It is appropriate to underline here the real role which Ireland can play in this particular conflict. If we were to raise our voices, and we have not done so so far, it is likely that we would be listened to in the White House. It is appropriate that we should consider and realise that we have leverage in America, that we have influence in America and we have a special relationship with the United States. We send thousands of emigrants there every year. Our people constitute a large percentage of their people and it should be realised by the Cabinet and by the Government that the United States needs us just as much as we need them. Indeed, they possibly may need us more.
As an aside, I am tired of American Presidents paying little attention to this country until they want to come over here for re-election purposes. We have had that experience with President Reagan, with President Nixon and, unfortunately, with the late President Kennedy. If the United States Presidents need us to welcome them when they come over here for re-election purposes, then they can certainly listen to our criticisms of their foreign policy. But we have made no such criticisms and that is the problem. Our relationship, while being special is, unfortunately, subservient and it is high time we symbolised the end of this subservience by opening formal diplomatic relations with Nicaragua. While I do not believe that the concrete results of that formal opening of diplomatic relations would be great, it would be symbolic in showing our independence and in showing our neutrality.
It is relevant in this debate to ask whether our neutrality is a real neutrality or whether it is a neutrality which is subservient to the United States because on this issue it is appropriate that we should look at the similarities that we as a nation have with Nicaragua. We are a small nation, we have a similar-type population and a similar kind of history to Nicaragua. We are ostensibly a non-aligned neutral country, although very often we do not show any such signs. What we should ask ourselves, and I would like the Minister's comments on this, is whether we are comcompromising our neutrality by refusing to make any independent statements on Nicaragua.
We have consistently followed a European Community line on this and it is a consistent umbrella of defence on this but in that surely we are compromising the sort of neutrality which we so often talk about. Neutrality does not involve simply sending troops out to trouble spots and saying that we are neutral between various countries in the Middle East or various factions in the Middle East. Neutrality involves a positive stance in favour of democracy wherever in the world and a positive stance against oppression, whether it be with a so-called friendly state or not. I believe we are guilty of a serious double-think on this issue. We are all in favour of democracy in certain areas but we are not in favour of democracy if it offends certain powerful trading and ideological partners of ours.
I do not say that the regime in Nicaragua is a perfect regime. I do not maintain that in Central America there is some sort of Utopia to which we should all aspire. Indeed, there are glaring faults with the Nicaraguan regime as it stands at the moment, no greater than possibly exist in this country or in Britain or in many European countries, but it is very easy to pick those faults and to say that the regime is not worthy of support or of diplomatic relations.
I will point out one or two of those faults. There was a state of emergency in Nicaragua until January 1988 which involved serious restrictions on freedom. It involved restrictions on movements of political opposition groups and on activities in which they could indulge. It involved restrictions on movements in war zones, it involved restrictions on freedom of speech, especially in the press. When I was in Nicaragua for one day during the elections the regime made a serious mistake in closing down for one day the opposition newspaper. The regime has made a serious mistake in its displacement of the Miskito and Sumu Indians, a mistake which it admits, where it moved them out of all their homelands. It created a terrible problem for themselves and it recruited many people for the Contras as a result, many of whom have since made use of the amnesty which has been introduced.
The regime is not a perfect regime and it never will be but it compares fairly favourably with any single democratic country which has within it a terrorist force. Having pointed out those faults I should say that it has many great assets and it has many great qualities. I was privileged to go there and witness the elections there in 1984, the first test of democracy in Nicaragua. That all-party committee, to which the Government never responded satisfactorily, which included a member of the present Government, reported unanimously that the elections carried out there were fair and democratic. It is only right that I should point out that that particular report was not the only one which stated this. More conservative parties, the Conservative Party in Britain, people of a more conservative hue, people who would be naturally anti-Sandinista reported to their own countries that these elections were almost impeccable and that they certainly compared favourably with the principles of democracy and the workings of the democracy in their own countries. The result of that, it must be remembered, was a 66.8 per cent vote in favour of the Sandinista Government. They got an overwhelming vote of support from the people of Nicaragua.
One of the perceptions which I did not hold before I went out but which was put across in much of the press was that the Sandinistas were a totalitarian, Communist regime, who for some reason were Russian supported and were blatantly anti-American. Nothing could be further from the truth. What I found out was that there was very little, if any, support for the Contras. Despite the fact that their particular brand of political thought — whatever that is — boycotted the elections, it was quite obvious to those of us who were there that there was simply no support for the Contras whatsoever. That revolution was a spontaneous uprising against the oppression of the Somosa regime which preceded it. It was not in any sense a Communist revolution although the Americans interpreted it as such; it was indeed a nationalist revolution.
