Item 1 is the minutes of the previous meeting held on 9 April which were circulated with the agenda for this meeting. Is it agreed the minutes are in order and there are no matters arising therefrom?
Ireland Aid Programme: Presentation.
I would like to briefly raise a question which we may consider later at the meeting of the main committee, namely, how we should update our information on Iraq.
The matter may be raised at the main committee meeting. Item 2 is a presentation by the Department of Foreign Affairs on the Ireland Aid Programme. I welcome Mr. David O'Donoghue, director of the development co-operation division of the Department and Mr. Frank Sheridan, a counsellor in the division. The Department has been invited to address the committee on the Ireland Aid Programme and the progress made on its expansion to meet the millennium development goals of the UN target of allocating 0.7% of GNP to development co-operation by 2007. The Department will also brief us on progress on the implementation of the recommendations of the Ireland Aid review committee. Following the presentation we will have an opportunity for a question and answer session with the delegation. Is that agreed? Agreed.
Before we commence, I remind the meeting that while members are covered by privilege, others appearing before the committee are not. I invite Mr. O'Donoghue to begin the presentation.
We are delighted to have this opportunity to give the committee a brief overview of the work of the Ireland Aid Programme which is administered by the development co-operation directorate in the Department of Foreign Affairs. We will be delighted to answer questions members may have on any aspect of the programme. We provided a short briefing note which members may have had a chance to study. I propose, with the permission of the Chairman, to go through this briefly and then deal with a number of other issues it does not cover.
The Ireland Aid programme is almost 30 years old. While it has had different names during its history, it has been called Ireland Aid as of 2001. The programme started in a very modest way in the mid to late 1970s. Initially, we selected one country in southern Africa, Lesotho, for priority treatment. If I recall correctly this decision was taken in 1976 and it was a number of years before we were able to add further countries when we subsequently moved into Tanzania and Zambia. Then in the early 1990s we added three countries, all of which are still known as priority countries or, more recently, programme countries. The last three in Africa were Ethiopia, Mozambique and Uganda. Quite recently we added East Timor, our first involvement in a programme country outside sub-Saharan Africa. The bilateral programme which revolves around those six countries in Africa represents the largest part of our expenditure under the Ireland Aid programme, approximately 60%. Another 30% is allocated to international organisations, UN agencies in particular and also to the EU's development policy while the remaining funding is distributed between support for NGOs, such as APSO and a number of other functions. The budget for Ireland Aid has expanded quite dramatically over the past decade or so but, in particular, since a decision taken by the Taoiseach and the Government in 2000, that we would achieve 0.7% by 2007. To put things in perspective, the overall budget increased roughly speaking four times during the 1990s. As of now it stands at €373 million for Ireland Aid. In addition to that there are smaller sums of money which are administered by various Departments. When added together they come to approximately €80 million a year so that when we speak of ODA, we mean the sum of the Ireland Aid budget and the individual small amounts administered by other Departments. Therefore our estimate for the ODA which the Government will provide this year is €455 million. I emphasise that this is an estimate because we will not know for some time what the final amounts are which were administered by other Departments such as Finance and Agriculture and Food which make contributions to particular international organisations. The bulk of the ODA is the budget allocated to Ireland Aid.
Political responsibility for the programme is vested in the Minister for Foreign Affairs and the Minister of State with responsibility for development co-operation. The Minister of State has day to day responsibility for handling the programme. He is actively involved in policy formulation and innovation and in the overall direction of the programme. The Minister is supported by a team at headquarters which is led by myself and involves a range of different staff categories. A relatively small number are diplomats and an increasing proportion are specialists who are hired by the programme on a short-term basis, although we are trying to extend their contracts to eight years. Over the next few years we will see an increasing share of the management of the programme being taken by specialists who have been working in development matters for a number of years. Some of them are general development specialists who have had a range of experience across the board in developing countries while others have a specific skill such as that of health or education adviser. We have such staff both at home in senior management positions and also in the field. By the field we mean the embassies we have in the six priority countries in sub-Saharan Africa which are led by diplomats but most of whose staff are specialists, either provided from home or locally recruited. Typically in the embassy in Uganda or Tanzania we would have perhaps two development specialists of a general kind and a number of locally recruited health, education, agriculture and other specialists.
When the Government announced the decision in 2000 that the budget would be increased to achieve the UN target by 2007, it was decided that an independent review should be carried out of the Ireland Aid programme in order to take stock of where we were at and where we might usefully expand with the growing resources. This review committee was chaired by the then Minister of State and it involved a range of experts from different fields who all had something to contribute. In March of 2002 the review committee reported and the Government accepted all of the recommendations. That report was published and I believe that copies have been made available to the committee. The very comprehensive set of recommendations produced by the review committee in effect is the basis for the expansion of the programme over the next few years. It is now being implemented under the various headings and it charts the way into the future for us. The Minister of State is leading this process and is giving fresh emphasis to a number of issues of particular interest, including the relationship between development and trade, the potential role to be played by information and communications technologies in achieving development goals and the area of debt relief.
