President Mary McAleese has delivered an impassioned warning against the dangers of feeling powerless in the face of world poverty.
Mrs McAleese said that while the "sheer scandal" of global hunger - where one in seven people worldwide is malnourished - paralysed us, we shouldn't allow this to happen.
"The scale of the problem is so appalling that there is a tendency to say 'what can we do?'," she told a conference organised by Gorta to mark World Food Day. "We cannot allow it to do this. We have to get stuck in and find solutions."
Despite its prosperity, Ireland had a deep, abiding Third World memory, she said, and we drew from the well of a history "twisted into grotesque shapes" by our experience of hunger, poverty and famine.
From our collective memory of the Great Famine, we understood the baleful role played by bad governance, lack of investment in education, landlessness and powerlessness.
Noting that the first of the UN's Millennium Development Goals aimed to halve world poverty by 2015, Mrs McAleese said these goals had to be goals, not ambitions that we simply talk about.
She praised as timely the proposal in the recent Government White Paper on aid to establish a hunger taskforce and said the role agriculture could play in the alleviation of poverty had been largely overlooked.
Mafa Chipeta, director of policy assistance at the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation, told the conference significant reductions in world poverty and hunger could not be achieved without the involvement of the private sector.
