I apologise for being late. I was not free to attend until now. I join Senator Norris and the others in welcoming Ms Lund, Mr. Williams and Mr. Cumming. I want to make a few points as this is an important discussion.
On previous occasions I paid tribute to the Norwegian experience and I am well aware that on the United Nations target, whereas Ireland is struggling to reach our 0.7% of GDP target, Norway's spend is at approximately 1.1% of GNP, which is a signal to all of the rest of us. In addition, I looked carefully some time ago at the Norwegian White Paper on development, which probably is the white paper that contains the largest component of human rights thinking. I might turn to a couple of points in that regard.
I am becoming pessimistic about the way this argument is going internationally, and even at the level of the civil society. My reason is that I, as documentary maker, attended the United Nations conference on economics and development many years ago in Brazil, where an interesting thing happened. Many states were represented. The Heads of State attended in great numbers, but most of the threatened communities such as the islands of the Pacific where the sea level would rise and wipe out communities, and so on, because they were not states, were not represented, and there were all these former colonial countries speaking for them. Immediately, the Business Council for Sustainable Development came into being. It was chaired by the president of Nestlé and the vice-president was the president of Fiat. I interviewed them. From that, the business sector internationally was able to take over the concept of sustainability and it has been downhill all the way. That is my introduction to what I have to say about the Irish case.
I am not convinced that people have addressed the moral issue and the political issue of making a decision that the commercial short-term yields will be qualified by human rights thinking or by ethical considerations. I do not see that. Even in the country I admire, Norway, about which we have heard, we are coming to the end of the high point of oil yields. When I last visited Norway, I addressed an issue on television about this, where the choice facing the Norwegian Government was that it will be now selling its technology to oil exploration around the world. Will it do this with a requirement, for example, that local communities will be consulted? This issue arose on the participation, for example, of Statoil in an issue of oil exploration off the west coast of Ireland. The issue faced there was: are we now in a new ethical agenda in oil exploration.
A related point is the statement of the chairman of BP in the recent appalling developments in the Gulf of Mexico and, more importantly, the suggestion by a member of the House of Lords in the neighbouring jurisdiction of the UK, Lord Sugar, that he wanted to warn people who might be attracted to President Obama's confrontation with BP about the pension funds that were invested in BP. In other words, the pensioners who into the future were to be used as a kind of stalking horse for letting international oil exploration companies operate with close enough to impunity.
Where I differ slightly with what Senator Norris stated is that I have a question about this project of ethical globalisation as a project. It is well meant but it has logical and structural weaknesses, and epistemological weaknesses. It seems as if always we are operating in a residue of thinking. We are operating after the fact. I tried to address where we are in Ireland on this and I want to give the delegation an update on it. Senator Norris and others are correct. We all combined in Ireland, for example, to outlaw cluster bombs, land mines, and so on. We have done well on that and I am happy about that. However, we did not get far in addressing the issue of end use in dual-use projects, and that remains an issue. We are always running after the bus. In a curious way, the civil society dealing with parliaments seems to do well running after the bus, not only on this issue. It can be critical of parliaments and make its demand, but really it does not push on to make the demand of the structure of economic thinking and the epistemological assumptions that are at the root of all of this, which is, that environmental issues, ethical issues and human rights issues come after the economic performance. That is why I gave the Business Council for Sustainable Development example, that it was able to see off the best expressed wishes of the global forum in Brazil in my day.
I asked in Parliament where we are in this regard. I asked the Minister for Finance, on 20 May, if it is his view that the National Pensions Reserve Fund should operate within the guidelines of ethical investment and in his answer, among other things, he stated:
In its work the Committee has considered the appropriateness and possible nature of an ethical investment policy for the NPRF. The approaches to ethical/responsible investment taken in other countries have been reviewed [that is good], and submissions from a number of civil society organisations have also been considered. The Deputy will also be aware that the NPRF was a founding signatory in April 2006 to the UN-sponsored Principles for Responsible Investment which seek to integrate environmental, social and governance issues, in addition to financial issues, into investment analysis and decision-making.
I understand that the Committee's report is now complete and I will consider it in due course.
That is where we were on 20 May last, as far as the Government is considered in answering my question.
I want to make a couple of relevant points in this regard. I am indebted to NGOs such as Trócaire and Christian Aid and even those in CONCORD, which is the association of different groups. Really, to have credibility, Governments should be required to give some performance on the extractive industries. In many countries in Africa the falsification of accounts enables the extractive industries to avoid more than we give in aid. More than Norway and the European Community together gives in aid to a country like Tanzania is lost by what is dodged by multinational corporations in the extraction of gold.
I made this point, and I am coming back to it. I will not go into it now but it is in the Official Report in the context of a case I made recently about economic partnership agreements between the European Union and Africa, which was merely one of my points. I do not see performance on the extractive industries. I do not see a robust scheme from anybody on oil extraction. I will cite other examples such as where there are breaches of rights in contested territories such as the Sahara Arab Democratic Republic and of the Saharawi people. The legal officer of the European Union regards the agreement involving the European Union, for which Spain is the principal beneficiary in fisheries and for which France is the principal beneficiary in exploration, as in contested water that they do not own. We had this in East Timor. On land, for example, an Irish company, Island Oil and Gas, in its brochure circulated investment opportunities for exploration near Smara, which Morocco occupies, which also is a United Nations matter. Areas where there have been Security Council decisions, International Court of Justice decisions, and so on, are not in the frame.
It has taken me a long time to say this, but in many cases I pay tribute to the ILO for its reports on bonded labour. I do not see performance on bonded labour, for example, on issues with which we all would have dealt on Israel, Palestine, Gaza, and so on involving companies including an Irish company indirectly participating in the building of the wall, which divides Palestinian lands and which has been a matter of a decision by the International Court of Justice in The Hague.
On the other issues, we should make a new approach that is not based on moral suasion on the principle of residual response but on the basis that the entire economic order is one that is almost inherently incapable of good faith on this issue. That is a challenge I make as an elected person of the Left to the very great friends I have in the civil society organisations. We cannot go on running after the bus. That is what we are all doing now. I wish I could come in here and pay tribute to everything that everyone is achieving but I am sometimes in despair at our slow progress in making any aspect of economics accountable. As we move into under-provision in the pension funds in Ireland, no more than Lord Sugar who told us all to shut up about BP, we will shortly all be told in the same way that we have some neck to talk about any kind of curtailment on an extreme open season on investment. That is the circumstance we are in. Instead of responding to a new charge on us, we should encourage those people who are on the fringes expressing ethical considerations to realise that it is at the heart of the structure of the relationship between economics and humanity that the problem lies.