On an ongoing basis we also have an emergency and humanitarian budget to deal with emergency crises, be they man-made or of natural origins. Iraq has clearly been a major focus in the past few months and we also dealt intensively with Afghanistan about a year and a half ago. There are ongoing famine and drought crises in the Horn of Africa and in southern Africa to which we have been paying a lot of attention. Overriding all of these in many ways is the HIV-AIDS crisis which has overwhelmed most of the countries in which we are active and which is threatening to undermine many of the development gains which have been made over the past ten years or so. HIV-AIDS is a key priority for the programme. The Taoiseach, in June 2001, announced that extra dedicated funding within the programme would be provided for the HIV-AIDS crisis in its various dimensions. We are also working at international level to build up our co-operation with international organisations; in particular a number of UN agencies which we feel are dedicated to reform objectives and which are working in ways that support our own work. These include UNICEF, the UNDP and UNHCR. We are also playing an active role in the development of the EU's development programme.
We have close relationships with half a dozen aid programmes in countries like the Nordic states, Britain, Germany and the Netherlands whose overall approach and philosophy is close to that of the Irish Government and with which we can do quite a lot in co-operation in the field. Our aid programme is completely untied and this marks us out from a number of aid programmes which tie their aid to one degree or another to the use of goods and services from their countries. Our aid is provided without any strings attached in terms of Irish companies benefiting. That is a position which the Government reconfirmed when the Ireland Aid review committee strongly recommended it.
The programme is overseen by a new monitoring body which is called the advisory board of Ireland Aid chaired by Des O'Malley. This board began work some six months ago and its mandate is to consider overall policy issues and provide general oversight of the expenditure and policy priorities. It is still early days but it has taken up its work with great vigour and is a significant asset to us as we go forward. The advisory board also has responsibility for managing the research part of the programme. Every aid programme needs to be underpinned by research which will help it to reach the correct decisions on expenditure and policy priorities. The advisory board has been given the role of developing the research on the programme. As members of the committee will be aware, members of the development assistance committee of the OECD will come to Ireland next week to begin what is referred to as a "peer review" of the Ireland Aid Programme. This exercise is carried out every three or four years in all relevant countries by the OECD. It is a very useful tool to improve standards, to ensure that the country concerned is working as far as possible in line with best international practice. We are regularly involved in such exercises in relation to other countries. On this occasion the two outside countries who will take part in the review of our programme are Belgium and Switzerland. We look forward to this exercise. They will visit the committee and we hope we can be of assistance in that connection.
The question of public ownership of the aid programme and public information about it, is something to which the Government attaches great importance and we are turning our minds to ways in which we can create greater awareness in Ireland of what is being done on behalf of the taxpayer in some of the poorest countries in the world.
It is sometimes difficult to create an understanding of the work being done on the ground. In some ways, NGOs have it easier because they have a requirement to obtain public contributions and they need to be constantly in the public eye in order to demonstrate the very valuable work they are doing. It is slightly different for us but nevertheless, there is a challenge here to make the public more aware of the significance of the work being done abroad and over the coming years to build on the standing of the programme and support for it. We all instinctively feel the Irish public empathises with efforts to improve the circumstances in which the poorest people of the world live but people may not quite appreciate the scale of what is being done by the Government in a number of those countries.
Our focus is absolutely on poverty reduction and that is the single unswerving focus of the programme. It means therefore that we target our efforts on the poorest countries of the world. There is sometimes a tendency on the part of other European neighbours to include middle-income countries within the ambit of their aid programmes and sometimes that is because of an historical connection which they may have had with middle-income countries in certain parts of the world. In our case we are building to some extent on the work of Irish missionaries who focused and continue to focus heavily on very poor countries in Africa. It is vital that the public gets value for money in terms of achieving development objectives with this quite sizeable public investment. We are guided by the so-called millennium development goals which were enunciated about two years ago.
These goals are internationally accepted as the measurement of achievement in the development field. Our document summarises these goals. In broad terms, they set out to reduce some of the key indicators over the next 15 years. There is a debate internationally about how one can mobilise sufficient ODA resources to ensure that those goals are achieved. Many countries have diminished their ODA contributions over the years; we are going in the other direction but it is nevertheless a difficult task and there are many competing pressures.
