We in Fine Gael welcome this Bill and support it. I thank the Minister of State for his fine and comprehensive introduction setting out the function of IDA and the World Bank and the whole replenishment process. We have in the past had debates on this measure in the House and it has given Members who are interested in this area — and would that there were many more — an opportunity to range over the whole Irish policy on ODA. I imagine that those who contribute today will — certainly I will — seize the opportunity to address this subject.
As the Minister has said, the Bill enables the Government to make a total payment of £9,660,000 to the eighth replenishment of the International Development Association. IDA is generally referred to as the soft loan arm of the World Bank and it was established in 1960 to provide concessionary assistance to the world's least developed countries or, as they are known in the Third World jargon, the LDCs. As the Minister stated, these loans are attractive because they are interest free and they have a ten year moratorium.
It is very important to make it clear that this does not represent any tremendous largesse on the part of the Government. As a Part I member of IDA, Ireland is expected to contribute to the periodic replenishments and it is mandatory on us to do so because of a previous commitment which we freely entered into and, of course, we are obliged to honour that commitment. The poverty in these least developed countries demands a response from us and I am very pleased that we are so responding. The subject matter of the Bill, when one removes the more desiccated facts and figures, is about one of the most fundamental questions, one of the biggest and most serious issues facing our global village. It is the single most important issue, in my view, facing the international community and we ignore it at our peril.
Often development is taken to mean economic development only. Indeed, many people measure development by means of the economic indicator, the GNP per capita. But development is about much more than that. It means more than negative freedom from hunger, or fear, or oppression in any of their different guises. It means creating conditions in which people can develop positively the full potential of the human spirit. We have seen only too clearly in many developing countries how poverty and under-development have bred insecurity which, in turn, has spread repression and intolerance.
Injustice and under-development are not separate; they are opposite sides of the same coin and they reinforce and they feed off each other. There are many examples of that throughout the world. Later today we will be talking about injustice and oppression under Standing Order 29 — injustice and oppression which are horrendous — obtaining in South Africa, where it is even less easy to understand and comprehend because that is not a poor country by any standard. Nevertheless, it is prey to probably the worst form of oppression and injustice in the entire world today.
By the same token it is true to say that justice and development are intimately linked. I believe that no society which tolerates injustice can truly call itself developed and we must continue, as we have done in the past, to condemn unreservedly abuses of human or civil rights wherever they occur.
The first responsibility of any Government — of course we are talking of this Government today — naturally is to their own people and the question must be asked: why then should Governments involve themselves in the development of other peoples in other countries. This may seem a basic or, indeed, a superfluous or unnecessary question to ask but it is being asked increasingly in countries which are developed. As the international recession continues and the pressures on living standards increase and intensify the question is being asked more frequently.
Recently while driving I was listening to the Marion Finucane "Live Line" show on which there was a discussion about why we are giving when we have so much poverty and, indeed, we have poverty in this country. The question was ably responded to by an official. Tony Meade, from Trócaire who made the point that, while charity begins at home, it does not necessarily end there and that this is a logical extension of our concern for those who have less than we have ourselves.
It is important to keep issues of development before the public. The considerations which cause us to be involved in development, both at the level of Government and as a people, are multiple and complex but they can be grouped under three headings. There is a very clear imperative, a moral and humanitarian imperative. As a relatively prosperous country we have an obligation to help those countries and peoples who are less prosperous and who require outside assistance to develop themselves. There are undeniably serious economic and social problems in this country at present but, despite all of this, we ought to remind ourselves that Ireland is, in fact, the 25th richest country in the world out of about 160 countries and is incomparably better off than most countries in the Third World.
I have had the opportunity — and I am very grateful to the people who gave me the opportunity — to witness poverty in a Third World country. It is something that has never left me and I hope it never will because it was just about the most fundamental shock to the system anybody could get to actually witness. In my case it was urban poverty in Manila in the Philippines and indeed I saw rural poverty as well. In many ways rural poverty is able to fend a little bit better for itself than urban poverty where the density of population and the consequent squalor and ensuing degradation of people are tangible and tactile and affect the senses and are absolutely overwhelming. Anybody who has been privileged to witness that will always give the fullest possible commitment to any measure such as this legislation or to any fundraising endeavour on behalf of the Third World and will be able to defend and explain their commitment and challenge those who wish us merely to look inwardly and maintain a position of isolation.
To those who say we should look after our own poor first and that charity begins at home, I say that our concern for underprivileged people in the Third World is no different from our concern for underprivileged people here in Ireland. As I have said it is an extension of that concern. We must always help those who are most in need wherever they are. We cannot close our eyes to deprivation in other lands on a scale unimaginably greater than even the direst poverty in Ireland. We have dire poverty in this country and I do not discount it for a second. Sadly, it is a condition that is on the increase and our society is certainly becoming more polarised as a consequence.
Another reason we must recognise our responsibilities to Third World countries, apart from the moral and humanitarian reason which I have covered, is a group of considerations which might be determined as economic. There is an element of self-interest in developing links with the Third World. We have much to gain from high living standards and greater economic activity in developing countries. We are a small country. We are critically dependent on exports and exports to the Third World offer us an opportunity, offer us new markets, offer us an extension of our own economic activity. We have to be very careful as to what markets we follow and how we do this so that we are clearly seen not to be in any rip-off situation but to be conducting our business and our trade with developing countries in a moral fashion. Nevertheless there is, of course, a consequent spin-off. The semi-State sector has a turnover of some millions of pounds in the provision of services to developing countries and there is not necessarily a contradiction between the two motivations, the moral and the humanitarian, so long as we keep our central objective in mind and that is one of a transfer of resources to the developing country.
