'Little to show' for Third World aid from West, conference told

The head of Ireland's €500 million-plus overseas aid programme has acknowledged there is "very little to show" for the large sums of money "pumped" into development aid by western countries.

Ronan Murphy, director general of Development Co-operation Ireland, said it was time to ask the $64,000 question: what are we doing wrong? It "wasn't good enough" to blame HIV/Aids for the problems of many developing countries, he told a conference yesterday on Ireland's forthcoming White Paper on development.

There was a need to look at the different ways used for delivering aid. However, few people who attended recent country-wide consultation meetings had raised this as an issue.

Frances Ruane, acting director of the conference organisers, the Institute for International Integration Studies in Trinity College, called for greater involvement by Government departments and the private sector: "Ireland is one of the most globalised economies in the world, so our global development strategy should be at the centre and not the periphery of Government policy."

Bjorn Lomborg, a Danish statistician and author of The Sceptical Environmentalist, said Ireland's aid programme needed to focus on priority projects that delivered maximum benefit.

"There are lots of problems out there. In an ideal world, we'd try to deal with them all, but we can't." Prioritisation wasn't pleasant, but it was necessary to achieve the maximum benefit.

Last year, Mr Lomborg organised the Copenhagen Consensus, an exercise in which a group of leading economists were asked how best $50 billion could be spent to alleviate the problems of the world's poor. The group rejected spending on climate control, but recommended support for projects to fight malnutrition, malaria and HIV/Aids, as well as the cutting of trade barriers.

A similar process for deciding how Ireland's expanding aid budget should be spent would engage the public and result in closer scrutiny, he suggested. "Let's make sure we do the best things first, and not attempt things we can't fix and or don't know how to fix."

However, Myles Wickstead, who was appointed head of secretariat of the Commission for Africa by British prime minister Tony Blair last year, disagreed. "You can't pick and choose between different things; you have to do them all," he said. Most of the world's problems could be tackled if all the wealthy countries increased their aid to the UN target.

Other measures that could make a huge difference could be introduced at no cost - for example, the ratification by western countries of the UN convention on trafficking and the drawing up of a treaty designed to curtail the trade in small arms.

Minister of State for Development Co-operation Conor Lenihan said Ireland was a "leader not a laggard" in development. The Cabinet would shortly decide when the UN target would be reached.

Concern chief executive Tom Arnold said the date set by the Government for meeting the UN target would be a test of its seriousness about the issue. There were "worrying" signs that this date was slipping back to 2015.

"All the fine words will be negatived entirely unless the Government puts a date on the table," he said.