We keep a very clear focus on the poorest countries in the world which are called the least developed countries - LDCs - and on poverty reduction within those countries.
I do not propose, Chairman, to prolong my introductory remarks much longer. I will speak about the Presidency next year and the development aspects of that role. Within the EU the Council of Development Ministers no longer exists; it has been subsumed into the new General Affairs Council. We intend to maintain a clear focus on development and development related issues during the Presidency next year. The Minister of State plans to host a meeting of his EU colleagues towards the end of the Presidency at which point the new colleagues from the acceding countries will have joined. The Minister of State will make contact with his new colleagues over the next few months to help them to integrate into the EU and also bilaterally to learn from some of our own experiences.
The extra ten countries look to us in some ways as a model of how a country without any previous colonising experience can operate effectively in the wider world, building up its resources from zero to a point where we now rank approximately sixth in the world in terms of our percentage commitment. I will clarify that remark: five countries have to date achieved the UN target of 0.7%. They are, in no particular order, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands and Luxembourg. As things stand, we are the sixth in the sense that we have the next highest percentage thereafter; we are currently at 0.41% of GDP. The Government has made a commitment to close the gap between that and 0.7% by 2007.
Ireland is seen nowadays as a country which is prepared to devote more resources to its aid programme and to reach out to the poorest populations in the world. I think it is related to our various historic experiences and our empathy with the poor through the work of the missionaries. It is an important part of our foreign policy and it is a major priority for the Government.
My colleague and I will be very happy to answer any questions from the members.
The committee is very grateful for that detailed presentation which is very helpful. It is a lengthy contribution which covered a great deal of ground. There are about six areas on which I wish to ask very specific questions. Before I do, I wish to preface by saying anybody making a presentation that seeks to elicit the context of development at the present time could not be happy that after 50 years of development assistance one third of the world's population is living on less than $2 a day. There has been contextual deterioration in the trade area where within 15, ten and five years, the yield of a basket of products in many of the countries of the South is as low as maybe 25% of what it was at the best market conditions. It has certainly deteriorated. There has not been significant progress in relation to debt, either odious debt or debt even as it affects us as was mentioned in the presentation and this phrase has been around since the end of the 1970s.
The position in the least developed countries is that the most recent debt relief of 1997 has effectively been wiped out and many of the countries that benefited under a very restricted review process are worse off now in 2003 than they were before that time.
We should call a spade a spade in matters that are within our remit. This morning I read a reply to a question I put to the Minister for Finance in which he indicates yet again his personal hostility to the Tobin tax on the basis that it would impede free capital movements and might interfere with the speculative flows and so forth, not in principle, he says, but in implementation to the extent to which he and like-minded finance Ministers in the European Union had a reluctance in participating or allowing a United Nations commission to review further the implementation procedures in relation to the Tobin tax. I mention this - and I am sticking strictly within the presentation we have just heard - to emphasise there are difficult contextual factors. As I understand it, we have not advanced the position prepared in relation to debt through the Department of Finance at either the World Bank or the IMF. I want that to be noted very carefully. We have not supported the Tobin tax and have represented hostility to it.
It is important to note that the level of aid is falling. I do not know if there are now three or four countries on the continent of Africa where the debt repayments are less than the combined education and health budgets. Yet there are reports that a 1% increase of GDP on health and education would save the lives of 11,000 children per day. On the debt, trade and aid sides in Africa, the story is a disaster. That is not a party point of view; it is an international observation point of view. Let us not be bland about it.
I have some specific questions on the presentation. Recently along with two other members of this committee, I attended a parliamentary forum on the World Bank. Not just the Irish representatives, but a large majority of the people present would have favoured changing that from a parliamentary assembly of the World Bank - in reality a consultation - to being a parliamentary assembly for the millennium development goals, which would have given some meaning to it.
As is now expected, we had the usual kind speech from Jim Wilkinson of the World Bank and an angry, defensive and at times offensive speech from Mr. Krueger of the IMF, who answered no questions or anything raised in the workshops and managed to alienate those who stayed in the room to listen to him. It was an exercise in autocratic arrogance. I wish he came here so that people could see what we are dealing with at the IMF. However we are not challenging him at the IMF on his assumptions and the imposition of a neo-liberal market model in countries where it is singularly unsuitable. In the course of that conference during the review of the millennium development goals by the officials of the United Nations it became particularly clear.
I believe Mr. O'Donoghue mentioned the eight goals and the 48 indicators. I understand the commitments are but a fraction of what was indicated at the Monterrey conference as we speak this morning. I understand the commitments at the Johannesburg conference to which Mr. O'Donoghue refers in his paper are but a fraction of what is indicated. While it is always worthy to have aspirations for the elimination of world poverty by target dates, commitment at the moment is very far short. This point is one for this committee. We may recommend it in relation to participation at a forum like the parliamentary forum of the World Bank. In many cases this was something that came out to tame the protest to some extent. Based on what Mr. Krueger was saying, he is not for changing.
