Ireland repays Native Americans for Potato Famine donation

The Navajo Nation has been hit hard by the coronavirus outbreak 

CREDIT: Kristin Murphy/The Deseret News via AP

Donations to native American tribes who have been badly hit by the coronavirus crisis are flooding in from Ireland as they repay a debt dating back to the 19th-century potato famine.

An estimated 40 per cent of the Navajo do not have running water at home, and a drought in the south-west exacerbated the crisis.

Already more than $1.3 million has been raised with donations flooding in from Ireland.  

The generosity dates back to a gesture made in March 1947 when the Choctaw Tribe, which was gradually re-establishing itself in Oklahoma having been outed from its ancestral lands in Mississippi, heard news of the Irish Potato Famine across the Atlantic.