I join in the congratulations to the Minister and in welcoming him to this House. If there are any long lulls in my speech he will be able to do what I do in similar circumstances, that is, study the extraordinarily beautiful ceiling we have in the Seanad Chamber. I am sure, without being partisan, he will agree with me that this is a finer place in which to debate, architecturally speaking, than the House to which he belongs.
There are a number of points I would like to raise in this series of statements on the allocations. The first one arises from my position as an academic. I have been advised by some of my academic colleagues of a small matter which the Minister might like to review, dealing with the taxation of visiting academics. The effect of the existing provisions runs contrary to the Government's clear intentions to support and encourage the exchange of academic personnel between different European countries and between this country and North America.
I refer to the existence of double taxation agreements between this country and the United States and with Australia, and I presume with other countries, too. These agreements with the USA and Australia provide that if an academic comes to teach in an Irish institution he or she does not come within the domestic tax net here if the academic post does not exceed one year. These agreements were made in the days before pay-related social insurance deductions applied to people of this income bracket. Consequently the exemption that was entered into by the Government on foot of this double taxation arrangement did not include any reference to pay-related social insurance. I believe this was an oversight and I ask the Minister to examine this situation.
As a result of this oversight a visiting professor receives a salary without deduction of tax but is obliged to pay 7.5 per cent PRSI and the host university has to pay 12.5 per cent share as the employer's responsibility. That constitutes a tax of 20 per cent on visiting academics that has crept in surreptitiously. It is clearly wrong and a violation of certain kinds of natural justice that a visiting academic should have to contribute to a scheme from which he or she will never obtain any benefit. Universities have to contribute to the cost of having visiting staff, especially if they have to bear the employee PRSI proportion also which I imagine they would often do. In other words, universities accidentally and not by any malign intention of the Government have to pay an extra 20 per cent for carrying out a Government objective of encouraging relationships between different academic institutions.
This outcome is counter to the exemption spirit of double taxation agreements and was not intended when they were made. It suggests that the Minister might look favourably at this very small adjustment; the loss to the Exchequer would not be huge but its resolution would encourage the exchange of ideas and I ask the Minister to consider abolishing this unintended taxation measure in the interests of Irish universities.
I refer to another parallel matter fairly sensitively because I am one of the people involved. There are proposals in the social welfare element of the budget to exclude from any benefit persons earning over £25,000 a year. This is unjust because people should not be taxed in order to provide benefits from which the payees are excluded entirely. People with an income of over £25,000 should be taxed and should pay pay-related social insurance; I am happy that out of the tax contributions of people like myself earning more than £25,000 from combined incomes, additional people who cannot pay for themselves are afforded proper health and social insurance schemes. That is absolutely just.
I do not mind how many people I bring with me, but it is slightly galling to find oneself excluded from the few remaining marginal benefits such as dental and optical treatment. I ask if this may be looked at. I do not say this in a penny-pinching way but as a matter of justice. It would not worry me if my PRSI contribution was increased; I believe in paying my fair share but I think I should also be allowed to benefit from these provisions which I help fund.
The main burden of what I want to say is about a larger subject. It is not about our domestic situation except in so far as it relates to the psychology of the Irish people but refers to Overseas Development Aid and the regrettable continuing series of aid cutbacks implemented by every Government since the mid-1980s, in clear contradiction of statements by Government leaders. I have before me a statement which I think was made in September 1990, to a world conference on children by the previous Taoiseach, Deputy Haughey. He said:
The developed countries have a special responsibility in bringing about an international political and economic environment that is just, secure and humane. Such an environment is required to advance the well being of all the world's children. However, for the developing countries, especially the least developed ones, it is vital to support their development efforts. The success of these efforts which must be supported by the developed world offers the best chance of improving the situation on the hundreds of millions of children who even today live in poverty and destitution.
Those were fine words and I am sure they were genuinely meant by Deputy Haughey, but instead of an increase for aid in the budget as Deputy Haughey suggested would be a kind of moral imperative only 18 months ago, we find not an increase or even maintenance of the previous level but a further reduction. I quote from the Irish National Committee of UNICEF with whom I have been in correspondence: "The proposed allocation to UNICEF from the Government is £240,000 for this year compared with £420,000 in 1991." This suggests that the Government's pledge of support for the declaration and plan of action in respect of developing countries has not lasted very long; there is a direct contradiction between political statements by leaders of Government on the one hand and allocations of moneys by the Government for Overseas Development Aid, and support to UNICEF and so on. This is a great shame.