I notice Mr. O'Donoghue mentioned the peer review group of the OECD. Why does he not use better-qualified, better-researched and more published experts like those of the United Nations commissions? The United Nations Commission for Europe in Geneva, the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa, the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America have more qualified people with better publications, refereed independently with a more independent view. They are not single paradigm people. They would be far more useful here to us than the OECD, which is very narrow. Much of its economic assumptions are suspect and I seriously question the work of many of the people who supply material to that organisation.
There is a point related to the OECD peer review group. The Ireland Aid review group suggested that our multilateral contributions should not exceed 40%. Is Mr. O'Donoghue worried about the fact that a previous Oireachtas Joint Committee on Foreign Affairs addressed the issue and had the Commissioner here to discuss the scandal of €1 billion of committed aid that was not spent Mr. Larsson suggested he was doing such a fundamental review that at last this problem would be addressed. He then proceeded to carry out such a review that alienated practically the entire NGO sector in one go, which was a considerable achievement. Where does Mr. O'Donoghue stand on that? We are all in favour of helping the poor, but I am not in favour of wasting my time. Why should we spend the lifetime of another committee eventually giving another invitation to Mr. Larsson to come and tell us what money is committed but not spent?
Mr. O'Donoghue mentioned a related institution, the UNDP. Malloch Brown also flashed through here a few years ago. We were able to elicit little except the fact that he was in favour of a market driven model of development.
In the course of his paper, Mr. O'Donoghue also refers to development education, which represents the weakest side. I understand the Ireland Aid review committee looked at this and came up with the suggestion that it be reabsorbed within Ireland Aid. What does that mean? Based on the figures mentioned in the presentation on development education, one would imagine that if we are to tease out what I am saying and the replies to it and were to discuss the role of the World Bank, the IMF and the OECD versus the United Nations commissions and so forth, that is a part of development education. However, it has a miserly sum here. It aims more widely to increase global responsibility for development inadequacies and solidarity with people of the developing world. That is admirable. In 2000 the budget was €1.5 million, it was €2 million in 2001 and €2.7 million in 2002. When one expresses that as a proportion of the total budget it seems very small. I am not sure whether the re-absorption into Ireland Aid is good or bad.
I was fascinated by the manner in which APSO went into decline and died. It was not so much that it died but it was absorbed. It is still dealing with missionaries. We all continue to pay tribute to their work, but they have been succeeded by thousands of development aid workers as well who worked in the 1970s in conditions of considerable insecurity, came back later and had amending contracts so that they could at least go back to their jobs without loss of service and that was a real gain.
If the programme is expanded to this degree and if a huge proportion of it is going into the EU which will not explain to us why it cannot spend that which we give and in not spending it damages the willingness across the European citizenry to help, from where will the staff come and how will it be recruited? I have no difficulty with the Department of Foreign Affairs running the aid effort and I have no difficulty about diplomats or people with proper training doing it either. However, I am really worried when I hear the word "specialist". In the different development programmes with which I am familiar, "expert" can mean many different things. It can mean, at the very best, a person who is interested in having integrated projects with the capacity to hand on. At its worst, it can refer to the people in Africa and Asia, usually described as the "when we" people, who are constantly speaking of when they were in one place or another. What does the term "specialist" mean in this context? How will these people be recruited and trained? From where will they come? What skills will they have? There will be a need for agriculturists, horticulturists, nutritionists and so on.
I welcome the reference to our "untied" aid, which is one of the admirable characteristics of the Irish aid programme. I also welcome the reference to the fact that we do not bring with us certain baggage associated with other countries. We are not simply a non-colonial country but one which had been colonised. We bring the perspective of the colonised, a term which one could not use in this jurisdiction for a decade and a half, lest one might be suspected of having another agenda. Now, however, we can use that term again and recover our history. What is happening in relation to some of our partners in the European Union is disgraceful. Why do we not speak out on that issue? Some countries are selling more arms into Africa than they are giving in aid. Countries are selling on the African continent machinery which cannot be repaired. That is quite scandalous.
I wish the Department officials well in their work. I would appreciate some information on the points I have raised.
