Mr. Dominic Crowley:

I want to come back to Deputy Stanton's specific question around the technical pitch. When we talk about famine we talk about IPC, which is the integrated food insecurity phase classification. This system was created a few years ago to try to get us past the argument of whether this is a famine or is not a famine. The problem is that this is extremely conservative in its estimates and, as Mr. Healy has noted, is that it measures things retrospectively. By the time a famine is identified it is already well under way. The specific challenge, generally speaking, in proving IPC level 5 is to identify the retrospective mortality data. One is trying to look backwards and trying to assess how many children have died in the previous period relative to a nominal baseline of child mortality. That is extremely difficult, not least because, as Mr. Healy has said, when one sees patterns of distress migration, which is when people try to move from one area to another in search of food, that is when one sees the highest rate of deaths. It is then almost impossible to identify the graves subsequently. At the moment in Somalia, the World Health Organization is trying to look at that retrospective mortality data, but whether it will come up with accurate information, and whether the information it comes up with will be sufficient to meet the threshold, is very questionable. I 100% agree with Mr. Healy in saying that this is totally academic. We should have been responding months ago on the understanding that there is a famine, irrespective of what the technical definition says.