Ireland, officially, has the image of a parsimonious, pennypinching, Scrooge-like figure in Europe. We have the worst per capita foreign aid record in Europe expressed as a percentage of GNP which is shameful when we remember that personal contribution of aid by Irish people are among the most generous in the world. The psychic trauma of the Great Famine of the 1840s left its mark on the psychology of Irish people; we understand with a kind of racial memory the sufferings of famine and deprivation, and consequently Irish people have been outstandingly generous in their contributions to Oxfam, Trócaire, UNICEF and so on. At the time of the Band Aid charity concert, the Irish people gave three times per capita more than people in the United Kingdom where the concert took place. That generosity of the Irish people is being cynically capitalised upon by Government who absorb the ever increasing amounts contributed voluntarily by the Irish people in order to cushion themselves as they consistently reduce the target figures for overseas development aid.
I would like to refer to a very well written and thought-provoking article in The Irish Times of Wednesday, 18 March 1992, by Fintan O'Toole who has, as I am sure the Minister will recollect, consistently spoken on the subject of the cutbacks in overseas development aid over a number of years. He illustrates very well, clearly and succinctly, the source of the concern of people like myself. He points out that overseas development aid has been falling consistently in recent years in breach of our international obligations and undertakings. In fact we have been moving away from our target. The target is 0.7 per cent. Ireland has been in a state of consistent decline for the past eight or ten years. That is extremely regrettable.
Over the period of the last accounting year, the Department of Foreign Affairs accidentally failed to spend somewhere between £600,000 and £1 million of allocated money. That sum is then assumed back into the budget and is lost forever. This could be written off as being the result of projects not coming in on time or of administrative detail but in 1990 the amount that came in under this heading was only £60,000. We are now dealing with at least ten times that amount. I have to say that that really looks like a cheeseparing exercise. It looks deliberate.
In briefing document after briefing document from the various agencies with which I have been in contact they refer to an overall concern that a foreign affairs committee should be established. I very much welcome the fact that the Government appear, at least, to give a solid commitment that there will be a foreign affairs committee. A number of the concerns people like myself have will be covered by this foreign affairs committee. However, in the past few months, not only have we not had the development of a foreign affairs committee, we have had the extinction of an important small committee, the Advisory Council on Development Co-operation which was abolished a few months ago. The excuse given is a directly budgetary one; they wanted to save £84,000. The Government gave an indication they were going to institute an informal committee in this area. Where is it? May I say in parenthesis that, despite the fact that the committee has been extinguished, I understand the Exchequer is still paying the rent on the office. I wonder if this is a very good saving. I think such issues should be highlighted. We got rid of an important committee and said we were going to establish an informal committee, which is rather insulting given the scale of the problem we are addressing here, and we have not done so.
With regard to the actual figures, may I point out — I am sure the Minister and his advisers are aware of the fact — that in 1986 the overseas development aid was 0.28 per cent of GNP. Our target was 0.7 per cent. It has declined since then and even including all the money raised by Trocaire, Oxfam and the other agencies, our total aid contribution is now 0.25 per cent of GNP. The clear conclusion that can be drawn from this is that the Government are relying on the cushioning effect of the generosity of the Irish people in order to skimp on the budget. The figure that was originally produced by the Government in the 1992 Estimates is bad enough but I understand this is further reduced by £200,000, from £43.109 million to £42.904 million in the budget provisions of 29 January. All the reductions are in the multilateral sector.
The EC Development Fund — the Lomé allocation — actually fell from £7.4 million to £7.25 million and the Food Aid Convention fell from £600,000 to £550,000. Again, this is clear evidence of an unnecessarily parsimonious attitude that shames this country abroad. I have received a bewildering number of documents from UNICEF, Oxfam and Trocaire. Oxfam would like to see some real movement, at the earliest opportunity, towards the United Nations target of 0.7 per cent. Every Government, including this one, have given a commitment to this. The Programme for Government, negotiated between Fianna Fáil and the Progressive Democrats, includes the deliberate stage by stage movement towards this figure of 0.7 per cent whereas what we have had is a movement away from it.