I apologise for my late arrival and the fact that I had not read the documentation before the meeting. I have been trying to catch up during the presentation. I note reference in the briefing document to un-spent EU development aid amounting to some €20 billion. What proportion of Irish aid channelled through the EU is in that un-spent category? Our contribution to the EU budget for development co-operation is one of the biggest elements of our ODA budget. It would be a matter of concern if some of that money remained un-spent because of apparent ineptitude at EU level. Irish people have difficulty in understanding the reason we can spend our ODA budget relatively efficiently and effectively while the EU cannot do so. Excuses by senior EU bureaucrats cannot get away from the fact that it should not be impossible to spend development aid for which the need is so great.
On another matter, I visited a project at Kilosa, Tanzania, some time in the 1980s. We have a deserved reputation for taking a fresh look at the ODA issue, in terms of not having tied aid and so on. Perhaps because we came relatively late to involvement in the development aid operation, we are looking at it with a degree of freshness. Has there been an evaluation as to where we made a permanent difference, as distinct from the very necessary humanitarian aid? Have we tracked projects through which we provided aid to start something, say, 15 years ago? I have in mind the many smaller projects as well as the bigger ones. I have a particular interest in the Kilosa project, for which there were huge plans at the time of my visit. I also visited Lesotho at that time, in the 1980s. Aside from specific issues, have we any long-term programme of evaluation? We should really think in terms of what makes a permanent difference.
My next point is related to the comments of my colleague, Deputy Higgins. I have not seen any indication of an attempt to reduce the international arms trade, even though it has been part of stated policy by every Government during my 20 years as a Member of the Oireachtas to discourage and reduce that trade. Is it not surprising - perhaps I missed it - that, even in the detailed material in the report of Ireland Aid for 2001, there is no reference to anything primarily concerned with reducing the arms trade? I believe every Member of the Oireachtas and every staff member of Ireland Aid would agree that a huge part of armaments expenditure is profoundly wasteful and is contrary to any concept of good development.
I noted Senator Ryan's comments with great interest. Having visited Tanzania and Lesotho in the 1990s, I am well aware of the projects to which he referred in Kilosa and in Lesotho. At that time, we had a very enterprising consul there who was involved in promoting several small industries. I refer to the mention of NGOs by the delegation. On a number of occasions, we have debated the question of NGOs delivering aid quickly to people in need. It also arose at a conference in Athens, which I attended with John Hamilton last Monday and Tuesday, involving the chairs of development committees from the EU and applicant countries. We had presentations from Action Aid, Oxfam and UNICEF. I am aware that the Irish NGOs have raised the question of additional funding for their operations in delivering aid quickly. Senator Ryan has referred to criticism by NGOs of corrupt practices in some countries, with money being used for arms and so on. I invite the delegation to respond to the issues which Senator Ryan and I have raised at this stage. Perhaps the replies to Deputy Higgins's questions can be taken when he returns from the Dáil.
May I ask one further question, which may be somewhat unfair? Deputy Dempsey and I attended a conference in Geneva, under the auspices of the WTO. If everybody had written a single hymn sheet, there could not have been more unanimity from the developing countries about the impact of US and European protectionism, as they regarded it, in the areas of agriculture and textiles. While I do not wish to put the Department officials on the spot, what is the point of spending money on improving farming skills or indigenous industries if the two biggest markets in the world are, effectively, excluding their products from fair access?
I am grateful to the members of the committee for their questions. As suggested, I will deal with Deputy Higgins's questions later. I will first address Senator Ryan's questions. With regard to the un-spent funding within the EU development programme, the figure of €20 billion refers to accumulated un-spent funds over, perhaps, ten years. The Government is unhappy with the fact that EU money in the aid area has remained un-spent over several years due to bureaucratic delays of one kind or another. We have worked hard at EU level, within the development council when it existed and among development ministers since then, to try to accelerate the rate of delivery under the EU aid programme. This is a key priority for the Minister of State and is something on which we will press the Commission over coming months and during our Presidency.
The contribution we make to the EU development budget is mandatory and part of our contribution to the overall EU budget. We manage to keep at the minimum level of contribution. In other words, we pay what is required but do not spend more in a discretionary way because of our concerns about the way in which the funding has been administered over the years. That said, we have detected some signs of improvement in the past year or two. The rate of movement has improved and a significant amount of the funding has now been spent due to pressure from Governments such as our own. However, there is still a long way to go. In our dialogue with Commissioner Nielson and other senior Commission people, we constantly emphasise the need for the Commission to reform itself internally in terms of its management of the aid programme. One of the measures it is now taking is to transfer more responsibility to the field, which has the effect of releasing funds more quickly.
A number of initiatives are being considered by the Commission at present for the spending of quite significant amounts of money in areas of importance to us. For example, we would like to see the issue of HIV-AIDS being given more funding from within the EU aid programme, and we have proposed that in the past. To sum up on this issue, we very much share the concerns expressed by the Senator, are pushing for improvements at EU level and will use our Presidency in that regard.
