Ms Caoimhe de Barra:

Yes, almost all of the member agencies of the Irish Emergency Alliance are involved in Sudan. This conflict erupted a year ago; some say that it was not something that was foreseen, in actual fact the politics of it are extremely complex but there probably was not enough international support for mediation between the two parties that are now in conflict. Those who are suffering are the people of Sudan. As Deputy Stanton rightly said, almost 18 million are facing famine and huge numbers are displaced, both internally and into countries across the border, countries that are equally fragile. It is of huge humanitarian concern. One of the issues is that when you have emergencies that are not visible to the public, it is very difficult for agencies like ourselves to respond. In fact one of our criteria as an emergency alliance is that there does need to be a certain threshold of media and public interest for us to mount an appeal. RTE and other media channels will support us. We need many diverse voices calling attention to different crises so that they reach the required threshold of media and public information for us to go out and campaign and run a successful appeal for those countries. It is a huge concern.