emer mullins's blog

Just to add to my recent posts on Colombia, Karen Coleman from Newstalk's the Wide Angle travelled with Trócaire to Colombia and you can read her blog here.

Martha Gomez’ husband was murdered 21 years ago in the town of Uraba in Antioquia by a Colombian army death squad masquerading as a paramilitary group called ‘Living Together’ because he refused to break a strike in a local banana plantation. It took Martha 21 years to be able to talk about what happened to her husband, Eian Gomez.

When news arrived in Colombia today that two Redemptorist priests had been assassinated on March 16 in Vichada, it sent a shudder of fear through many people. Frs Gabriel Fernando Montoya and Jesus Ariel Jiminez were working with communities affected by conflict.

Colombia blog day one

March 14

There’s a fascinating item in the Lonely Planet travel guide to Colombia. It mentions the so-called ‘bullet-proof tailor’ of Medellin, who turned a skill for making Kevlar-lined clothing and mine-resistant boots into a three million dollar business with clients all over the world. It may be an almost amusing sidebar in a travel book, but it really highlights the horror and depth of the violence that has consumed Colombia for years and left its population to suffer the many consequences.

Blog day two Colombia

I didn’t expect to kiss my favourite Skechers goodbye in Colombia but then I didn’t expect to get sucked into a mud flat in a mangrove swamp area on an island just west of the Colombian port city of Buenaventura on Sunday morning.

I am here to see the kind of work that the money people put in the Trocaire box each Lent pays for. This year we are concentrating on the 26 million people worldwide who no longer have a home because of conflict and war. Colombia has almost four million people in this situation.

There's a great buzz in New York any time but this week it's very noticeable around the UN building on 44th Street at 1st Avenue, as the world's leaders gather for the annual general assembly and the midway review of the Millennium Development Goals, a series of eight targets designed to significantly reduce poverty and disease by 2015.

As the government prepares to launch its Hunger Task Force report tomorrow in New York, we had the opportunity yesterday to visit the Irish Hunger Memorial in Battery Park in the city. Located on a half acre site of prime Manhattan real estate, the memorial at first glance is not very prepossessing. I had heard of it but never seen any photos. I suppose I expected something evocative like the famine sculptures in Mayo and even in Dublin, but this seemed to be a little field with overgrown stone walls, the remnants of a typical Irish cottage.

Nancy Aburi, a member of the Irish government’s hunger task force from Kenya, said if we are to positively affect development in Africa we should concentrate on women’s empowerment and education. The women of Africa, she said, will help build communities and develop the continent. We were speaking after Taoiseach Brian Cowen launched the Hunger Task Force report in New York at the UN. The Task Force was set up last year to look at ways in which Ireland could have an impact on the fight against hunger.