The latest figure I have for our contribution to the European Union is that of €68 million for 2001. What is this year's figure?
Some €10 million.
Mr. Frank Sheridan
I wonder if two figures are being confused. A large contribution is made to the general budget figure. A proportion of the general budget from all major states is used to fund the directorates within the Commission which oversee development. That amount is counted for aid and shows up in the statistics on it. However, the contribution we would make to the European development fund, where these blockages occur, is a much smaller figure of €12 million.
So the EC budget in Annex 1 of the records is a general contribution of which a proportion is allocated.
Mr. Sheridan
Yes. That is a proportion of the Irish contribution to the general budget which helps to fund DGAs within the Commission, which oversees the operation of the EDF.
Our most recent contribution was €12 million. The Senator is correct to make his second point regarding where the Irish contribution has made a difference and whether it is possible to evaluate our impact. We try to evaluate on a continuous basis the impact we have. Permanent difference is clearly something that cannot be measured for some time but the Senator is correct in that we want to ensure, for the sake of the Irish public, that what we do has an impact.
At headquarters in Dublin, there is an evaluation and monitoring unit which, as its name implies, looks at our programmes on an ongoing basis to see whether we are getting value for money or whether there is any measurement of progress in a particular country to show that what we have put in is being translated into real improvements. It is difficult to get that sort of statistical measurement in the short-term but, over a period of years and especially in conjunction with other aid programmes which are asking the same questions, we can begin to see that a country is reducing or improving some of its indicators. For example, it might be that infant mortality in a given country goes down or that effectiveness in tackling HIV-AIDS becomes apparent. Uganda has had some success in the past five years in tackling HIV-AIDS because of a concerted approach across the different social sectors.
Measuring our impact is an area of the programme to which we attach great importance. The Senator mentioned Tanzania and Lesotho. Lesotho, where we began in 1976, is a good example of a country where we have made a real difference on the ground. In the early days, we were one of the few donors there but we are now the only donor. It is easier, therefore, to measure the impact that Ireland has had in such a small country where we are the only resident donor.
We have had particular success in Lesotho and Uganda in the area of universal primary education, which has always been a top priority for the Irish programme. The Connemara pony project was a famous one in Lesotho. I am not sure of its current status but on a recent visit there I saw plenty of ponies in the mountainous regions. One could see the particular relevance of that project.
The review report did not explicitly refer to the arms trade because, I suppose, those who comprised the committee saw their remit as being to look at the development co-operation programme as such. However, in so far as it referred to the importance of doing more in the area of conflict prevention, the report is, in a sense, a hold-all for a number of initiatives that can be taken to reduce the instance of conflict. The use of small arms, for example, is an important area. The report was a summary of many wide-ranging discussions. While the Senator is correct that there was no specific reference to that, I know members addressed that issue because I took part in some of the discussions.
The present Minister of State would feel that the Everything But Arms initiative, which was concluded a couple of years ago and in which he was involved in his former capacity, showed that the EU, at least, wants to take concrete steps to reduce the prevalence of arms in African countries. Nonetheless, it is a problem which will continue. We are dealing with a continent which has a higher prevalence of conflict than anywhere else in the world. It is almost a given that a country we are dealing with will either have emerged from conflict or that conflict could potentially break out again in some part of it, which is something of which we are very conscious.
We will only work in a country, in the sense of having a country programme there, if we are satisfied that the Government concerned is taking real steps to eliminate conflict, promote democratic institutions and human rights, and is open and transparent in its dealings with its public. A range of considerations is brought to bear, one of which is a manifest commitment on the part of the Government to tackle conflict where it exists. This consideration is uppermost in the minds of Ministers, even if it was not explicitly mentioned in that report.
The question of NGOs getting aid quickly to people in need was raised by the Chairman. We work closely with the Irish NGOs and we actively help them to ensure that aid is quickly distributed on the ground. We do this when short-term emergencies arise, such as in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as in long-term development projects. The Minister of State introduced a new scheme some months ago to enable NGOs to get up and running very quickly at the outset of a new emergency. It means that a certain amount of money is automatically available to them for start-up costs and that they do not have to wait for a particular bureaucratic decision on funding. This scheme was introduced to help such organisations to become operational at the beginning of a crisis, in whatever part of the world.
In relation to the Chairman's other point, corruption is an issue of ongoing concern to us. We try to use our aid programme to strengthen financial management systems and public administration in the countries in which we work and to reinforce the efforts aimed at tackling corruption which are being undertaken in the countries concerned. It is clear that it is a difficult area and progress can sometimes be slow to measure. It is essential that a partner Government has good governance and public administration and we sometimes need to help them to develop such systems. We will not go into a country whose quality of governance is so poor that the prospect of ever reaching the standard we need is remote. We have certain minimum standards of what is required before we will operate a full country programme. I hope that has covered the basic points raised in that series of questions, although I may have missed something.
