President speaks of crippling debt crisis

Ireland may not be a substantial creditor nation but it shares in the "moral obligation" to react to the debt crisis crippling developing nations, the President, Mrs McAleese, has said.

Speaking in Galway at the opening of a human rights seminar yesterday, President McAleese said that the goal of poverty reduction could not be met without concerted international action to stem the haemorrhage of resources caused by the debt burden.

The Irish aid programme was "playing its part", she said, through bilateral aid to Mozambique and Tanzania, and through the Government's financial support for multilateral debt relief, chiefly through the World Bank Heavily Indebted Poor Country Initiative.

Criticising the slow impact of this initiative, the President said there was clearly a need to extend it to a larger number of countries and with a "greater sense of urgency and flexibility". Currently, three countries will benefit from debt relief under the project this year but some of the most highly indebted countries will not, she noted.

In countries such as Tanzania, Mozambique, Zambia, Honduras and Nicaragua, governments had been forced to spend more on servicing their debt than on health and education combined. In Africa as a whole, where half of all children did not attend school, governments transferred four times more to creditors in developed countries than they spent on health and education.

Referring to the devastation caused by Hurricane Mitch in central America last month, the President said that while the prompt action by many in agreeing to cancel or reschedule Central American debt was most welcome, there remained the substantive issue of alleviating debt in the longer term.

Also addressing the seminar, which was hosted by the Galway One World Centre along with the Debt and Development Coalition, the Galway West Labour TD, Mr Michael D Higgins, criticised the reduction in bilateral aid and emergency relief fund, and the increase in multilateral aid, in the Budget. This went against the very spirit of the Irish aid programme in the past, he said, in transferring control of resources to multilateral agencies, rather than to people on the ground in developing countries.

The President had said she could not envisage the size of the international debt, now running at $2.2 million trillion, he said. In fact, one could translate it as equivalent to the expenditure of the G7 countries over 41/2 years, he said.

The biggest issue facing us was the need to support an economic literacy movement, which would transform the economy into one for its people, Mr Higgins continued. This applied to both Ireland and abroad, he said. By educating people in relation to debt relief, one could link this to building and strengthening a civil society.

Later yesterday, the President undertook her first official function in the Connemara Gaeltacht cupla focail - when she celebrated the 25th anniversary of Comhar Chumann Dhuiche Sheoigheach (CDS Teo) in Cornamona, north Galway. Mrs McAleese has been learning Irish with the assistance of Bord na Gaeilge, and delivered her speech on the co-op's importance in Irish to the applause of over 200 people.

Irish Times reporters add:

Ireland has achieved its one million signatures for the "Sign for Human Rights" campaign launched by Amnesty International in mid-October, Amnesty announced yesterday.

The Director of Amnesty International Irish Section, Ms Mary Lawlor, said one million was the target set when the campaign was launched. "When the campaign was officially closed by John Hume and An Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, we had 930,000 signatures in but we knew there were thousands more out there which had not yet been returned - they have continued to flood in - and I expect when the absolute final count is made, we will have exceeded the million."

Amnesty International, in a statement to mark the 50th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, said that far from celebrating the role of governments it would be celebrating the work of human rights defenders around the world, who continued to be persecuted for trying to bring about the better world promised by governments in 1948.