Madam, - Taoiseach Bertie Ahern has good reason to be proud of his achievements. The five ministerial posts he held before becoming Taoiseach, his role in nurturing peace in Northern Ireland, his guidance of the Republic through its most prosperous decade and his term as president of the European Council will ensure him a special place in the history of this country.
This week sees yet another highlight for Mr Ahern when he becomes only the fifth person ever to be afforded the honour of addressing both houses of Congress in Washington.
But there is one achievement above all that he can be particularly proud of, one that has transformed the lives of more people than anything else he has done in a long and busy political career. That occurred on September 14th, 2005 when, in an address to the United Nations General Assembly in New York, he pledged that Ireland would reach the UN target of 0.7 per cent of Gross National Product to be given in official development assistance by the year 2012.
Of course in 2000 at the millennium summit in New York, he had first committed to reach 0.7 per cent by 2007, and it is generally accepted that Ireland got a place on the Security Council because of that promise, but the target was dropped in 2004!
Today we are more or less on track to achieve that aid target and by 2012 Ireland's contribution to ODA should be about €1.5 billion a year, which is a sum that we can all be proud of. Through Irish Aid and its partner organisations, Irish taxpayers' money is making big differences to the lives of many millions of people in some of the most impoverished communities in the world.
We in ChildFund Ireland are a partner, albeit a small one, in this effort to reduce the tide of human misery and I would like to take this opportunity to thank Mr Ahern for his courage in sticking up for the poor of this world and to express the wish that his successor, Mr Cowen, will keep up the good work.
I have no doubt that he will. - Yours, etc,
MICHAEL KIELY, ChildFund Ireland, Lower Mount Street, Dublin 2.