On the last occasion when we had the expediency motion to set up this joint committee when I spoke I ended up being accused of having expressed very similar sentiments to those of the Minister for Defence, Deputy Paddy Cooney. The irony of that will not escape Members of this House in the light of recent events. I would like to put it clearly, first of all, that, of course, the principle of this committee, and I am sure the intentions behind it, are most welcome. Therefore, I would not dream of opposing it.
There are a number of questions and implications involved in it that deserve at least, to be put on the record. The first is the term "developing countries". It is a term which enables us in the rich minority of the world to get away with something close to murder, because it enables us to carry on the pretence that everybody is really getting better; it is only a question of a different degree, yet, some of the facts need to be put clearly on the record. In recent years the price of cotton has fallen by 37 per cent; the price of sugar has fallen by 54 per cent and the price of rubber has fallen by 78 per cent. That is probably true of almost every raw material and basic commodity being produced by what are probably more honestly called the poor countries of the world and probably more correctly called the oppressed countries of the world. It is not an accident that they are the way they are.
That is what has happened to every commodity and that has been the state of their industrial development. They are not developing. They are going backwards. That is the first thing that needs to be said. The use of the word "developing", in terms of what a lot of people working in the whole area of development would understand to be the case, for these countries is in fact a misnomer. It is probably even offensive to many people working in the area but I accept that it is done with the best of intentions.
The other thing that needs to be reiterated at a time like this — and I am glad the Leader of the House mentioned it; other than to mention a few things I will not go into it at any length — is the fact that we are a rich country. We are a rich country because in every basic and fundamental issue which divides the rich from the poor we side with the rich. Whatever about political and military neutrality, we have no moral right to be neutral on the fundamental issue of justice and injustice. In fact we are not even pretending to be neutral.
We talk neutral but we act very expediently in our own interests almost entirely in terms of our deliberations on international agencies. We tend, qualitatively and marginally, to take slightly different positions, but on the fundamental issue of the imbalance in terms of trade, in terms of tariff structures and many things like that, we have clearly identified our interests and our needs as being those of the rich and powerful. In no area is that more evident than in our very unflinching development of the Common Agricultural Policy which effectively discriminates against poor countries who cannot buy our produce because of its prices and cannot export their produce to the EEC because of our tariff barriers. That is a fundamental fact.
This is true of a number of areas. I would mention our sugar industry, for instance. We can talk forever about our aid and our concern but when our total overseas development aid in the last year for which I have figures was £17 million — that is a few years ago — the actual earnings by various State agencies in Third World countries amounted to 50 per cent more than that. We would not want in this House to over-state the significance of this committee. The one welcome thing about this committee is that, as the Leader of the House said, the terms of reference are extremely wide. I would just like to make a couple of comments on them in case they would be interpreted too narrowly. "Ireland's relations with developing countries in the field of development co-operation" is fine, but it could be taken to be just ourselves and that small number of countries where we are actually doing something, whereas in fact it must include our relationship with the whole issue of structural injustice in the world at large and the whole issue of, dare I say it again, armaments expenditure which is the greatest single obscenity in the whole area of world development. All those issues need to be confronted.
I do not know how this committee can avoid considering our political neutrality because it is fundamentally linked to the future of our relationship with Third World countries. We are not in a position to separate one issue from another unless we perpetuate the idea that development aid is our form of charity to keep our otherwise somewhat guilty conscience reasonably silent. If that is what we are at then we are doing not only ourselves an injustice but we are doing the two-thirds of the world who are poor a great injustice because we are actually pretending to do something when in fact we are doing nothing. It appears to me that a major function of a committee such as this is to elaborate on and develop public opinion and public awareness of the structural injustices on which our own prosperity is currently based. I am more and more convinced, as are many people working in aid of development, that not only is it not possible for the rich countries of the first world to develop at the rate at which they have developed in the past but it may be necessary that many of us get used to simpler living standards if those who have nothing are ever to have the basics of life.
Whatever has been the past record of this committee — I do not think it has met on a sufficient number of occasions to have a detailed record — it will have to take a broad and generous interpretation of its terms of reference. It has to move well beyond the idea of just supervising the minuscule amount of official aid that we give. It has to move beyond a limited perception of a limited number of countries. For instance, it would be a very useful exercise to investigate the role of Irish companies in the South African apartheid regime. If we are talking about aid to developing countries then the whole apartheid regime in South Africa is a major obstacle to development in the whole of Southern Africa. It would be very interesting to look at the activities of Irish missionaries in central America and look at the activities of one country that we have very friendly relations with in the context of Irish aid.
The terms of reference of this committee need to be interpreted in the broadest possible basis. It is, in some ways, a committee which could and should fundamentally alter Irish thinking and should fundamentally reflect within the Oireachtas the widely-held views of the public at large in this country about development, views which have been contributed to and formed to a great extent by Trócaire, which deserves to have its record and its activities commended in this House. The views of the Irish people on Third World development have changed profoundly over the last ten years. There is no agency more effective in achieving that change than Trócaire through its work at home. In the context of Trócaire and its recent seminar it needs to be said that what Trócaire did is only a minuscule example of what is expected from us by both Irish people working overseas and Irish people at home who have worked overseas.
It needs to be reiterated that this is not and should not be a committee to look at how our minuscule aid is handed out. It is not a committee just to look at a couple of selected countries. It must look at Ireland's role within the EEC as a rich country, as a country within a bloc which is a major arms exporter, as a country within a bloc which has a vested interest in preserving certain tariff barriers that discriminate against poor countries. It must tackle fundamental and basic questions about justice in the world, structural injustice and the built-in oppression which is part of the way the market economy operates in the world at large. If it does less it will be doing no more than paying lip service to development, paying lip service to justice and, at the same time, enabling us to avoid the difficult issue and the difficult fact, which is that we are rich, they are poor; we are powerful, they are powerless; we are the powerful, they are the oppressed, and in the words of Tolstoy, if we are on a man's back and we offer to do everything to help him except get off his back then we are simply liars and cheats. Our job is to get the rich world off the backs of the poor world so that they can develop themselves. That is the fundamental change which is required. It is the task of that committee to contribute to Irish public opinion. If it gives us a lesser task it is wasting its time and is probably holding back development.