I mentioned trade.
I could not agree more with the Senator about the coherence agenda and I know that view is also shared by the Minister of State. It is important to us that there is coherence between the Government's development policies and other policies being pursued in other sectors across the board. It is obviously a difficult agenda and one which will be addressed at a forthcoming WTO conference in Cancun. From a development perspective, there are clear arguments in favour of achieving coherence between what we are doing with our aid on the ground, and the effect of other policies, such as those being pursued internationally. Our own bilateral aid will not have the same impact if the policies being pursued at international level undermine or are inimical to a partner country's own efforts to develop its trade and economy. These difficult issues will feature on the international agenda later this year.
I asked our visitors to wait until Deputy Michael Higgins came back before responding to his questions.
Thank you, Chairman.
The first question asked by Deputy Higgins related to the very difficult context in which the aid system operates. I could not agree more with the Deputy, as it is absolutely true that international aid levels are falling. In many ways, the problems being faced by the poorest people in the world are much worse today than they were a decade ago.
Regarding debt relief, I have to mention that the Minister of State launched a new strategy, which was agreed with the Department of Finance last July. As the Deputy is aware, the strategy proposes total debt cancellation and is based on an analysis similar to that he put forward. The current debt arrangements, under the HIPC initiative, are not working and something more needs to be done. We have argued that an increase in global ODA is required for that to happen. We have been pursuing this initiative in the World Bank and the IMF. I have listened carefully to what has been said and I feel the question of whether we are having an impact is a moot point. The Minister of State used his contacts with Jim Wolfensohn and other World Bank officials in the latter part of last year and in the first months of this year to press the case for total debt cancellation. The World Bank is not persuaded that this is the way to proceed and therefore it is an uphill struggle, to some extent, for us to prevail in this issue. The Minister of State is fully committed to it. We have been active in the two forums, but much more remains to be done.
The Tobin tax is, first and foremost, a matter for the Department of Finance, but we are interested in any way in which global ODA resources can be increased. Increasing such resources is a priority for us. The Government has made clear that it will reach its UN target, so we are on good ground in asking others to make a similar commitment. I cannot comment any further on the Tobin tax.
The Deputy is absolutely right that the reality since the Monterrey commitments were made has not been inspiring. This is a source of concern to the Government and we are pursuing it at EU level in various ways. I can only relate it to a range of factors - perhaps aid is slipping further down the agenda as a consequence of diversions such as the conflict in Iraq. There is a long way to go to restore this issue to a status of primacy on the agenda.
The slide started a long time ago.
Exactly. I was going to say that aid levels have been falling for several years. We do our best to encourage our EU colleagues to reach the UN target and we have had some success in that regard. Belgium, for example, has recently announced that it will achieve the 0.7% target by 2010. Canada has issued a similar statement, although the figure relates more to the overall volume of aid in that instance. I am not relating that purely to the Irish example, but I would like to think there is some connection and that a moral force can be used there.
I will allow my colleague, Mr. Sheridan, to address the question of the peer review, a mechanism which has been forced on us in the sense that it is an international instrument for measuring the effectiveness of an aid programme. All countries submit voluntarily to it. We can have other methods of measuring our programmes, of course, and we measure parts of it with the aid of various consultancies which we commission, or with academic studies. A range of smaller reviews is under way. The peer review undertaken by the development assistance committee is, perhaps, the most comprehensive instrument of its kind.
Mr. Sheridan
The OECD is perhaps the most experienced international organisation in the area of peer review. No other body, to our knowledge, does it as often in all its areas of activity. Perhaps to depict it as an OECD review is to mistake the fact that it is a peer review conducted by the member states of the development assistance committee of the OECD. It is led by Belgium and Switzerland, supported by members of the DAC secretariat, in this instance. Three officials from Belgium and Switzerland have visited Tanzania and have appraised our programme there as part of a field visit. They will lead the group that will come here next week to examine the programme and to carry out a fairly full interrogation of the people involved in the programmes and of much wider stakeholders including the NGOs. When we go to Paris in October, it will be to appear before the full membership of the development assistance committee to answer its members' questions rather than to answer the secretariat.
It was asked if there was other expertise available to evaluate one's programme. Under the untied process, we tender out to anyone who has interest, be they companies, academic groups or organisations. They have the right to apply for any of the tenders of evaluation and we have had quite a number of foreign groupings come in. One of the most significant modalities within our programme of activities involves the area based programmes through which we engage at particular local government levels. We have had these programmes evaluated by a Dutch company. Our engagement with United Nations bodies has been evaluated by a group of Danish consultants. We ensure that we get the best talent and expertise to examine our programmes.
