This week:
IT IS now accepted that famine is stalking Gaza. Frank O’connor the Irish playwright, novelist, and short-story writer is credited with saying: “Famine is a useful word, if you want to avoid words like ‘genocide’ and ‘extermination’.” The context is more likely to have been the Great Irish Famine than that happening in Gaza right now.
Fermanagh was one of the hardest-hit counties in Ulster during The Famine and the first place in the nine-county province to report blight on the potato crop.
The population of the county was reduced by almost 30 per cent during the Famine years of 1845-1851 through death or emigration, and 20 per cent of those who perished in that period did so in one of the county’s three Workhouses, where the destitute were forced to seek refuge.
They died of malnutrition, typhoid, and typhus men, women and children, separated from each other, segregated in conditions that punished them for destitution not of their own making.
More than 4,000 young orphan girls from Fermanagh were shipped to Australia between 1848 and 1850.
Ireland under British government insistence continued to export food. In 1847 alone, 39,000 tonnes of wheat and 98,000 tonnes of oats were exported, and imported 199,000 tonnes of wheat, 12,000 tonnes of oats and 682,000 tonnes of maize. Lest we forget!
We continue to watch the growing famine in Gaza, and the political paralysis in relation to ending it, with increasing horror and despair.
The room for denial of the reality that is Zionism diminishes with every family buried in the rubble, every emaciated and starving child.
At its heart, Zionism is a Right-wing, supremacist cult whose power lies in the wealth and financial and political influence of its creators, and advocates, on the democratic institutions of government, primarily in Europe, North America and Australia all of which owe their own wealth and power to their respective histories of colonialism and genocide.
I imagine Israel believes if they all got away with it, so will Netanyahu and the IDF. They won’t.
The youth generation of this century have too much humanity, integrity and courage to let that happen.
They are also wiser in their own generation than their grandparents were.
The creative and constructive campaigns in raising awareness and much needed funds for UNWRA, UNICEF, Oxfam, Medical Aid for Palestine and Doctors Without Borders, and other charities battling daily to keep children and adults alive, is inspiring and awesome, as is their resilience, determination and their innovative actions to build boycotts of goods which add funds to war chests.
What might cause some concern amongst our more selfserving political parties is that these young people have not abandoned politics.