"THE workers' paradise on earth" is how North Korea likes to style itself, but the reality witnessed by Trocaire's director Mr Justin Kilcullen in the past week belongs more to hell than heaven.
"We visited a kindergarten in Sunchon city. The place was half empty. In the classrooms, there was no play, no noise, none of the life you associate with a school. The children were thin, with runny noses. They were clearly unwell.
"When we asked about the other children, we were told some were at home. They were too weak to come to school. Some were in hospital. Others were dead."
Everywhere, famine stalks the land in this state, one of the last communist regime in the world. North Korea has 50 metre swimming pools, a 150,000 seater stadium, even nuclear weapons, but many of its 23 million people are slowly starving to death.
"North Korea has no food left. People told us they received their blast ration four weeks ago and nothing since. International aid has been promised, but none had arrived in the areas we visited. We were told the machinery to unload ships at the port had broken down."
Mr Kilcullen returned last night from a four day visit to the country. "One woman told us she knew which grasses were nutritious. She could tell which tree barks are edible and which are poisonous. She mixed seaweed into the brew. When we asked her how many people she was feeding from her small pot of brew - we would have considered it a snack - she told us six."
He is a veteran of many African famines, but he says he has never seen anything like this. "This is an urban famine. People rely completely on state handouts and now these have stopped. They're stranded on the 20th floors of grim concrete housing blocks without the means to help themselves.
"The extraordinary thing is that the fields are all planted. People come out from the cities to help with the weeding now that there is no petrol to run the machinery for this."
However, the harvest is five months from now and the rainy season is due next month. If there are floods on the scale of last year and 1995, the crops will be destroyed. "The experts say that flooding is inevitable now that so mane trees have been felled and the topsoil has been washed away. The ordinary people just say they are praying for a good harvest."
Travelling between his base in Pyongyang and the countryside, Mr Kilcullen and his party of government officials had the broad highways to himself - the shortage of petrol has taken almost all cars off the road. "You get the impression that the country is slowly grinding to a halt.
"If this were an African famine, there would already be mass starvation, but North Korea has survived so far by sharing out the misery equally. Everyone is suffering. The trouble is now that if one goes, they'll all go together.
