Even if there is no conceptual link between the issues of aid and waste in the public sector there should be a moral one, writes Marc Coleman.
When dealing with any Government, you always have to ask whether the right hand knows what the left hand is doing. For example, in 2002 the Government with one hand abandoned its target of spending 0.7 per cent of gross national product (GNP) on official development assistance by 2007. With the other, it agreed to raise public sector pay by an average of 8.9 per cent, costing an extra €1.1 billion a year.
Minister for Finance Brian Cowen announced yesterday that meeting our aid targets would be "demanding but achievable". Another hand of Government - the Comptroller and Auditor General - also yesterday published a report on the efficiency of Government spending.
Now the Government faces many demands for the use of taxpayers' money. And let's face it, the Third World's poor don't have a voice in our social partnership system. Even if they did, they don't vote in elections. So the decisions made separately on development aid and benchmarking in 2002 were politically understandable, if morally puzzling.
Prompted in part by Bono and Sir Bob, the Government has recently done the decent thing and restored our aid target, albeit at a later date of 2012. And that target is staggered so that by 2007 - within the present multi-annual budget horizon and lifetime of the Government - spending on aid should rise to 0.5 per cent of GNP.
The target for 2007 should be achieved - the Government has committed an extra €98 million in aid spending each year in 2006 and 2007 over what was promised in the latest estimates package. But thereafter targets are still conditional. Take the following quote from the Taoiseach, for example: "The figures up to 2012 are based on the growth perspective that [the Department of] Finance sees at this stage and I think that's realistic." But realistic does not mean certain.
This is where the Comptroller and Auditor General's report comes in. It identifies incidents of waste which, if corrected and allocated to aid, would greatly help. Let's start with the automated passport system for the Department of Foreign Affairs, the department which administers overseas aid. Some €13.5 million was wasted on that programme. Now let's turn to the failed MediaLab programme - there's another €35 million. And the report also highlights €30 million spent on acquiring land for a new prison in north Dublin. If these figures are added to the extra €98 million committed by Government, the aid target would be reached comfortably and earlier than expected.
Ideally, we should give from the heart and, as Mother Teresa exhorted, do so until it hurts. But even the money saved by the relatively painless elimination of waste would go a long way to funding our aid targets in a manner that did not cause conflict with other claims of Government. Even if there is no conceptual link between the issues of aid and waste in the public sector, there should be a moral one. Remember your mother saying how it was a sin to throw away food when so many Africans were starving? We might well ask why Government finances should be exempt from this morality.