in Dublin.

Geldof said: “Eight miles south of the richest continent in the world, eight miles, that is all the gap there is between Europe and Africa, eight miles between the richest continent and the poorest, there were 30 million people dying of want in a world of surplus. That isn’t only intellectually absurd, it is economically illiterate and it is, of course, morally repulsive.”

The Boomtown Rats front man and co-writer Midge Ure’s first version of Do They Know It’s Christmas? raised £8 million for famine relief in Ethiopia.

Organisers felt unable to take the money from the couple who sold their house, Geldof said.

The archive will be transported from London, where it had been in storage, to Dublin. It will be catalogued, preserved, digitalised and exhibited.

Sir Bob Geldof signs a contract at the National Library of Ireland (NLI) in Dublin with Chairman Paul Shovlin and library director Dr Sandra Collins, as he announced that the Band Aid Trust is donating its archive to the NLI