Ní bhfuair mé faill aréir ach chun fáilte a chur roimh an mBille seo. Ansin, b'éigean dom scoir. Last night, in welcoming this Bill to authorise further aid for the Third World, I was saying how appropriate it was that such a Bill should follow so soon on the Economic Planning Department Bill which was concerned with our own economic and social development. I say "appropriate" because I have always felt that we should never become so preoccupied with our own problems, serious as they may be, so preoccupied with our own advancement, as to forget the fact that we are already amongst the 25 richest countries in the world. In fact, we are No. 21 on the list. An enormous gap separates us from the 1,200 million people—over 40 per cent of the world's population—who, despite all the efforts made so far, still have to try to survive on less than £1.50 per head per week. They are, in other words, condemned to live in squalid and degrading circumstances. Amongst these, as the Parliamentary Secretary remarked, there are at least 750 million in a state of absolute poverty, at the very margin of physical existence, and the sad fact is that their condition has virtually stagnated over the past decade, which has been accepted as a decade of development.
I have been brought to a knowledge of these grim facts by the assiduous and eloquent concern of Mr. Robert McNamara, who is President of the World Bank and President of IDA, the organisation for which we are in this Bill providing additional finance. I have had the honour of being for a period of years alternate governor for Ireland of these institutions, the Minister for Finance being the governor for Ireland. Mr. McNamara's speeches at the annual meetings have focused on the plight of the poorest nations. In one of his latest speeches, the one he delivered in Manila last year, he summarised this plight in frightening terms. I quote from his speech:
Compared to those fortunate enough to live in the developed countries, individuals in the poorest nations have:
—Remember, these are the 1,200 million people I referred to—
an infant mortality rate eight times higher; a life expectancy one-third lower; an adult literacy rate 60 per cent less; a nutritional level, for one out of every two in the population, below minimum acceptable standards; and for millions of infants, less protein than is sufficient to permit optimum development of the brain.
This, to me, is one of the most startling and appalling things of all. In other words, what is being said is that children are mentally retarded or stunted permanently without hope of recovery simply because of a deficiency of protein in their early years. To resume Mr. McNamara's speech:
This is what absolute poverty means for some 750 million human beings in these nations. With an average per capita income of less than $100 today, and little more than a faint promise of a miniscule $2 annual increase over the next decade, they are locked into a set of circumstances that they cannot break out of by themselves.
It is not a scene that any one of us here, so favoured, so fortunate, so surrounded in our personal lives by privilege and advantage can contemplate without compassion and resolve.
Mr. McNamara has said with frightful clarity that it is beyond the power of any set of statistics to illustrate the human degradation involved. The picture I have just given persists in spite of the great increase in aid, both on commercial terms through the World Bank and on concessionary terms through the IDA, over the last 15 years. It persists mainly because other forms of official development assistance have tended to slacken off or decline. It is now a good many years since a target of 1 per cent of GNP was proposed as a reasonable indeed, moderate measure of the resources which the richer countries should be passing, through official and private channels, to the poorer countries to help them develop.
Further precision was given more recently to the official aid content in this 1 per cent. The United Nations in 1970 and the EEC in 1974 prescribed 0.7 per cent of GNP as the minimum target to be reached by each economically advanced country—and we are in that category—by the mid-seventies. Unfortunately, these developed countries have in general come only about half-way towards this prescribed minimum. Mr. McNamara has described their performance as "disgracefully inadequate". In our own case, as the research paper published last week by Trócaire and the Irish Commission for Justice and Peace points out, we have gone less than one-quarter of the way towards that 0.7 per cent minimum target. We are only about the 0.14 per cent stage. Any indication, such as this Bill provides, of our willingness to do better is to be warmly welcomed.
