Thomas Michael Kevin Elmore-Meegan (born 26 March 1959, in Liverpool), also known as Michael Meegan or Mike Meegan, is a British-born Irish humanitarian and the founder of several charities and non-governmental organisations, specialising in anti-hunger and community health care programmes. His brother, Simon Elmore, is a Munich-based musician. Elmore-Meegan co-founded the International Community for Relief of Starvation and Suffering (ICROSS), an International aid agency operating in East Africa that describes itself as "a small international organisation working to fight poverty and disease in the poorest parts of the world. ICROSS Ireland closed in 2012, causing ICROSS International, based in Kenya, to extend its own programmes. Background Born in Liverpool of Irish and French parentage, Elmore-Meegan was baptised by John Carmel Heenan (later John Cardinal Heenan). He spent his childhood between Grenoble in the French Alps, Freshfield, Lancashire, and at Rishworth, Yorkshire. He was influenced by the Mill Hill Missionaries in Freshfield. He spoke French and Latin by the age of ten. In 1971, he moved to Dublin, attending Terenure College, Dublin, run by the Order of the Brothers of Our Lady of Mount Carmel (the Carmelites), where he graduated in 1977. He entered the Roman Catholic Society of White Fathers -- the Missionaries of Africa/Les Pères Blanc -- hoping to become a missionary. Due to a serious burn injury and keloid damage he left the White Fathers, instead completing a degree in Philosophy at the Jesuit Milltown Institute of Theology and Philosophy (awarded by the Holy See), following which he entered the Jesuit novitiate. Later, in 1989, he took an MSc in Community Health from Trinity College Dublin. After Ecclesiastical training earning an Honours degree in Philosophy from the Holy See, Elmore-Meegan moved to Kenya at aged 20, where he settled in the Northern territories of the Great Rift Valley and began to perform development aid work among the local people. This was largely funded by his own inheritance and by close personal friends. In 1978 his early drafts of spiritual axioms, All Shall be Well, later to be a series of reflections on poverty was published by Collins in 1986 (Fount Religious paperbacks). He began sculpting at an early age, mostly working in clay and bronze. He still does private commissions in bronze. Since 1980, he suffered a series of serious illnesses in Africa, ranging from cerebral malaria and amoebic and bacillic dystentry to cholera. In 1992, and again