Category Archives: Humanitarian response

Remembering Mike McDonagh

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Summary: the sudden death of Mike McDonagh on 21 June 2025, brought an end to a life that was larger than most.

Mike was a legend in humanitarian response having worked across the globe as a country director for the Irish non-governmental organization Concern for more than 20 years. This included time in Laos, Cambodia, Somalia, Angola, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Liberia, North Korea, Honduras, Albania and Zimbabwe.

Invariably you heard the stories of Mike before you met him. When I arrived in Angola in the middle of the 1990s people were still talking about Mike’s recent time in the country when he set up Concern’s response to the brutal civil war there.

Even for a humanitarian response to a war this was a testing operation. At one point Dublin headquarters began nagging Mike because his financial reports were late. He let them know that he was somewhat inconvenienced at the time – the office in Luanda had just been blown up and they had lost everything.

One long-term Angola development specialist, Dr Mary Daly, remembers how Mike broke the blockade on the besieged city of Malanje in the Angolan central highlands during this phase of the war. Against all advice, Mike brought in planes with supplies and had them fly into Malange. This forced other agencies to join in the effort.

There was always something of the buccaneer to Mike. He never doubted for a moment that he was the most charming rogue anyone had ever met. For most people he was probably correct. He was also a living example of the truth that you do not have to be a saint to be a hero.

Mark Evans, a water engineer, who survived the artillery bombardment of the city of Kuito during that time, remembers being surprised by the tenderness that Mike showed him when he was eventually evacuated from that massacre. As a witness to multiple war zones and the worst of humanity, Mike understood the toll that mitigation of such violence took on those who sought to respond. Marcus Oxley, a long-time Concern colleague of Mike’s described him as “a very relational person, with a genuine compassion and respect for people in need and a belief in “life with dignity” as the core of humanitarianism.”  

I got to know Mike on his second stint in Angola, another bloody phase of that brutal civil war. It takes a certain amount of courage to endure that sort of environment once. It takes quite another quality of courage to return to it. But it was a quality of courage that Mike had in abundance, underpinned with an unshakeable good humour and a generosity of spirit for anyone who was genuinely trying to make the world a better place.

After Concern Mike joined the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in 2004, working in Darfur where he drew international attention to the attacks on humanitarian workers there, and the impact these had on aid for the civilian population.

As in Angola Mike developed a reputation. Jonathan Lingham, formerly of the UK’s Department for International Development, described him as “an absolute professional. His knowledge, advice, and wisdom was eagerly seized upon by new arrivals in Khartoum, especially by younger members of the NGO community, many of whom looked up to him as a sort of father figure. It was a difficult place to work. Mike was always available, kind, giving.”

It was in Sudan that Mike met Sarah, with whom, after years of bachelorhood, he started a family. No one was surprised when he turned out to be such a devoted husband, and doting father to Saoirse and Molly.

After Sudan, he worked with OCHA in Ethiopia, Iraq and Libya.

On news of his death the OCHA Chief of Staff in a message to all OCHA personnel said, “Mike was a force of nature, a humanitarian with grit, and was not one to ever let ‘the perfect be the enemy of the good’. He was famed for his no-nonsense approach, his one-word email replies, and for finding “creative” ways to get things done. He was a legend with many of us re-telling any one of his numerous escapades to inventively overcome challenges to get assistance to people in need.”

If anyone had ever said to Mike that he was a representative of what EM Forster called the “aristocracy of the sensitive, the considerate and the plucky… [who] are to be found in all nations and classes and throughout the ages” and who represent human decency in the face of the worst inhumanities, he would probably have said “Ach, away with ye!”

But he was. As Paul Heslop, the veteran demining engineer put it, “Even those of us who knew Mike sometimes have difficulty grasping what a giant he was in the humanitarian sector.”

In recent years, Mike was furiously vocal about Israel’s genocide in Gaza and Western leaders’ complicity with Netanyahu’s atrocities. How could he have been otherwise? Mike had seen so much violence he knew war crimes when he saw them. His very life was an indictment of those who assert that Israel has every right to defend apartheid and supply them with the diplomatic cover and weapons to do that and worse.

