IRELAND: Deaglán de Bréadún examines the role of Development Co-operation Ireland, the official channel for Ireland's assistance to the Third World.
How Development Co-operation Ireland Is spending its aid budget this year:
The bulk of development aid goes to the eight programme countries above.Other allocations include more than 100 million in "support for civil society", such as €46.2m in grants to five leading non-governmental organisations and 12m to the Irish Missionary Resource Service.
Emergency humanitarian assistance receives 37.5m while 13.52m is provided under the heading of recovery assistance, eg helping people to re-establish their livelihoods in the wake of conflicts or natural disasters. A total of 47m is allocated for UN development agencies.
Approximately 50m is given to combat HIV/Aids and this sum is about to be doubled in the next year.
The long-running row over Ireland's contribution in overseas aid has been put to rest, at least for the time being. At the world summit in New York in September the Taoiseach revisited his promise, made at a summit five years earlier, to achieve the UN target of an 0.7 per cent allocation of Gross National Product in official development assistance by 2007.
The new target date is 2012 and the Taoiseach says budgetary provision has been made for gradual increases over the next three years to reach an interim target of 0.5 per cent by 2007, when the Government's term of office is due to expire. In his address, Bertie Ahern committed the Government to development assistance figures of €658 million next year and €773 million in 2007.
Indeed Minister for Foreign Affairs Dermot Ahern said subsequently that when the Estimates were published, they would show a "considerably higher" figure with "substantially more money" for next year, due to a rise in GNP.
The row could flare up again if, for example, there was a further attempt to renege on the 2012 commitment, citing changed economic circumstances.
It's a lot of money in anyone's language. Under current projections, Ireland will be donating €1.5 billion of development assistance in seven years' time. The main channel for these funds is Development Co-operation Ireland (DCI), formerly known as Ireland Aid, the development division of the Department of Foreign Affairs. This year it alone accounted for €470m out of the total €545m in development assistance.
Proper allocation, monitoring, and evaluation of the use of the money, is a major challenge. Much of the funding goes to Third World countries where the standard of governance is not always what it should be, but DCI insiders insist they have not been "scorched" as yet by any serious misappropriation of funds and that rigorous oversight procedures are in place to make sure it stays that way.
Its "mission statement" commits DCI to "the reduction of poverty, inequality and exclusion" in developing countries. The bulk of Ireland's development funds and resources go to eight "programme countries", all of them very low down on the human development index of the UN development programme.
Reflecting Ireland's missionary traditions, six of these are African states: Ethiopia, Lesotho, Mozambique, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia. The other two are Asian countries, both of which have emerged from conflict: newly independent Timor-Leste (East Timor) and the latest addition to the list, Vietnam.
Minister of State for Development Co-operation Conor Lenihan, who has responsibility for DCI, said a programme was being "written and designed" for Vietnam and that there was a DCI official "on the ground" already, with another about to join him. "There are plans to extend aid to Cambodia and Laos also, using Vietnam as a 'gateway'," he said.
In addition, a large proportion of the DCI budget goes in emergency relief and recovery assistance. After the tsunami on December 26th last, the official Irish response was an initial donation of €1m but, as the scale of the catastrophe became apparent, the figure grew to €20m. After the Pakistan earthquake €5.18m was donated for relief and reconstruction.
As funding increases, further programme countries may be added but the number will not go beyond 12 because of the administrative burden. There are already acute staff shortages in DCI.
There is a further complication with the plan to decentralise the organisation from Dublin to Limerick. Many fear this will have a seriously detrimental effect on DCI, with staff being hired because of their willingness to move to Limerick rather than for professional reasons.
A parliamentary question tabled by Fine Gael foreign affairs spokesman Bernard Allen disclosed that only 23 per cent of DCI employees and two out of 15 senior development specialists, had indicated an interest in moving. Allen warned of the potential damage to Ireland's overseas aid programmes, with the loss of expertise and valuable experience.
Are DCI funds well spent? This reporter has visited DCI-aided projects in Ethiopia, Lesotho, Mozambique and South Africa, and all appeared to be worthy endeavours, with Irish taxpayers' money being put to beneficial use.
