Irish agencies and church leaders involved in the millennium campaign for the cancellation of Third World debt are stunned at the response from the Group of Eight states at the weekend, but pledged themselves to continue to lobby support for the cause.
The heads of government of the world's eight wealthiest states, meeting in Cologne, Germany agreed to cancel $70 billion (£53 billion) of debt owed by poor countries.
Jubilee 2000, an international movement to which the Irish Debt and Development Coalition is affiliated, has been campaigning for the cancellation of all debt.
"We are bitterly disappointed that the G8 commitment falls far short of even the limited expectations which we had," said Mr Justin Kilcullen, director of Trocaire, in Cologne. "But we will continue to rally public support for the alleviation of the debts."
The money freed up amounted to an extra $27 billion over a number of years, he said, dramatically less than what was needed to provide a permanent release from the debt crisis for poor countries.
The G8 summit recognised that poverty alleviation and sound social policies should be part of economic reform programmes, but the amount of actual debt relief that it had delivered would not be sufficient to achieve this.
"While the G8 also noticed the vulnerability of developing countries to `exogenous shocks', the biggest shock remains the burden of unpayable debt," the Trocaire director emphasised. The G8 summit had earmarked $70 billion in write-offs for struggling Third World economies, yet the cumulative debt of sub-Saharan Africa alone stood at at astronomical $250 billion.
For the countries worst affected, repayments now added up to approximately 40 per cent of government budgets - with dire consequences for such primary considerations as health and education, he said.
Tanzania, for example, spends nine times as much on debt servicing as it does on health, yet 40 per cent of its people die before the age of 35.
Bishop Bill Murphy from Kerry, who was also in Cologne, said he was particularly heartened by the public response to the issue of Third World debt during the summit: "The atmosphere here is electric, with tens of thousands of people reaching out in common humanity to the poor in developing countries."
He was "particularly proud," he said, when the crowd gave a great cheer in acknowledgement of Ireland's achievement in gathering over 800,000 signatures to add to the Jubilee 2000 global petition of 22 million: "How can the leaders of the West ignore these millions of voices - their reaction is not only anti-poor people, it is anti-democratic too."