2018 marked 30 years of the Doolough Famine Walk and was attended by around 300 people. The weather was good and the day was memorable with inspirational words from Richard Moore and Fatin al Tamimi and stunning songs and music from Lisa Lambe and Nigel Linden. Here is a short film which captures how the walk went.
Date for the diary: Famine Walk 2018
Remembering and Solidarity
Saturday 19th May, Doolough Co. Mayo
Registration from 12.45pm in Louisburgh Town hall
Beginning at 1.30pm
Walk Leaders: Richard Moore, Fatin al Tamimi
Music: Lisa Lambe
Famine Walk 1988-2018
Register online here (alternatively you can raise sponsorship for Afri – just bring this to the registration desk on the day) and see who’s going on Facebook
Download the brochure or the sponsorship form
Saturday 19th May 2018 will see the 30th anniversary of the Doolough Famine Walk. Afri first organised the walk in 1988 to commemorate the Great Hunger of 1845-50. Regions such as Mayo illustrated how a natural setback such as potato blight can mutate to disaster in the context of unchecked market forces, lack of democratic structures and resources, and a pitiless, moralistic ideology. While some £9.5 million was eventually spent on late and poorly-designed ‘Relief’, £14 million went to sustain the military and police forces.
Our walk retraces a journey of horror which occurred on 30th/31st March 1849. Two poor-law commissioners were to assess people in Louisburgh, entitling them as ‘paupers’ to meagre relief rations. The inspection never happened, but the people were instructed to appear at Delphi Lodge at 7 the following morning. They walked the hilly road in wintry, even snowy, conditions. At Delphi Lodge they were refused food, or admission to the workhouse, and so began their weary return journey, on which many, even hundreds, died.
Afri, drawing on the local history of Louisburgh and Doolough, recalls the dead and displaced of the Great Hunger – and all those facing the same grotesque and avoidable cruelties in today’s world, from the so-called ‘War on Terror’ to the indignities of ‘Direct Provision’. We walk the famine road to remember the causes of hunger and poverty in our world – political, military, economic and environmental – and our failure to learn the lessons of our own history. Our Walk Leaders eloquently represent the spirit of resistance and transformation:
In the twentieth-anniversary year of the Good Friday Agreement we welcome Richard Moore, who was blinded as a 10-year-old child by a rubber bullet fired by a British soldier during the Troubles in Northern Ireland. He reacted by founding Children in Crossfire, declaring: “I learned to see life in a different way. I may have lost my sight, but I have my vision”.
2018 is also significant in that it marks the 70th anniversary of the Palestinian Nakba, and in this context, we are honoured to welcome Fatin Al Tamimi, Chairperson of the Ireland-Palestine Solidarity Campaign.
The extraordinary voice of Lisa Lambe will provide the music for this year’s walk. We are delighted to have Lisa as part of this year’s walk line up.
Register online here (alternatively you can raise sponsorship to help Afri continue our work – just bring this to the registration desk on the day) and see who’s going on Facebook
Read an article about the Famine Walk and BBC Radio 4 Ramblings Show.
Find out about our ‘Music From A Dark Lake’ CD, a compilation of songs from past Famine Walks.
Reflections from the Food Sovereignty Assembly and Famine Walk
Around thirty people gathered for Afri’s 3rd annual food sovereignty assembly, which took place in the town hall in Westport on the 20th May this year to examine food sovereignty issues and to explore what practical steps are necessary to implement the ideas of the Food sovereignty Proclamation which was agreed and posted in 2015. Among the questions discussed at this year’s event were: how can we accelerate the transition to a low carbon, fair and resilient society?; how can we produce both food and energy in ways that reduce greenhouse gases and their negative impact on the planet? Among the many suggestions was to continue to have April 24th – the actual date of the 1916 Rising – as a food sovereignty day in future years as it was this year.
Continue reading “Reflections from the Food Sovereignty Assembly and Famine Walk”
Ireland SolidariTree
On the eve of the Afri Famine Walk, Palestinian poet and activist, Rafeef Ziadah, planted an olive tree and an ash tree, sacred trees of Palestine and Ireland, with Lord Mayor of Dublin Críona Ní Dhálaigh in attendance. The olive and the ash, together called the SolidariTree, symbolises the bond of support between the people of Ireland and of Palestine. The event was organised by Palfest Ireland.
