Sir, - The "Programme for a Partnership Government 19931997" stated: "We will increase Ireland's Official Development Aid (ODA) to 0.2 per cent in 1993 and by 0.05 per cent each year thereafter, so as to make steady progress towards achieving the UN goal of 0.7 per cent of GNP. By 1997, we should be on a par with most of our EC partners."
Now, in 1998, we are at 0.3 per cent of GNP, so that the annual increase over these past five years has been only 0.02 per cent and we are still far away from the European Union countries' average of about 0.45 per cent of GNP, and even farther from the UN goal of 0.7 per cent which Ireland has accepted as its target.
In all of this I question the role of the Department of Finance and ask what criteria it uses in making its recommendations on Ireland's development aid budget each year. In this current year, if I understand recent media reports correctly, the Department is recommending to its Minister - and he seems to have acquiesced in its recommendations - that the budget for next year should be set at the reduced figure of 0.29 per cent of GNP. How do the Department officials arrive at this figure? Have they any idea at all of the effectiveness of the Irish aid programmes and the Irish NGOs in the poorer countries of the world, or are they just concerned with the arithmetic of the national budget? What is the basis of their recommendation that, in what will clearly be an expanding budget, overseas development aid be cut? And have they assessed the impact of the cut which they recommend?
Surely their debate must be informed by some assessment or evaluation of the Irish aid programme and I think we the taxpayers, whose money is under consideration, should know. Over many years, in both an executive and advisory capacity in the Irish aid programme, I have observed with wonder and total admiration the great dedication, effectiveness, selflessness and humanity of our aid workers in the many poorer countries of the world, especially Africa. I must ask if the officials in the Department of Finance in Merrion Street know anything of this activity when they do their sums for their Minister. If they do, I suggest that they are somewhat out of touch with the sympathies of the plain people of Ireland outside Dublin 2 and I hope that the Government and its Cabinet recognise this in their current debates on this vital issue. - Yours, etc., John Kelly,
Mount Eden Road, Dublin 4.