The opening shot in RTE's coverage of the EU-Africa summit meeting in Cairo on Monday showed Bertie Ahern striding out to meet Muammar Gadafy of Libya. In a sense they personified the two sides in the summit: the rich North represented by Ahern, boasting the fastest-growing economy in Europe; the poor South by Gadafy, for all his defiance and oil, among the poorest of the poor.
The Africans believed the summit was, or ought to have been, about debt relief. The EU leaders dismissed the idea: debt was an issue for the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.
Some of the Europeans couldn't resist the temptation to lecture their African colleagues about good government and the need for political and economic reform. Some of the Africans reminded the Europeans of their colonial past and refused to take their expressions of concern for the future of Africa at face value.
To judge by reports in The Irish Times and on RTE, BBC's World Service and Radio Four, such issues as EU arms sales in Africa and the promotion of trade between African states and the EU were approached with the caution of circling diplomats.
And what did the leader of Europe's most rapidly growing economy, who might have been expected to arrive with sound advice if little else, have to say to his less fortunate African colleagues? Well, the first topic of conversation between Ahern and Gadafy was neither debt nor reform but bullocks - specifically, the reopening of the Libyan market to cattle from Ireland.
At the summit's formal sessions Ahern returned to an even older theme: how Ireland shared the African experience of colonialism and economic underdevelopment. "We, too," he said, "have struggled for our independence and had to cope with a legacy of underdevelopment. We have faced difficult challenges arising from a historical experience which had elements in common with yours."
And, linking Africa's crises of AIDS and debt, he asked how future generations would judge a global society which required the poorest countries "to repay debt at unsustainable levels while facing a viral pandemic which was killing young people in such numbers".
If the question was rhetorical, so was the guff about the solidarity that was supposed to spring from shared experience. It was all very well to shed a rhetorical tear in far-off Cairo for the Famine; Ireland, at least, is not one of the EU states to which developing countries are deeply indebted.
However, there are other ways of measuring the extent to which declarations of goodwill are genuine. And, far from Cairo, the Fianna Fail-Progressive Democrats coalition had admitted less than a week before the conference that its modest interim target for overseas development aid would not be met.
The target was 0.45 per cent of GNP by 2002. It couldn't be reached, Liz O'Donnell explained to the Dail, because of a change in the calculation of GNP. So our deadline for the target set by the UN, 0.7 per cent of GNP, has been postponed yet again, on this occasion until 2007. We've never come within an ass's roar of it. And with the present Government in office, we never will.
As Ruairi Quinn said at a Labour seminar last week: "The Taoiseach has proved that he cannot be trusted to put our money where his mouth is. . ." Quinn promises to do just that by insisting that the 0.7 per cent target be met within two years of Labour's participation in government.
This doesn't take great courage, but it's a start. To ensure that the target continues to be met, whether or not Labour is in office, the party has published a Bill which would set it on a legal footing. Non-governmental organisations and the Ireland Aid programme could then plan long-term projects in the knowledge that funding would be secure.
"We have the organisational structures to ensure that this money is invested in local communities across the developing world," Quinn said. "What we do not have at present is the political will to make this a reality."
Joan Burton, who once taught in Tanzanian schools and was responsible for development aid in the centre-left coalition, emphasised the need for investment in the World Education for All campaign.
She saw the damage done when spending on all social programmes was cut to the bone as a result of IMF structural adjustment programmes in Tanzania in the 1980s and, later, the paralysing impact of the debt crisis.
She also drew attention to a telling contradiction: "Unfortunately, many of these cutbacks have gone hand in hand with the introduction of democratic political reforms to replace one-party rule.
"Usually political reforms have led to wholesale privatisation and that has included privatisation of education at all levels, thus restricting provision even further to a small elite."
Policies on development aid, like those on immigration, should occupy a central place in the platforms of parties for the next general election. So should the cruel contradictions of this State's treatment of children and the need for reform of the health services, two issues explored at separate conferences by Fine Gael and Labour this week.
At the Fine Gael conference Tom O'Malley of NUI Galway described the plight of homeless children as "possibly the major human rights issue of our time" but one which had been completely ignored.
Echoing a question raised again and again by Judge Peter Kelly, he asked: "When will there be a tribunal to investigate the reasons for the appalling lack of accommodation for homeless children and the equally appalling lack of secure accommodation for children with particular needs?"
Labour's discussion document, Curing Our Ills, presented by Liz McManus challenges the notion that the only development possible in the health services is the American way, exclusive, expensive and inevitably unequal.
The paper, which Brendan Howlin calls "the blueprint for the best health service in the world", requires extra spending by the State - up from 5.75 per cent to 8 per cent of GDP - but does not assume that money alone will solve the problems we face.
However, I suspect that the issue at the core of the proposed discussions will be the theme - excellence for all.
dwalsh@irish-times.ie