Clinton Launches Joint Irish-US Hunger Effort

Mrs Clinton was speaking at an event on the sidelines of the UN Summit in New York, which was jointly hosted by Ireland and the US.

Irish foreign affairs minister Micheál Martin was also joined by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon at the launch of an initiative called "1000 Days: Change a Life, Change the Future".

It's a joint US-Irish effort to highlight and push forward a plan to deal with hunger, and in particular the need for nutrition in the first one thousand days of a child's life.

Experts say if a child is denied key nutrients in the first two years of its life, it can have lifelong implications.

Both Minister Martin and Secretary Clinton commented on the resonance of the issue for the Irish.

Minister Martin said that Ireland and the US were "bound together by our shared history - a history that witnessed hundreds of thousands of Irish people fleeing hunger at home and finding refuge in this country, where they built new lives".

Mrs Clinton said it was "always a pleasure to work with the Irish, because they make it fun."

"We have a huge fun deficit in the world," she said.

Executive Director of the World Food Programme Josette Sheeran described the meeting as historic.

"I think we've made history here. I guarantee you that if you met with a group of nutritionists two years ago, and said their cause would be taken up by foreign ministers and the Secretary General of the United Nations, they wouldn't have believed you," she said.