It was a very exciting revolution in that it was a people trying to express personality. It was a revolution against the corruption, the oppression, the torture and the killings which happened beforehand. It was not a revolution in favour of a particular form of foreign ideology but what followed that was, unfortunately, a reaction in the US which was paranoid. Whereas they had supported the corrupt regime they then, with a sense of guilt, reacted and branded this revolution as some sort of a Communist revolution. Nothing could have been further from the truth.
Neither did this revolution or the revolutionaries involved in Nicaragua want to threaten the United States. Indeed it was quite obvious from the start that the Nicaraguan people wanted good relations with the United States. When I was there I continuously came across people who had been educated in the United States and who knew the United States well — the native Sandinistas — and they said they liked the United States, they wanted good relations with the United States but they detested the Reagan regime. They felt that as a result of what the Reagan regime was doing they were being driven against their will straight into the hands of the USSR and the Cubans who, at that time certainly, were welcoming them into their hands because they simply had nowhere else to go.
Those of us who were out there came away with the firm suspicion that whereas the Contras — the creation of the United States — could not win the war, the United States was still looking for an excuse to invade Nicaragua because it was the only way it could maintain its total influence there after Somosa. That has not come to pass and I hope it will never come to pass but it is a continuing danger.
It is worth looking, in this context, at the Contras, the group which has been created by the CIA and by the United States. The Contras were created post-1979, but it is worth looking at who they are and what they are doing. They are CIA-backed, they are US-supported. They are terrorists and nothing else, they are bandits. They have enormous similarities in my view to the Provisional IRA because the Contras hide under the rather romantic title of freedom fighters when they are simply terrorists who maim and shoot at will. They have no democratic mandate nor are they likely to have. Both are supported by an outside régime — in the case of the Contras, by the United States, in the case of the IRA, by Libya. They are a group of malcontents and ex-Somosa men with basically nowhere else to go. Nothing could be more apparent to anyone who visits there than that the Contras are not only representing a small group of people there, to my mind, they are representing virtually no-one except themselves, but they are representing a destructive course intent upon devastation. We found as a group strikingly no support for this particular brand of terrorism.
It should be pointed out that when we were there we were allowed almost total freedom of movement, if not total. I cannot remember being refused to go anywhere; we were allowed freedom of movement to question who we liked, talk to who we liked, inspect who we liked at any time at all. We could simply not find support for the Contras. However, the Contras have managed to do an enormous amount of damage because of the external support which they have been receiving. The economy of Nicargua is in tatters because of the war of attrition and the destruction being wrought by the Conras there.
It is not only that. The trade embargo imposed by the United States has caused an enormous disruption to the Nicaraguan economy. Nicaragua did most of its trade with the United States pre-1979, found it was reduced in 1983 and now it is brought to a complete standstill. Having absolutely no trade with the United States has again mean that Nicaragua has had to look elsewhere for markets and where else would it naturally look but to the eastern bloc? The eastern bloc, and western Europe to a lesser extent, has been willing to start trading with Nicaragua and not surprisingly.
That is not all that has contributed towards the disruption in the Nicaraguan economy. It has been a particularly unlucky and unfortunate history. Following the earthquake in 1975, international aid was squandered and stolen by Somosa. This year there was a devastating hurricane which has left appalling damage in its wake and I deplore the reluctance, and indeed refusal, of the Government to give massive aid following this particular hurricane. The amount of damage which has been done is difficult to estimate. The numbers rendered homeless as a result of the hurricane vary between 200,000 and 300,000 but in an economy which is already so damaged and devastated, this sort of natural disaster is really unfortunate.
Nicaragua spends 63 per cent of its GNP on arms which is a tragic figure for an economy which is short of all the basic raw materials. Twenty per cent is allocated to be spent on the needs of the children and the elderly and 17 per cent is left for all the other services which a State would normally provide. As a result, the State cannot provide them and the State is suffering enormously. Nonetheless, it has achieved great strides in one or two areas and it should be noted that it has succeeded in reducing the illiteracy rate from 50 per cent to 30 per cent. It was 50 per cent when the Sandinista revolution took place. It has concentrated nearly all its available resources on the education process and, as a result, teachers have quadrupled in the past ten years. It has had to conduct this particular struggle with the minimum of international aid.
It is all very well to say that Ireland contributes aid to Nicaragua through the European Community. This is true, but Ireland is also free to contribute aid to Nicaragua in a bilateral fashion and bilateral aid from Ireland to Nicaragua, as the Minister and as the Government know, has reduced and reduced very dramatically in the last five or six years. It was never particularly great but it is now gone from about £25,000 in 1979 to £9,000 which is a paltry and insulting amount. Indeed, our contribution to Nicaragua is unfortunately and shamefully to depend once again on the voluntary groups.