Oxfam are also seeking a commitment on the part of the Minister to matching emergency aid provisions for Africa in 1992 with the levels committed in 1991 and ensuring that the EC makes a similar matching commitment. They say there is an immediate need to make further provision to the United Nations SEPHA — the Special Emergency Programme for the Horn of Africa — appeal for £621 million for the period February-July. I do not have the figures before me but I understand that to date the UN have received only £400 million in response to that appeal, that is just two-thirds of the budget for a situation which is of extreme importance.
I am sure the Minister is aware that 40,000 children are dying per day. One quarter of a million children are dying per week from simple food-related problems, in other words starving to death or dying from simple primary infections that could easily be cured with the application of appropriate pharmaceutical remedies which are available in the EC.
One figure in the Estimates for official overseas development assistance worries me. The amount for the United Nations relief and development agencies is down from £1 million in 1991 to £800,000. That is most regrettable. Disaster relief is down from £1,800,000 to £1 million. Do the Government anticipate smaller occurrences or disasters in the coming year? What is the thinking behind this cutback? The figures released by the Government represent cutbacks amounting to 12 per cent, if expressed in terms of GNP.
Four simple recommendations have come in from Oxfam. First, that the European Community should match its 1991 commitment of an extra £140 million ECU, 400,000 tonnes of food aid, by establishing a similar 1992 plan for Africa. Second, Ireland should match its 1991 commitments to Africa with a similar amount for 1992. Third, the United Nations should take action at the highest level to help end conflicts in Sudan and Somalia and protect displaced communities in conflict situations. Obviously, it is not just an economic situation. The hardship, deprivation, starvation and misery of many people is complicated by complex economic factors which render the provision of assistance to them problematic and expensive. Finally, it is recommended that Ireland, through the EC, take action with UNCED and GATT and within the United Nations to ensure the long term needs of Africa are met.
Even as far back as 1989 we were at the bottom of the European table and we still are. I can wave a graph round, if it is permitted by the rules of the House, but it will not register in the Official Report. This graph is very dramatic. Norway is at the top of the list followed by Sweden, Denmark, Netherlands, Finland, France, Belgium, Italy, Germany, United Kingdom, Switzerland, Austria and, last, Ireland. In terms of per capita percentage of GNP we are bottom of the table and that is a pity.
Organisations like Campaign-Aid, for example, have pointed out the kind of discrepancies I have mentioned. In a press statement issued on 29 January this year they said the Minister's, Deputy B. Ahern, first budget was clearly in breach of the Fianna Fáil-Progressive Democrats' Programme for Government regarding Third World aid, as the £2.6 million reduction in official development assistance from last year's £45.5 million allocation was inconsistent with the commitment given in the Programme for Government which states that the Government will undertake a planned programme of increases in Ireland's official development assistance for 1992 to 1994 so as to achieve a higher ODA-GNP contribution by the end of that period. In other words, we are getting political promises that it is going to increase and in fact it decreases.
This reminds me of a situation where I went over a certain barrier in the university and I received exactly the same wage cheque. I protested to the accountant and he said it was only due to the generosity of the university that I did not receive a negative increment in my pay cheque because by going into a new tax band my pay should have dropped by a small amount. They had rounded it up to the same amount as before. I wrote back and said, "I know nothing, I am glad to say, of the vulgar science of mathematics but I understand English; there is no such animal as a negative increment, what you are talking about is excrement and you can have it back".
We are talking here, in a sense, about negative increments. Whatever argument may be raised with regard to mathematics there is no such animal either morally or grammatically speaking as a negative increment. I am sure the Minister understands the point I am making. I urge him to consider this question of overseas development aid very seriously. Every major organisation produced briefing documents protesting at the attitude and actions of the Government. I do not believe the actions of the Government, which may be seen as necessary in budgetary terms, represent the wishes of the Fianna Fáil representatives in this House or of the very large majority of Irish people.
I would like to look very briefly at the question of inner city redevelopment, particularly with regard to housing. I had some small involvement a number of years ago in persuading the then Minister for Finance to include some small provisions for tax relief for listed buildings within the designated areas. There were problems involved. One was that in order to trigger any tax incentive the cubic capacity of the rooms provided by any redevelopment had to be beneath a certain mathematical computation. I was able to point out that this required the savaging of the beautiful proportions of 18th century rooms and would take us back into a tenement situation. The Department of Finance were very nervous that we might create a kind of haemorrhage and many restrictions were put in. The buildings had to be list one buildings, had to be approved by the Department, had to be in the designated area between the two canals and so on.
