President compares Aids impact to 'legacy of loss' caused by Famine

President:The legacy of loss experienced in Ireland as a result of the Famine must keep us "wise" to the equally cataclysmic impact of Aids in Africa, caused by "state neglect, poverty, ignorance and voicelessness", the President, Mrs McAleese, said yesterday.

Marking World Aids Day, Mrs McAleese said decades of progress in the "struggling continent" of Africa were now being obliterated.

The President was speaking at the unveiling of a monument in St Stephen's Green in Dublin, a "rose bowl" sculpted by Sandra Bell as a tribute to the work of the Rose Project.

The project, founded by Mary Donohoe, is funding 18 programmes in east Africa. It is named after a a young Kenyan woman, Rose Atieno, who died of Aids in November 2003.

According to Ms Donohoe, who helped nurse Rose with her son Curtis, then aged eight, Rose died "in a rat-infested hut".

She said 6,000 people would die of the virus in Africa "today, and 6,000 will die tomorrow, and their deaths will pass without comment". There was a "frightening ambivalence in relation to this continent", she said, and criticised the tendency to see the people of Africa as "passive recipients".

"The local response is quite simply heroic. They are courageous people swimming against a tyrannical tide."

President McAleese said a disturbing factor was the fact that rates of HIV were growing among women. "Women - especially young women and girls - are particularly vulnerable because of denial and neglect of their rights, endemic gender equality, ignorance of sexual realities and pervasive violence.

"A great part of the challenge we face is educating young women to protect themselves."

She said the rose bowl sculpture, which stands by the park lake inside the main entrance, would stand as a challenge to "all who see it to keep remembering the suffering inflicted by HIV/Aids and to take responsibility for ending it both at home and abroad.

"I am proud to unveil this work, which confers meaning, dignity and purpose on a life and a death too easily otherwise forgotten among Aids's vast roll-call of victims."

Also yesterday, in Trinity College Dublin a "human red ribbon" was formed by hundreds of members of the public. Wearing red they formed the "ribbon" in Front Square. The red ribbon is the symbol of solidarity with people living with HIV/Aids, and in memory of those who have died of the illness. The event was organised by the Union of Students in Ireland.