The world is a sadder, poorer, less just place without Mike. But he died holding Sarah’s hand. That is as great a way to go as Mike could ever have hoped for on any of those battlefields where he spent his life trying to staunch the bleeding of the innocent.

Humanitarian response for slow learners: lessons urgently needed for Gaza

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Summary: calls for humanitarian aid are being used by pusillanimous politicians to distract from their failures to directly address the causes of humanitarian crisis in Gaza, most specifically Israel’s genocidal assault.

For over five years in the late 1990s I worked, mostly for Oxfam GB, organizing assistance, including water supply and sanitation, for the civilian victims of the civil war in Angola. 

So, humanitarian response is a subject area I know a little about. As students of management and leadership will be aware, a problem with a bit of expertise is that you can presume that everyone understands the fundamentals as well as you do. This is called taken-for-grantedness in the literature. 

I have been taking-for-granted that David Lammy and Keir Starmer – human rights lawyers after all, as they like to tell us, and therefore smarter than everyone else, as they like to imply – would understand the fundamentals of humanitarianism. After all, they have been pontificating on it since the start of Israel’s murderous assault on Gaza in 2023. 

But maybe they don’t. Maybe it is possible that they are not the craven accomplices to war crimes that their ongoing military and diplomatic support of Israel suggests. Perhaps they are just pig ignorant of the vitally important stuff that successful humanitarian response requires. 

So, here are a couple of the most basic lessons of humanitarianism for their edification.

1. The solution to a humanitarian crisis caused by war is not aid. It is an end to war. At the early stages of Israel’s latest assault on Gaza, Starmer and others attempted to deflect from their monstrous acquiesce in Netanyahu’s war crimes by rejecting the calls for  an immediate ceasefire and instead calling for pauses in the violence to allow for the delivery of more aid. 

The technical term for this position in relation to humanitarian response is “Oxford Union debating horseshite”. It is part of an approach to politics that values a plausible sounding point to win an immediate argument over the concrete measures necessary to resolve the actual causes of the crisis that the argument is about. Food assistance, vital as it is, does not protect from the other forms of collective punishment, such as the cutting of power and water that Keir Starmer advocated Israel doing, let alone the mass burning alive of children that Israel has routinised in Gaza since the outset of its violence.

2. If a belligerent nation is using famine as a weapon of war, then they are not going to permit humanitarian assistance unless put under robust pressure to do so. Robust pressure, not expressions of sadness or concern: Boycotts. Divestments. Sanctions. Criminal accounting.

3. If an assaulting army deliberately massacres humanitarian workers delivering food aid to hungry people, they are probably using famine as a weapon of war. Humanitarian workers not party to that war crime will therefore be made a target.

4. If an assaulting army on encountering their own nationals, stripped to their underpants and begging for help in their own language, shoots them, then that army is not on a rescue mission. Imagine what fate awaits those who cannot speak the attackers language. But you don’t have to because it has been documented by those the Israelis would seek to make victims. Indeed, the Israelis themselves have even videoed their own war crimes to show the world, so proud are they of what they inflict.

5. If an assaulting army is enslaving the civilian population they are attacking, then they are certainly not interested in any aspect of the humanitarian well-being of those civilians. In March 2025 the Israeli newspaper Haaertz reported that, ‘In Gaza, Almost Every IDF [Israeli Defence Forces] Platoon Keeps a Human Shield, a Sub-army of Palestinian Slaves.’

The British government used to like to depict itself as a world leader against slavery. But there has been a deafening silence from that government, and indeed much of the anti-slavery community, on this matter. 

6. If you have soldiers in place to machine gun aid recipients, then the purpose of an aid distribution is not humanitarian. It is war crimes. 

7. If you are materially supporting a political regime that has publicly stated its war aims are ethnic cleansing, then no amount of humanitarian assistance will mitigate that. You too are practicing genocide, even if you are also offering the doomed their meagre last meals. 

Maybe these ideas are new to Starmer, Lammy and the rest of their government. But they are not hard. Indeed, tens of thousands of ordinary British people demonstrate that they grasp these most fundamental points already as, month in, month out, they gather in protests across the country to indict their own government for its abject moral collapse.