The Government is considering proposals to agree a definite timetable for overseas development aid which would bring the State towards the target set by the United Nations.
The Minister of State for Foreign Affairs, Ms Liz O'Donnell, said proposals were at an "advanced stage" to agree the timetable for the increases to reach both the interim target of 0.45 per cent during the lifetime of this Government, and towards the UN target of 0.7 per cent.
Speaking at the launch of Ireland Aid's annual report for 1999, the Minister said the amount of Irish aid had grown fivefold from €40 million in 1992 to €200 million this year, which is 0.31 per cent of GNP.
Last year Ms O'Donnell threatened to resign because she felt the Government was not increasing the level of overseas aid to keep pace with the current economic boom.
Ms O'Donnell said yesterday Ireland had one of the fastest-growing development co-operation programmes in the world. However, given the internationally recognised standard of measuring the amount of aid is based on GNP, Ireland still lagged behind, around eleventh on the list of OECD donor countries.
"In 1999, in contrast to some quite wealthy countries which cut their aid budgets, we increased our overall overseas aid budget by more than €40 million to €181 million, from €139 million in the previous year," said Ms O'Donnell.
But she added that these volume increases had not been sufficient to allow real progress in linking overseas development aid with our GNP target. "We are respectable and doing well but there has never been a better time to do it than now." She said while a lot had been achieved in the past 26 years the needs and challenges for development were alarming.
"We are living in a world where 1.3 billion people still live on less than $1 a day, where 12 million children die before their fifth birthday, where 34.3 million people are infected with the HIV virus and 13 million AIDS orphans are left to fend for themselves.
"Today 21 million people are displaced by civil war, disease, famine and ecological disasters. But, rather than being daunted by the scale and depth of these challenges, we press on sure in the knowledge that our aid is making a difference to the lives of many."
Ms O'Donnell said she would continue to press for a complete overhaul of the EU development aid programme where accumulated unspent balances of billions of euros were a testament to the programme's failures.
Criticising bureaucratic delays in emergency situations, Ms O'Donnell said "bottlenecks in getting aid to the starving" which could be avoided through foresight and planning had cost lives.
Speaking about the problem of HIV/AIDS, she said: "The alarmingly high infection rate in sub-Saharan Africa threatens to destabilise the entire continent. The scale of this unprecedented tragedy demands an unprecedented response," she said.