The development assistance committee will produce a progress report next week. There is a link between what it did last time and what is being done now which gives the process particular meaning. Two challenges were put to us last time, one was how to grow and one was how to manage growth. Since the issues were raised with us in 1999, we are asked to outline our progress in those challenges next week and when we report next October. We are confident we will be able to show that we have pro-actively gone after those issues and endeavoured to address the inadequacies to be dealt with within the programme.
I am happy with that response. It may be a matter for the main committee, but I repeat my criticism of the OECD at a general level. I agree that in terms of its economic assumptions and its general reports it brings a very narrow ideological ethos to its evaluations. The time is long past to raise serious questions about its assumptions in terms of the economics and the methodologies by which it proceeds. I accept this is a larger issue which concerns the OECD rather than the development review process.
I am interested in employment and how people are being brought in. Perhaps Mr. O'Donoghue will say a word on the matter. It is purely to be of assistance that I ask.
I thank the Deputy very much. It is clearly necessary that as the budget increases adequate staffing levels for the operation must be supplied. One of the recommendations accepted by the Government following the Ireland Aid review report was that the staffing of the programme would be kept under regular scrutiny. I take the point about the word "specialist". I made a distinction between people who have had general experience of development work in developing countries and those qualified persons such as health and education advisers. In the former category one might find people who have worked for Irish NGOs in developing countries, those who have worked as volunteers or those who have worked in multi-lateral organisations and have built up experience of relevance in a number of countries. General development experts whom we employ might come to us after ten years spent working in two African countries and one Asian country. They might have worked in the health sector or in agriculture and they bring a range of first hand experiences to our programme. We find that invaluable.
They work in our embassies in the countries concerned and pass on the benefits of their experiences. In our programme in Dublin we have a health adviser who provides vital input in areas like HIV-AIDS issues. We have an education adviser who helps us to design our activities in the education sectors in, for example, Tanzania and Zambia. They work with local health or education experts in those countries. That is how most aid programmes operate. We cannot take such staff on as permanent civil servants, but we employ them on contracts which can now last up to eight years. Cumulatively, an eight year contract is in effect a long-term commitment to the aid programme and it gives us the benefit of people's experiences. We can renew the contracts. We ensure that we have a fair degree of continuity over several years though it is not the same as having a permanent civil servant. However, contractors are anchored in the programme for a reasonably useful period of time. That is how we will continue to meet some of the extra staffing needs. While some of the extra staff posts will be permanent, I suspect they will be in the minority.
APSO is to be integrated with Ireland Aid on a phased basis. Committee members will know there was a background of some uncertainty about APSO's future in the context of dwindling volunteer numbers abroad. Separate reviews of its role were carried out which came to a head at the time of the Ireland Aid review. The view was taken that APSO should be given a new mandate to support missionaries specifically, while organisationally it is integrated with Ireland Aid over a period of time. That process is under way and while it is difficult in some respects, it is intended to complete it in due course.
I should clarify that development education relates in the main to schools education programmes. If the budget is not huge, it is because there is a focus on activities in that area. We have accepted the former national committee for development education into Ireland Aid, but there is a new advisory committee which represents various development education interests and it is chaired by Dr. Peader Cremin. The advisory committee gives us the independent input we used to receive under the national committee structure. The advantage of bringing the development education unit into Ireland Aid is that it is more directly linked to the programme and there is a greater focus in the budget. It is easier for us to work in that area when the unit is part of the same overall operation. Development education is about issues at home and abroad and the development education remit goes slightly beyond as it may refer not only to international development but to social development at home. The two are very much linked. The new arrangement is working well thus far and people are happy with it.
Can the budget be increased without reference to the Department of Finance?
To some extent we can decide priorities within our overall budget, but we have to see what our overall budget will be.
If there is no other business, I thank Mr. O'Donoghue and Mr. Sheridan for appearing before the committee to give a very informative presentation. I hope this committee will be able to address some of the issues mentioned in relation to Ireland's EU Presidency next year. We received some buzz from the development and debt coalition regarding development issues which we would like to discuss with the Department of Foreign Affairs. Hopefully, we will have a chance to do that again.
The Department is to be commended for its Ireland Aid programme which enjoys a world-wide reputation for effective, high quality aid. It is having a very real impact on the lives of the poorest people on the planet. On behalf of the committee, I wish the Department well in its efforts to expand the Ireland Aid programmes.
The joint committee went into private session at 1.19 p.m. and adjourned at 1.20 p.m. sine die.