In the wake of Hurricane Mitch, Trocaire has mounted a major relief operation in five departments of Honduras, providing food, water, medicine and essential cooking stoves to 85,000 people who have lost their homes and crops because of the hurricane.
At least one million people have been affected - one in six of the population. They have lost everything. And they had very little to begin with.
The weather experts say Hurricane Mitch was a tropical storm. But the winds and rains which battered this region recently have become more than a climatic phenomenon. It is a humanitarian disaster that has unleashed human suffering on a massive scale and ruined the fragile economy of what was already one of Latin America's poorest countries.
The Honduran Vice-President, Mr Billy Handal, says it could take 40 years to get back to where we were last Friday.
On an emotional level, the people are punch-drunk from the pounding they have received. Hundreds of people have died. The authorities say the death toll might reach 5,000. One million people are homeless. More than 100 villages and communities have disappeared. Of the 18 counties in Honduras, 16 have been directly hit.
About 10 days after the start of the floods, 10,000 families are still waiting to be rescued. Entire communities in the capital, Tegucigalpa, most but not all poor, have been swept away. We have no electricity, little food, petrol has run out and the phones function in only one district. One-third of all homes have been swept away. At least one-quarter of a million families are displaced in Tegucigalpa alone.
It has been the first time that such a crisis has struck at all sectors and parts of the country at the same time.
A state of emergency has been declared and, in an emotional address to the nation on Monday night, President Carlos Flores said: "Honduras is mortally wounded, but not about to expire. We will get back on our feet".
Right now, there is little dry land for the country to walk on. Half of the country is submerged by the floods.
I ventured out in Tegucigalpa over the weekend to assess the damage. Only one of the five bridges that cross the city was standing. As I stood on the bridge, I counted 18 buses floating down the river. At that stage, water had reached the third floor of the main public hospital.
I met a man with his three-year-old daughter, dead, wrapped up in a plastic table cloth - he had been turned back from the morgue which has no power and is stuffed to the ceiling with dead bodies.
The walls of the central prison collapsed and 2,000 prisoners tried to jump into the river below. The police opened fire in desperation. I was trapped on the other side of the river and it looked like a set from a horror movie as the bodies of the dead prisoners rushed along in the river with fridges, TVs, bank records, wood, Toyota pick-ups and bits of houses.
Honduras is one of the poorest countries in Latin America, with 82 per cent of the population living below the poverty line. A typical monthly shopping bill for a family of five comes to $256 (about £170) while the monthly minimum wage is only $60. But that was last week, before Hurricane Mitch.
Honduras is a country where everyone works because work means survival: there is no dole, no state-funded safety nets. Shoe-shiners, newspapers boys and women and children selling sweets and snacks are everywhere on the streets of the major cities. Entire rural villages move to coffee plantations in the harvest season. Hundreds of thousands of families depend on labour on the export plantations of bananas, citrus, sugar cane and melons, on shrimp farms and in the maquilas - clothing assembly plants for the US market.
Now 70 per cent of the country's key exchange earners - bananas, coffee, African palm oil, shrimp farms and melon plantations - have been eradicated. The free trade zones on the coast have been flooded and are swamped in mud. The companies are foreign-owned capital which will probably flee to other countries leaving more than 100,000 Hondurans jobless.
Damage to infrastructure is immense with 89 bridges down across the country and five airports out of operation. One of these in the industrial city of San Pedro Sula was built recently and cost tens of millions of dollars, money that cannot be recovered.
Infrastructural damage is so extensive that nothing less than a massive international commitment of aid and technical assistance can enable Honduras even to return to where it was, let alone continue to develop. While emergency aid is needed to solve the immediate problems, the scale of this disaster calls for long-term structural aid and the cancelling of Honduras's debt.
The cost of damage to roads and buildings has been put at $2 billion. Electricity and water systems are down in 70 per cent of the country. And it is impossible to move around from one city to another.
All of this destruction in a country which is already swamped with a horrendous debt and which has been struggling to get on its feet after the horrors of the 1980s when all of Central American was hampered by civil wars.
For Trocaire, this disaster means a decade of work has been lost and hundreds of people helped by Trocaire and the Irish people have been killed. Some 29 Trocaire projects have been wiped out and another 30 in health and agriculture made meaningless. This means loss of hope for the poor and most vulnerable communities.
Before Hurricane Mitch wiped out the country's infrastructure, Honduras had featured on the list of the world's most indebted countries, hoping to get debt relief from the World Bank and its international creditors. If Honduras's external debt of $4 billion was unpayable before disaster struck, the only way the country can survive is for the world financial community to write off the debt.
What should the international community do? This is not just about short-term relief. What will become of Honduras next week, when the first emotional response dries up?
The Government can play a key role in motivating the European Union to take a co-ordinated response to the destruction in Central America. We call on Ireland to engage in serious discussions with the EU and international financial institutions at the highest level on recovery and reconstruction, debt cancellation and disaster preparedness in the region.
The people of Honduras have been through enough. I have grown to respect the strength and resilience of these people.
Our response to their needs over the coming months and years will be a real test of our commitment to support them and other poor people around the world.
Sally O'Neill, Trocaire's Central American representative, is based in Tegucigalpa
Anyone wishing to make a donation to Trocaire's Honduras operation should contact 1850 408 408