Minister hails plan to provide €100m in relief

CLIMATE CHANGE FUNDS:IRELAND WILL have "a good story to tell" when the Cabinet decides where the €100 million pledged for the EU's programme to fund climate change relief will come from, Peter Power, Minister of State for Overseas Development, said yesterday.

It is essential that the climate change funding promised at Copenhagen “does not undermine the fight against poverty” and that it “complements development assistance”, he told the Joint Oireachtas Committee on Foreign Affairs.

The “exact composition” of the €100 million would be finalised by the Government, but it would include substantial new and additional funding, he said.

Development ministers at the Copenhagen talks spoke of a struggle to get the additional funding, but “Ireland would have a good story to tell when the Cabinet meets to deliberate,” he said.

Irish Aid and its partners “faced real challenges in making do with less funding than planned or anticipated”, Mr Power said of €25 million cut in the Overseas Development Aid budget.

Donors and aid organisations needed to adopt a more results-based approach, he said. Mr Power defended the cut which brought the budget to 0.52 per cent of GNP. It was a “very positive achievement” in the context of the economic crisis and the cut was a “relatively small amount,” he said.

The target of spending 0.7 per cent of GNP on development aid by 2012 was “set in very different economic circumstances”.

The aid programme would grow when the economy began to grow again, he said.

Breaking the 0.7 per cent promise damaged Ireland’s credibility and influence internationally, Helen Keogh of NGO umbrella group Dóchas said in a presentation to the committee yesterday. She urged the department to set out a road map to get to 0.7 per cent.