Statement by President Higgins on the need for global action to address inequality

Statement by President Higgins on the need for global action to address inequality

Date: Mon 26th Aug, 2024 | 18:09

"As we look towards the gathering of global leaders at the United Nations in New York next month, including the Summit of the Future, it is important that full consideration is given to the urgency that attaches to some of the very grave matters which the world is failing to collectively address.

For example, UNICEF tells us in a recent statement that in large swathes of southern Africa the particular consequences of severe drought and El Nino has placed more than 270,000 children at risk from 'life-threatening severe acute malnutrition (SAM)' in 2024.

Southern Africa with its burden of existing debt has no fiscal space to deal with this, or to deal with the consequences of climate change for which it was not responsible.

The report "A world of debt: A growing burden to global prosperity", launched by the UN Secretary-General António Guterres last month, shows that 3.3 billion people - almost half of humanity - are living in countries that spend more on debt interest payments than on the essential basic services of education or health.

It would appear that the gap between the needs of humanity and the use of the resources of the world has more of the character of the 19th century than of the capacities we were promised for our present century.

As Secretary-General Guterres stated at the launch of that report, "Half our world is sinking into a development disaster, fuelled by a crushing debt crisis".

Yet the absence of a commitment to undoing the consequences of inequality is a striking feature of politics as so many countries on so many continents prepare for elections.

As we prepare for September's meeting of the United Nations in New York, should it not be at the top of our agenda that funding is not in place to address these issues?

In this context, initiatives such as that of President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva to end hunger and poverty must be welcomed and will be an important matter for discussion and deserving of all nations' support in New York.

Yet while the poor suffer, the investors in the military-industrial order are returning historic profits to shareholders.

The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) has reported that world military expenditure increased to a total of $2,443 billion in 2023, the highest level that SIPRI has ever recorded.

The acceptance of the inevitability of war and ineffective attempts at the revival of multilateralism, concentration on what are existential threats, are matters to which former Prime Minister Gordon Brown has recently referred. In his words:

the cooperation needed to firefight is proving so elusive that even now, an international agreement to prepare for and prevent global pandemics remains beyond our grasp. Nor, even up against the existential problem of climate change (the planet is on course for a temperature increase of 2.7C above pre-industrial levels), can many hold out hopes that Cop29 in Azerbaijan will be equal to the challenge. At a time when global problems urgently need global solutions, the gap between what we need to do and our capacity - or, more accurately, our willingness - to do so is widening by the minute."

Perhaps it is that we have moved beyond the vulnerability of multilateralism and are living through a period of indifference or impotence, where even the most minimal shared morality and values is not evidenced in global politics.

I recall at the time of the Vietnam War how the image of a child standing in front of a tank or the image of the My Lai massacre could shock the world, enter the world's discourse and indeed effected a change. Such a response and change is as urgently needed today.

It is so important that all countries redouble their efforts as they prepare over the coming weeks for the critical dialogue which must take place in New York, that we seek to provide hope to those billions of people across the world who so urgently require appropriate support, and end what Pope Francis called 'the plague of indifference'."

Public link

Please use the above public link if you want to share this noodl on another website.