Without being captious I was sorry to see one particular word in the Parliamentary Secretary's opening statement. It was the word "unfair" in reference to what I think he meant was a disproportionate suggestion for increase in our concessionary aid through IDA. From my point of view I should like to avoid any suggestion of unfairness in reference to the contribution we should be making to the Third World. Having said that, I do want to say that great credit is due to the former Minister for Foreign Affairs and to his Finance colleague for the quite remarkable advance in our official development assistance from less than £1 million in 1972-73 to £7.3 million for the current year. I do not intend to go into past history and criticise anybody for not doing better in the past because I am sure the present Minister for Foreign Affairs and his Finance colleague will carry forward this trend so that within a reasonable period of years Ireland will at least catch up with—and I would love to see it give a lead to—its fellow countries in the better-off category in terms of percentage commitment of GNP to official development assistance.
In this context I would urge on the Minister for Foreign Affairs and the Parliamentary Secretary the desirability of early decisions on the structures for an effective and expanded programme of Irish co-operation in the development of the poorer countries. As you may know, I, as the Chairman of the Agency for Personal Service Overseas, had the privilege of presiding at a meeting in the spring of 1975, attended by a wide range of organisations, not just voluntary organisations in this field, but organisations representing trade unions, industry and farmers and I am glad to say we reached a consensus in recommending what these structures should be in relation to the expansion and better direction of our programme of development co-operation. These are on the table of the new Minister. I understand that he hopes soon to be able to announce his decisions. I very much hope he will at least accept the desirability of the early setting up of a National Development Co-operation Council because it would serve two urgent needs, not only that of bringing the advice of voluntary agencies and other interested bodies to bear on the formulation of Government policy about overseas development assistance but also, as a second important function, of bringing back to representative bodies and to a wider national public a more lively education about the need for a greater effort in development co-operation. This educational process would, I hope, increase public support not only for greater overseas development assistance but also for greater development co-operation in the wider sense which includes very awkward things like agreeing to admit the products of less developed countries more freely. In so far as this educational process worked, it would make it easier for the Government to increase their commitment; indeed, it would also put some valuable pressure on the Government to increase their commitment.
This commitment takes various forms. As Senators know, there is a distinction between multilateral and bilateral aid. Multilateral aid, which is the biggest element in our official development assistance—it represents 80 per cent of the £7.3 million—includes what we are talking about today, the contribution to IDA. It includes also our contribution to the World Bank, to the World Food Programme, to the EEC Development Fund and so on. Bilateral aid covers personal service overseas, with which I am particularly concerned, and it also covers the development projects which, to an increasing extent, the Department of Foreign Affairs is mounting in a selected number of less developed countries.
Having mentioned personal service overseas, I should like first of all, to say that it seems—and I am answering Senator FitzGerald in part here—to be a form of aid singularly free of any corruption or any possibility of corruption because it is given directly. The aim behind all the voluntary service and expert service which APSO assists is not only to pass on aid now through the persons sent abroad, whether they be volunteers, experts in agricultural science, irrigation or genetics, but also to build up in the countries concerned native skills in these particular occupations. In the past bilateral aid was usually looked upon with some misgivings because of the possibility that it was commercially oriented or in some way tainted with a form of neo-colonialism. One can say without any hesitation that no such stigma attaches to our aid. It is no way questionable. In fact, one could even think of it as being more altruistic, perhaps less commercially orientated, than some of the end-products of multilateral aid.
While I am talking about commercially oriented as against altruistic aid, I express the hope that in Ireland, while we may pursue our legitimate entitlement to a proper share for our own nationals whether they be individuals, companies, professional firms or State bodies, in the final spending of multilateral funds, we will always give primacy to the altruistic aspect of our concern for the Third World? We should remember that we are not the losers for being generous. In this matter of development co-operation, there are not two sharply divided categories of givers and receivers. We are all engaged in what has been rightly called by a very distinguished Frenchman in the voluntary service field, the Abbé Pierre, un development humain reciproque, a mutual human development, from which both sides gain significantly. Moreover, I firmly believe that helpful concern and compassion for the peoples of the Third World would do much to put our own problems in perspective without in any way diminishing our capacity or determination to remedy them.