Film by RoJ
Date for the diary: Famine Walk 2016
Famine Walk 2016: Memory, Solidarity, Sovereignty
Saturday, May 21st, Registration from 12.45pm (€20 per adult participant)
Delphi Lodge to Louisburgh, Co. Mayo
To register go here. See also facebook eventpage here.
Walk Leaders:
Rafeef Ziadah (Palestine)
Francisco Cali-Tzay (Guatemala)
Clare O’Grady Walshe (Ireland)
Cathryn O’Reilly (Dunnes Stores Strike)
Music: Máirtín O Connor
(special fundraising gig for Afri with Máirtín & family in the Derrylahan, Louisburgh at 8.30pm on Saturday 21st)
Impressions from the 2014 Hedge School
By coincidence, the Afri Hedge School 2014 took place on the 96th anniversary of the official ending of World War 1. I say ‘official’ ending as of course a monstrous machine of that size and ferocity doesn’t suddenly come to a halt all at once. Active battling in which several human beings lost their lives continued well after that iconic moment of the 11th hour, on the 11th day of the 11th month on which the leaders cried ‘stop!”. And signatures were made on a piece of paper. I say ‘official’ as the fallout, the ramifications of that horrific war, ironically titled in the recruitment propaganda as ‘the war to end all wars’, is still to this very day having its devastating impact. The battles continue long after Armistice. The trauma has traversed generations in the many insidious ways that trauma can. Palestine is just one of many, many ongoing casualties that continues to bleed and die.
The lives of those men who had chosen to become or had been forced to become soldiers and were sacrificed in that war are traditionally remembered by silence and ceremony on this iconic day.
The Afri Hedge School chose not to hold the silence, but rather to facilitate the raising of voices. It invited the testimony of witnesses and casualties beyond those in active combat. It welcomed the awkward questions. And it framed all of this within the matrix of conscience. Continue reading “Impressions from the 2014 Hedge School”
Afri supports Palestinian Appeal for Solidarity and Humanitarian Intervention
The on-going humanitarian crisis in Gaza has in recent times once more reached such a level of frenzied depravity that it is too easy to become frozen in a kind of shocked paralysis. The fact that it comes amidst a persecution by the Israeli powers of the Palestinian people that has spanned many decades and the earthly lives of countless Palestinian souls, makes it seem all the more unjust and no less intensely disturbing.
Horribly stuck in a traumatic historical time warp, it is as if the crimes of past wars have achieved the ultimate victory over humanity by the perpetuation of these same crimes by their victims on other human beings.
The parallels between the terrible crime against humanity that was the genocide of the Jewish and other people by the Nazi regime, and the crimes against humanity and apparent genocide being conducted by Israel against the Palestinian people today, are so obvious that it seems redundant to even speak of them.
Yet in the face of an impotent international political system and an international community that, for the most part, remains resolutely silent in the face of such crimes, then failing to speak of these parallels (when recognising the sovereignty of all life) is a kind of treason: a betrayal not just of innocent Palestinian civilians but of humanity everywhere. Continue reading “Afri supports Palestinian Appeal for Solidarity and Humanitarian Intervention”
Tribunal Hearing Against Israel and Yaron Begins
Press Release from the Kuala Lumpur Foundation to Criminalise War
KUALA LUMPUR, 20 November 2013 – The Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal (KLWCT) commenced hearing of genocide and war crimes charges against the State of Israel and Amos Yaron, a retired Israeli army general today.
In the prosecution’s opening statement by Prof Gurdial S. Nijar, he stated that this trial is significant as it charges a nation that thumbs its nose at UN resolutions; decisions of the ICJ and shakes our confidence in the meaning of civilisation.
Prof Gurdial stated, that the prosecution intends to give incontrovertible proof of the incredible crimes conceived since 1945 and which still continues until today. He stressed in his statement that for the Palestinians, it is a continuing tragic saga of huge proportions. What they term as Nakba or ‘catastrophe’ which started in 1948 with their forced dispossession and eviction from their homeland is a history of the present: an on-going dispossession, dislocation, massacres, ethnic cleansing and all else. In short, the continuity of the trauma is not just the result of 1948 but an on-going process, and continuing into the present and linked to current Israeli policies and practices. Continue reading “Tribunal Hearing Against Israel and Yaron Begins”