The Minister for State at the Department of Foreign Affairs, Ms Liz O'Donnell, has said the Government's aid budget has reached record levels - more than £120 million this year. She said this had taken place at a time when other countries have been scaling back their commitments.
Ms O'Donnell was marking yesterday's publication of the first annual report of the National Committee for Development Education.
She said the new Government is committed to carrying on the trend, with a "generous but attainable" target of 0.45 per cent of GNP by the year 2002, she said. The current percentage is about 0.31 per cent.
But as the aid budget grows, "so does the need to keep the public informed of general development issues and of the context in which Irish aid is working".
One of the tasks of development education was to draw public attention to the chronic problems of the world.
The response to the Ethiopian famine of the 1980s showed how compassionate people could be when confronted with images of acute human poverty and suffering.
"What received far less attention was the extent to which the famine was the product of years of war and repression. The crisis was a tragic culmination of decades of underdevelopment.
"Had even a fraction of the generosity of Live Aid been harnessed towards prevention in the years before disaster struck, the devastation wrought by the crop failures would have been far less."
Ireland is giving a very strong priority to the "slow and steady work" of sustainable development, she said. In 1997, the fourth year of the aid programme in Ethiopia, the Government has allocated £8.5 million for a range of poverty-related projects covering three areas and benefiting more than five million people.
Ms O'Donnell congratulated President Robinson on her appointment as UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and said she intended to make the issue central to Ireland's development strategy.