There is a third group of considerations which prompts us to involve ourselves in this area. These would be political considerations and related to our fundamental objectives of foreign policy. The maintenance of a stable, secure, developing international system is of extreme importance and it is necessary that there should be order and coherence in our world. If there is under-development there is a threat to all of us and our stability as a global village, as a whole entire world, is undermined in some way. Debts in some developing countries have raised the spectre of a crisis in the international banking system and if that ever did materialise it would have extremely serious and profound results for our very vulnerable economy here. So, for all of those reasons, because we live in the shadow of one another but primarily, to my way of thinking, for moral and humanitarian reasons, we should be to the fore in supporting issues of development, in providing funding and services and personnel for the Third World.
Despite our own budgetary difficulties, in my view it is extremely important that the awareness of development issues should be heightened and increased among the general public. In this way political leadership can be more assertive in support of aid and aid can assume a higher place on the political agenda and as a consequence, in the scale of priorities as it is viewed by the public. The essence of the challenge is to ensure that the public who, as taxpayers, are the ultimate providers of aid resources, understand the purpose of assistance, know the facts about aid and appreciate the record of its effectiveness and, indeed, when it fails, understand the reasons for its failure.
Only in this manner can the public make informed judgments about the priority to be accorded to development assistance expenditures. Such public understanding can be enhanced by the efforts of both private and public organisations to communicate the important role of aid in development. I pay tribute to all of those organisations who make Trojan efforts to bring to the fore issues of aid, Trócaire, Concern, GOAL, to all the NGOs who, despite our own difficult financial position, have not lost sight of their vision as the very reason for their existence and who bombard — and rightly so — the Irish people with information and keep issues of development to the fore.
In speaking of this, I am afraid I cannot but voice my criticism of the present position in this country on issues of development where they are affected by our political system because, to my way of thinking, over the last year issues of development have been kept on the political back burner and there has been a disturbing cut in funding. Obviously I intend to refer to that. Most people concerned with issues of development have deplored it; nothing can be done about it now for 1988 but I hope in the course of my contribution — and I do hope other Senators too from all sides of the House will join in to make a very concerted effort to implore the Minister for Finance, or the Minister of State who is with us here today, to ensure that in the 1989 Estimates more can be done in providing funds for development work because there has been a disproportionate cut in that area in the 1988 estimate.
Leaving aside the issue of funding which I will develop, I want to speak about this massive falling-off in enthusiasm, in interest and in political energy in this whole area of development. The present incumbent of the Office of Minister of State at the Department of Foreign Affairs with special responsibility for development co-operation is, I am sure, a most worthy person. I have met him. I respect him and my criticisms, I emphasise, are not personal criticisms. I intend to criticise the role, as I perceive it, and as I suspect many people concerned about development issues perceive it. Those of us who care about this issue — and it is a growing number of people and particularly of young thinking people — have been sadly disappointed at the lack of dynamism, the apparent lack of policy and in general a lacklustre performance coming from that quarter.
I emphasise that I am not talking about the cut in funding because the sort of things I would wish to see done can be done with energy, with drive, with enthusiasm, with goodwill, with imagination, with concern and none of those things necessarily requires the harnessing of vast sums of money. I believe this attitude is not so much the attitude of the present incumbent to whom I have referred but is coming directly from the top and I propose to spell out how this is so.
When the present Taoiseach was appointed Taoiseach in 1982, he did not include among his Ministers of State, a Minister at the Department of Foreign Affairs with responsibility for development co-operation. In fact, he described the post — and I certainly have never forgotten his description because it was a particularly unfortunate but memorable one — as superfluous and supernumerary. The very same Taoiseach, on regaining power in 1987, failed to establish an Oireachtas Joint Committee on Development Co-operation. Now it is generally agreed that the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Development Co-operation did much to stimulate interest, to educate, to inform, to highlight and to bring to the attention of Members of the Oireachtas and, indeed, the wider public through their sterling work, issues of development and situations in developing countries. I pay tribute to the members of that committee. I was never fortunate enough to be a member of it myself but those who were members of it, who worked, gave a commitment and generally heightened the level of awareness of Third World issues. Certainly, in the Seanad, over the years we debated the various reports coming from the committee and, indeed, they attracted the attention of the media and, as a consequence, the wider public.
It is very interesting to note that at the height of the Bob Geldof Band Aid enthusiasm the same Taoiseach, who was then Leader of the Opposition, in a flood of enthusiasm made the statement that he felt the issue of development co-operation deserved the status of a full Cabinet Minister. I regard that as populist politics. It might be forgiven or smiled upon indulgently, as one would smile on seeing the Taoiseach standing beside Stephen Roche, Bob Geldof or whoever, but in a very sensitive area, in an area where expedience has no place at all — it is to my mind an area of life or death — it is politically immoral and it deserves to be condemned. I do not take pleasure from condemning it but I will highlight it because it is reprehensible.
This political disinterest that I talk about must be catching because in the course of preparing for this debate I was taking a look at the debate in the Dáil which took place on Thursday, 3 March 1988. It came to the time for the Progressive Democrats to make a contribution to the debate and as reported at column 1610 of the Official Report, Deputy McDowell, representing the Progressive Democrats got to his feet and said:
The Progressive Democrats support the Bill and I have nothing further, relevant or irrelevant, to add to that.
Deputy McDowell then sat down again. Now, what I cannot understand is what does this convey? I am of the school of thought which feels that when people speak in the Dáil or Seanad, they should make cogent, coherent and make reasonable points and that there is no need for longwindedness. I hope I am not undoing my words in the course of my contribution here this morning. To my way of thinking, that remark by Deputy McDowell is laconic to the point of being insulting to the issue. Could he not stir himself even to make an impromtu speech, if he did not have the information——
