Ireland remains committed to its target of spending 0.7 per cent of gross national product on development assistance by 2012, Bertie Ahern said yesterday.
The Taoiseach was responding to Pope Benedict's message for the World Day of Peace. Mr Ahern welcomed the Pope's message - "the human family, a community of peace" - and noted "the fundamental place of the family in society, indeed as the first natural society, is reflected in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, whose 60th anniversary we celebrate in 2008".
Mr Ahern said "sustained efforts in poverty reduction and fulfilment of the Millennium Development Goals remain of key importance for Ireland in its commitment to assisting developing nations".
He noted that "his Holiness has highlighted the need for the human family to respect the planet and the environment as our common home. Environmental protection and climate change are issues to which Ireland also attaches great priority and which will be to the forefront in guiding our future actions domestically and internationally.
"We very much support the efforts to achieve a new internationally agreed Climate Change Convention by the end of 2009."
Ireland continued to be "deeply concerned at the continuing conflict in Darfur. We have been active in urging the need for rapid deployment of the UNAMID mission," he said, while this country was "also playing a leadership role in, and will make a substantial contribution to, the planned EU peace support mission in eastern Chad and the north-eastern Central African Republic, which it is hoped can shortly be deployed".
The Pope had also drawn attention to the conflict in the Middle East. "It is important to build on the recent progress achieved at the Annapolis Conference and to support the negotiations now under way aimed at achieving a two-state solution before the end of 2008," the Taoiseach said.
Ireland was seeking "a comprehensive ban on cluster munitions" used in conventional warfare. "It is my hope that next May in Dublin we should conclude an international agreement which will result in an effective prohibition on their use," he said.
He repeated that Ireland was also deeply committed "to upholding, implementing and strengthening the multilateral instruments that seek to prevent the testing and, ultimately, the destruction" of nuclear weapons.
Mr Ahern was among the congregation at the Mass to celebrate World Day of Peace at St Teresa's Church in Clarendon Street, Dublin, yesterday, celebrated by the outgoing Papal Nuncio Archbishop Giuseppe Lazzarotto with the Archbishop of Dublin, Dr Diarmuid Martin.
President McAleese was represented by Capt Niamh O'Mahony. Also in attendance were Ministers Éamon Ó Cuív and Dick Roche, Government Secretary Dermot McCarthy, and Fine Gael TD Richard Bruton.
We are "cosmic dust in a state of consciousness", Mgr Dermot Lane, parish priest at Balally, Co Dublin, and president of the Mater Dei Institute, preached.
He called on "all of the Christian churches working together, to become an environmental lobby, both at local and international levels in the years ahead." What religion could bring to the environment debate was "an awareness that our world, our small blue planet in the midst of a vast Milky Way, is in truth a sacred sanctuary, a dwelling place for the divine. . ."
