Economic boom makes Irish aid performance even more shocking

Was Bertie Ahern really reviewing Irish aid projects in South Africa recently or was he just escaping the Irish winter? Is he serious about increasing aid to the world's poor, or was it all a holiday?

South Africa isn't even a priority country for Irish aid (Lesotho, which he also visited, is). It's likely that more public money was spent on the visit than on the small-scale projects he opened. And surely the time for grand gestures was over the millennium, when the British and American governments, as a jubilee gesture, wrote off millions of pounds of foreign debt and the Irish Government . . . lit a candle to show its compassion?

The record of Mr Ahern's coalition Government on aid spending is abysmal. Exactly three years ago, when in opposition, he first committed Fianna Fail to meeting the universally accepted United Nations target for aid spending. That target involves the rich countries spending a modest 0.7p out of every pound of national wealth on aid.

Today, in the middle of the biggest and most sustained boom we have ever seen, Ireland isn't even halfway towards that target. For the third year in a row, that bit of our wealth we donate to the world's poor has been frozen. The Government's own interim targets are in tatters and will never be reached.

It's the same old story, only shockingly, obscenely worse in the current boom environment. In no other area of policy are our leaders so addicted to making promises, and then so negligent in fulfilling them.

Year on year, commitments are made and then broken. Noble sentiments and statesmanlike pronouncements about Ireland's commitment to making the world a better place haven't brought us any nearer to the UN target. Politicians repeatedly call for a cross-party consensus on aid spending, but the only consensus that joins them is the making of promises they will never keep. There are no votes in helping the poor, especially when they're overseas.

We used to blame it on our poverty. When we got rich, we blamed it on our wealth. When we got richer still, we blamed it on the laws of mathematics. The excuses are endless, but the result is the same. In October 1998 the Minister of State with responsibility for overseas aid, Ms Liz O'Donnell, threatened to resign over the level of the aid budget. The following month, the Minister for Finance, Mr McCreevy, all but froze the budget anyway, yet Ms O'Donnell did not resign.

Instead, she was fobbed off with promises of a "multi-annual" increase. This has since materialised as spending of £178 million last year, an estimated £184 million this year and £207 million next year. Increases of this order mean Ireland has no chance of incremental growth towards the UN target.

However, Ms O'Donnell said this "radical new departure" would end the danger of "slippage" and make "the annual wrangle over what will be spent on overseas aid a thing of the past".

However, there never has been a wrangle - at least between the political parties - over aid spending. As far back as October 1996, Mr John Bruton called for an all-party commitment to increasing aid spending by set amounts. The Labour leader, Mr Quinn, made a similar call last week.

When the budget came around last November, Ms O'Donnell didn't even bother threatening to resign. Instead, she blamed a "new method of calculating" gross national product for the fact that Ireland's aid spending would languish at 0.31 per cent of GNP instead of the 0.35 she had already proclaimed the previous June.

Meanwhile, under Mr McCreevy's influence, Irish aid has changed in character. More of the money goes to the bureaucrats in the UN or EU agencies, or to the World Bank or IMF in the form of debt relief. Proportionately less goes to aid agencies, missionaries, and the kind of projects people normally associate with overseas aid.

So aid spending is now at the same level - 0.31 per cent of GNP - as when Fianna Fail and the PDs formed a coalition in June 1997.

NOT that Labour or Fine Gael are much better. On average, aid spending has gone up quicker when these parties were in government, but even Ms Joan Burton, the ideologically committed Labour minister in charge of overseas aid during the last government, failed to keep her own targets for increasing the budget.

Perhaps it's a sign of the times that all this has provoked such little public reaction. The failure to meet aid targets didn't even merit a footnote during the kerfuffle over the last budget. Even the aid agencies, seemingly spent of passion and energy, have reacted with little more than a whimper.

There are reasons for not increasing aid. There are also reasons for arguing that Irish aid is expanding fast enough already.

However, the politicians have not advanced these arguments. They'd rather make the kind of grand statements that sound good in foreign embassies than grapple with important foreign policy issues.