Coming into town from Dublin Airport after 10 days in Mozambique, we remarked on how prosperous people in Dublin looked. We also noted Dubliners looked somewhat stressed and tense. In Mozambique, among some of the poorest people in the world, you could not help being struck by their hope, their belief in change and their feeling of community in the face of deadly odds.
Africa owes the banks of the West massive amounts of debt. What we owe Africa is a little light on its horizon. We need to address - for human reasons as well as economic and political ones - how debt can be addressed without killing the future for Africa's children. For example, if the $100 million Mozambique spends servicing its debt every year could be spent on health, the government would have a chance of defeating malaria and the childhood infections which kill tens of thousands each year. As the President, Mrs McAleese said in December, the Republic may not be a creditor country, but we share the moral obligation to react to the debt crisis.
At present, Mozambique is listed among the 10 poorest countries on the globe. Economically underdeveloped, it emerged six years ago from a bloody civil war visited on it by neighbouring South Africa and its allies. The countryside remains heavily land-mined, making much agricultural land unusable. Health clinics and schools were targeted in the fighting. Roads are often no more than dirt tracks.
So what is the Western world and the Republic in particular doing about this massive crisis in the developing nations? The international banking institutions, the IMF and the World Bank have set up a policy, known as HIPC (the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries initiative), as their contribution. Under HIPC the poorest countries in the world prove good faith by adopting policies of growth as approved by the banks and paying money into a fund which then allows them for amounts of debt relief. In the longer term, the proportion of their GNP which will be paid in debt will decrease. But in the meantime it is a painful process involving cutting public spending and privatising many social services. In addition, money must be found to pay into the HIPC fund in order to qualify.
The Republic has made a contribution to this process. Irish Aid, the Government's Overseas Aid Programme, has given $5 million to the Mozambique government as a form of bridging finance for qualification. In addition, Irish Aid and other, non-government organisations such as Trocaire, Concern and Goal finance projects on the ground.
Along the Swaziland border, workers have established the practice of breeding goats as a form of capital and in Maputo, where children are forced to scavenge for food in the city dump, we visited a new school. And - he'll kill me for saying this - we also discovered that the Irish Ambassador, Justin Carroll, spends his free evenings teaching in a barrio school.
Betty Purcell is editor of Divided World, a special edition of which, devoted to Mozambique and the debt question, will be broadcast on RTE 1, tomorrow at 11.10 p.m.