The capacity to anticipate and prevent the threat of famine exists today but almost a billion people are allowed to "live in conditions of extreme or avoidable hunger", President Michael D Higgins said at the national famine commemoration day.

President Higgins was speaking at the event in Glasnevin Cemetery, Dublin, which also saw the unveiling of a new memorial to honour those who died during the famine.

The mid 19th century Celtic cross was donated by the Glasnevin Trust, and the President said it will serve as a "permanent memorial to and reminder of those people".

"This memorial stone will stand here beside the other important memorials of this cemetery as a testimony to our national remembrance of, and grief for, those who endured so much suffering during an Gorta Mór," he said.

Mr Higgins said Glasnevin Cemetery is the “single largest burial ground for the victims of An Gorta Mór” with many “interred in mass graves, or ‘unpurchased graves’, with no headstone to mark their final resting place”.

Thousands of families from across Ireland fled to the port of Dublin hoping to escape to other countries but failed to do so. The identities of those who died are recorded, however, in the archives of the Glasnevin Trust.

Mr Higgins laid a wreath at the new memorial, as did numerous ambassadors and dignitaries from other countries who were in attendance.

In an address, the President said: “We now have the capacity to anticipate the threat of famine. We have the capacity to take measures to avoid it; and yet we allow nearly a billion people across our world to live in conditions of extreme but avoidable hunger.”

He said famine has never only been an accident of nature and the moral principles that allowed the Great Famine remain in place across the world today.

The Irish Famine, he said, “was more a series of mistakes” and was “not providence”.

"It took place in the context of empire and an imbedded atmosphere of conflict. It took place in a particular context of land ownership. Yes, it took its toll on a population that had massively increased – but hadn't the population of the whole of Europe itself increased from 140 million people in 1740 to almost 270 million people in 1850?"

Patterns evident during the Irish Famine can be seen in the experience of other famines, he said.

“We can discern structural features, which created the social vulnerability that is famine. Dependency on a single source of food is obvious, but other factors also come in to play.

“The Ireland upon which the Great Famine would descend had, as a consequence of the Act of Union 1800, seen its industrial and commercial structure slip into decay. That century of the Great Famine also is one when a number of assumptions came to dominate political and, it was claimed, moral, thinking. The new citizen of the post-industrial revolution period was to be thrifty, industrious and motivated by individual welfare – characteristics very different from those assumed to be the characteristics of the Irish peasant.”

During this time, it was believed by British authorities that providing relief to those who were dying would create “dependency...a target that could not be allowed slip”.

“Many of those who may have had the best of intentions, but were however operating with the most dreadful assumptions, must be understood. They made disastrous calculations, even beyond the erroneous assumptions of their economics.

“The mistakes of the past must not be repeated when facing the threat of famine today, he said.

“The moral principle remains the same: should we adjust our populations to an abstracted economic ideology, or should we, rather, use the best of our reason to craft economic and social models that can anticipate the needs and care for the peoples who share this fragile planet?”