'Angela's Ashes' author warned world of dire poverty in Haiti - but no one listened

"They say that 80% of Haitians live in dire poverty, but I'd say more. Walking into the shantytown of San Martin is like going to hell."

This was before all hell broke loose in hell after the earthquake.

"Everything is compressed," McCourt said. "Narrow little alleyways. Gutters running down the middle. Anyone with a few dollars - and all of them are the ruling mulatto class - lives in the mountains behind high iron gates and high walls to keep out the masses."

No one was texting money to Haiti then. Haiti made no headlines. There were no celebrity telethons for Haiti.

"Meanwhile, in San Martin, people wanted to proudly show off their new latrines that had been installed by Concern Worldwide," McCourt reported. "They wanted us to compare them with the old latrines - ancient, overflowing. Buzzing with flies."

McCourt understood because as a kid in Limerick, he had to use the same outdoor latrines.

"In Haiti, on hot days - and all the days there are roasting - [the smell] makes you gag," McCourt said about the good old days before the earthquake.

"But you move on, past the local canal that is swimming with plastic bags filled with human waste. No one has any running water. No such thing as a shower. You buy buckets of water from entrepreneurs who own locked cisterns. In New York, we have nothing to compare this kind of poverty to. It makes Bushwick look like Southampton."

Two weeks ago, a Brooklyn friend sent me a link to a story about Patrick Farrell - nephew of the late Eddie Farrell of storied Farrell's tavern in Windsor Terrace - winning the Pulitzer Prize for his wrenching Miami Herald photographs of the 2008 hurricane that ravaged Haiti, leaving 800 dead and a million homeless.

It made me think of former Brooklynite McCourt's visit to Haiti in 2001, after winning his Pulitzer for "Angela's Ashes," chronicling his own life of squalor. I thought how no amount of publicity ever changes anything.

The horror is that there is no horror.

No horror until the other night, when we watched the "60 Minutes" footage of bodies scooped by a bulldozer plow and emptied into a dump truck for burial in a mass grave.

But Haiti did not happen in a vacuum.

"We have a huge Caribbean community in New York," McCourt warned in this space in a Sunday paper in 2001. "Many of them Haitian, and we never hear a word out of our two Democratic senators, Schumer and Clinton, or our congressional delegation.

"We'll never hear a promising word out of this [George W. Bush] White House about Haiti, so it is up to us to pressure our other elected leaders to initiate some kind of attention to this nation of 7 million that is on our doorstep. The entire national debt of Haiti last year was $985 million, or the price of one - ONE - United States stealth bomber. It's simply an outrage that we are doing NOTHING! The country that gave Haiti the most aid is Cuba, and we have a goddamned blockade around it!"

I never heard from Schumer or Clinton after McCourt's ominous words appeared in 2001.

Back then, McCourt said Haiti's state-run school system was basically nonexistent, so mountain people built metal sheds with no walls, no benches, no desks, where kids had to walk an average of 3 miles each way.

"None of the children I spoke with had had any breakfast," he said. "If a kid is hungry, he can't learn because all he thinks of is food. No wonder illiteracy is 70%. These private schools charge $9 a year, but many parents can't afford it."

McCourt also spoke of a galloping AIDS epidemic in Haiti, but medical facilities were a shambles, with dental clinics using 20-year-old drills, with no anesthesia.

"I've traveled to other places like Caracas and Bombay," McCourt told me. "But nothing compares to the hopelessness I saw in Haiti. ... My trip to Haiti was simply unforgettable. The next time I hear someone complain about anything at all, I'll tell them to shut up, you could live in Haiti."

Those are Frank McCourt's ashes.

dhamill@nydailynews.comMY BACKYARD