The people and the Government cannot claim credit for the great work being done out there by groups like Trócaire and the Irish. Nicaragua Support Group and other voluntary groups who send people out to work to bring the coffee crop home, or to do any work to support the economy in a voluntary way. The Government are doing virtually nothing. It should be recognised by the Government that the Nicaraguan regime, despite the restrictions which it has had to put on freedom and which compare extremely well with restrictions on freedom in other countries which are threatened by terrorism inside, including ourselves, has managed to make great progress in the realm of human rights.
It should be noted, and I cannot emphasise this more strongly, that one of the first things that the Nicaraguan Government put into effect when the Sandinistas came to power was to abolish the death penalty, something which in its wisdom the Government here have not seen fit to do. In addition, there is a particularly humane prison system operating in Nicaragua, an enlightened one, and a most unusual one which I was privileged to witness which is based not so much on punishment but on rehabilitation. Nicaragua has ratified the UN covenant on civil and political rights and it has, in a very unusual move, guaranteed the rights of indigenous peoples which means giving them the rights to the preservation of their own language and culture. This was in direct response to the mistakes which the Sandinista Government made and acknowledged it had made in regard to the Indians. I think in direct response to that it reacted by guaranteeing them these rights. I cannot emphasise more strongly that while the Government is not perfect in any way, it is certainly happy to recognise its mistakes and it is certainly moving in a direction which must be acceptable to the western world in terms of human rights and democracy.
There are several things that the Irish Government can do as regards Nicaragua. The first is a general move, to stop hiding behind UN resolutions and EC resolutions and moves. These are worthy, these are supportable, but they are not positive enough. I do not wish to anticipate the Minister's reply but I hope he does not say that we have supported all the peace moves which have been made in Central America over the years, that we have supported the UN resolutions and that we contribute through bilateral aid. That is simply not enough. That is simply cowardly and that is simply not what the role of truly neutral country committed to democracy and the rights of small nations should be doing. What we can do is take positive action in several ways. We can increase bilateral aid by responding to appeals from Nicaragua, such as the recent one after the hurricane. We can break our silence on US policy. Our silence was apparent from the time when the United States mined the ports, to the result of the judgment of the Court of Justice at the Hague which found against the US. If ever there was a time for us to speak out it was after that particular judgment but we were silent.
The final way we can do it, in specifics, apart from diplomatic relations to which I am coming, is to respond to the recent appeal after the hurricane. The response from the Tánaiste to say that one had to compare this with worse disasters in Ethiopia and in Sudan was totally inadequate. In addition, I am a little tired of seeing reports on Nicaragua consigned to the shelves and gathering dust there. Apart from the report to which I contributed from the parliamentary delegation in November 1984, whose recommendations have not been implemented, there was another report from HEDCO in 1985 which made many recommendations on Nicaragua, one of which was the exchange of third level students between these countries and, indeed, I am told that £50,000 was allocated in the HEDCO budget for this. This has not come to pass either. We could make a positive effort to increase trade with Nicaragua. Our trading with Nicaragua is extremely small. It is minimum. We could send out APSO personnel to Nicaragua.
I am not anticipating the work of the nearly all-party committee on foreign affairs which has been set up by all parties, bar one, in the Oireachtas in the last two weeks. This committee can take a stand in Nicaragua. It can investigate and report on Nicaragua. It can interview on Nicaragua and it can question on Nicaragua and it can pressure the Government on Nicaragua and it will do this.
I want to deal with the issue of diplomatic relations. First of all, we have no diplomatic representation in Central America at all. This is a great pity, it is a shame and I do not believe that the argument of expense is adequate to deal with it because it would surely be perfectly acceptable to the Government here and to the Nicaraguan Government if we were to introduce non-resident, inexpensive diplomatic relations with Nicaragua. The Nicaraguan Government, as the Minister will know, have frequently requested that we open diplomatic relations with them and apparently this has been turned down by our Government. We need to introduce some element of consistency into our diplomatic relations with other countries. I cannot understand how we can maintain diplomatic relations with Libya and not maintain diplomatic relations with Nicaragua. It seems to me there is a glaring inconsistency in our foreign policy but possibly the only reason is to do with trade, that the one criterion is trade. If we were to initiate diplomatic relations with Nicaragua we would simply assert ourselves as an independent nation in the international world of diplomacy. We would assert our independence of America, which is what we need to do, because the suspicion persists that our reluctance to make any courageous public pronouncement about an undoubtedly democratic regime in Nicaragua and about the indefensible hostility of the Americans towards it, is simply a cowardly reaction and a fear of some sort of consequences and a fear of America which is unmerited. I believe we have this great chance with a new regime in America to take this step, this of opening formal diplomatic relations with Nicaragua. We would offend the Americans, yes, and I would like to offend the Americans on this issue but we would thereby assert our own genuine neutrality and independence.