I ask the Minister to request an official in his Department to write to me giving me information about the takeup of this scheme with which I am sure the Department officials will be familiar. My information is that there has been virtually no takeup. Perhaps one person has applied. One of the reasons is that there are no proper forms. I wonder how seriously the Department are taking this matter for which provision was made by three and a half pages of amendments in the budget which were eventually introduced by the Taoiseach, then Minister for Finance, Deputy Albert Reynolds.
Valuable as this opening was it does not really attack or address the situation properly. What is needed in order to encourage people to do such rehabilitative work and to live in the inner areas of our principal cities is direct cash injections. If people on middle incomes are to be induced to reconstruct the fabric of a historic building, tax incentives are not of much use to them. They are of some small use but in order to do something major like repair a roof a conservation grant system is necessary. Every country in Europe that has successfully done this has introduced such a provision. I have restored my own house. I declared my interest in the matter in that people earning more than £25,000 have to pay PRSI and do not benefit. I have no personal axe to grind here because I have completed my work. It will not benefit me except as a citizen of one of the major cities. With a small pilot scheme for direct cash injections we could transform the city in the interests of everybody, not just myself.
In relation to the Temple Bar area, I was rather amused to see the Government propose retaining the use of a building there as a brothel. I hope it will not be seen as being too lighthearted of me to say so but long before most of the people who are now hopping on the Temple Bar bandwagon had even heard of the place, I took a lease on a building there in 1978. There was not one solitary active thing in that area in 1978 except a pub and a barber's shop. At the extreme fringes of Temple Bar there was the Project Theatre of which I was also a director. In 1978 I took the lease of No. 10 Fownes Street and we created a Gay Community centre, the Hirschfeld Centre. Into that came a very large number of people. We ran discotheques for the green movement, the environmental movement, those interested in Wood Quay, in women's issues and so on. We had a throughput of 1,500 people each week. That is where the energy to lift that whole area came from. There is no question of doubt about that. People who came in spotted the opportunity, started small business and so on. We released the energy to restore that area.
I have to say also Pace the Government-sponsored brothel, if one is looking for a Latin quarter, a Bohemian atmosphere or a left bank quality, I do not think one would get it from many of the other establishments; it was the Hirschfeld Centre that produced that atmosphere in the area. Yet, what do we see? Three times I have on the Adjournment asked for money to support the redevelopment of the centre which was destroyed by fire. Three times it has been cavalierly tossed into the bin, despite Government support. I would like to put the Minister on notice of one thing. I know the way European Structural Fund money works and I know the attitude in Brussels. They make it virtually mandatory to deal positively with people who come from marginalised and disadvantaged groups. I could, if I were a nasty mean minded person and a dog in the manger, telephone Brussels in the morning and say the Temple Bar area is a wonderful project but who started it? I could send the history of the project and the debates which show where the Hirschfeld Centre was starved of cash for redevelopment, despite the fact that it saved the State a lot of money by its highly successful crusade against the spread of the Aids infection. However, the Minister, I hope, will accept my word that I am far too nice a person, far too altruistic, and I wold not spike my own city or my own country by taking such action. I would like him to look at this situation and see if our needs, as the people who instigated the Temple Bar renewal, could not be accommodated in some way.
I would like to raise, briefly, the question of Irish Shipping. Will there ever be provision to make some gesture of decency towards the employees of the former Irish Shipping Company who were literally thrown out on the streets' some of them having given 40 years service in the interests of this nation. I would like the Minister kindly to give some indication on this. I am attempting to widen an opportunity that was given me when I raised this matter in relation to another Bill — The Merchant Shipping Bill. The Minister, Deputy Woods, took up the point I made and said he was, at that time, instructing civil servants in his Department to investigate the possibility of making some proper allocation for the former employees of Irish Shipping. I know this is a concern shared on all sides of the House; I see my friend Senator McGowan nodding. Everybody in this House feels strongly — and there was a Fianna Fáil commitment on this — that these people should have their pension rights honoured at the end of the day. I would be most grateful if the Minister could at some stage address this.