One that made a particularly favourable impression was a dormitory built for a girls' secondary school at Senokoase in the Drakensberg Mountains of Lesotho, described as "the highest-altitude district in the southern hemisphere". Hundreds of girls in the area must make their way, via mountain roads, to receive their schooling. If they go home at the end of the day, they run the risk of being abducted and raped by young men in the locality. They are then claimed as wives and are not able to return to their families.
With DCI funding, a dormitory was built at the school allowing girls to stay overnight, a nuts-and-bolts, bricks-and- mortar project that shows DCI in a positive light.
But senior politicians lament the fact that DCI's use of its resources gets too little attention. They are looking for ways to make the aid projects more visible so non- governmental organisations (NGOs) don't get the lion's share of the credit for development work.
Even the existence of DCI is not widely known and efforts to secure publicity for the Government's development work weren't made any easier by the change of name from Ireland Aid. An Irish-based advisory board was set up three years ago to work with DCI. Headed by former Fianna Fáil TD and minister of state Chris Flood, the board's function is "to maximise the quality, effectiveness and accountability" of the aid programme.
DCI has received favourable reports in peer review exercises conducted by the Development Aid Committee of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation Development. Actionaid International, a British-based independent policy review group, has also praised the "untied" nature of the official Irish aid programme. Unlike many donor countries, there is no obligation on the aid recipient to use Irish labour or materials in its projects. Only three other countries gave completely untied aid - the UK, Norway and Sweden.
In the meantime, consultations have been taking place, including a series of public meetings in provincial towns, about the first White Paper on this country's overseas aid, which is due for completion by mid-2006. Lenihan says it will set out public policy for 10 to 15 years.
The relationship between Ireland and the programme countries is modelled in many respects on the EU's relationship with ourselves, before we became one of the more advanced and prosperous member states, although it is a government-to-government partnership rather than a relationship between a government and a multilateral institution such as the EU.
Decisions to restrict or terminate aid are not taken lightly. "The Government's position is that there has to be a balance between the misconduct of a particular government and the needs of the ordinary people whose welfare should always be the priority," says Lenihan.
Combating HIV/Aids has also become a major dimension of DCI's work, eg under an agreement with the Clinton Foundation, set up by the former US president, Ireland will provide €50m over five years to fight HIV/Aids in Mozambique. Apart from providing anti-retroviral drugs to Aids sufferers, there is the major challenge of ensuring that patients have enough food in their stomachs to sustain and absorb drug treatment.
The Taoiseach has shown a strong personal commitment to the fight against HIV/Aids and was one of only a handful of government leaders to attend the special UN conference on Aids a few years ago. In his summit speech he announced that the increased funding for official development assistance would be used to double spending next year to €100m on the fight against HIV/Aids and other communicable diseases such as TB and malaria.
Other priorities include support for the new UN Democracy Fund set up last July at the suggestion of President Bush to provide "emerging democracies" with legal, technical and financial assistance and advice.
Of course, Ireland works with a large number of other donor countries throughout the developing world and there are moves to improve harmonisation between them. This is intended to avoid a situation where there would be an imbalance of aid going to, say, education, when the health sector would be under-resourced.
DCI co-operates with governments and agencies worldwide to achieve the UN's millennium development goals, a set of targets adopted at the 2000 Millennium Summit for the eradication of poverty and disease and the promotion of universal education and gender equality.
There are huge challenges facing DCI and the decentralisation programme will not make them any easier. The vast new influx of money will have to be wisely spent and carefully monitored. Public support for the aid programme will have to be given a more solid basis through wider dissemination of information and greater involvement by the ordinary citizen.
Every new day could see a fresh catastrophe in some far-flung place or the deepening of an existing crisis in a poverty-stricken African state.
Even when media and public interest is diverted elsewhere, DCI and NGO administrators and development workers will have to remain focused on their task as the alternatives for the poor of the world, and ultimately the rest of us, are too awful to contemplate.
Series concluded