World View Paul GillespieThe Government's White Paper on Irish Aid is an ambitious document containing a commitment to increase it to the United Nations target of 0.7 per cent of gross national product by 2012.
Hopefully this brings to a close an argument begun in 2000 when Taoiseach Bertie Ahern pledged at the UN General Assembly that Ireland would reach the target by 2007. The promise had to be adjusted in following years because funding was not made available during an economic downturn.
The White Paper reaffirms the existing policy goals of helping the poorest of the poor (mainly in sub-Saharan east Africa), principally by focusing on basic needs in education and health. Irish aid will remain untied. There are fresh commitments to tackling corruption by good governance, preparedness for emergency and humanitarian intervention, conflict prevention, peace-building, policy coherence and public-private partnerships.
Its radical and humane approach was greeted enthusiastically by a large and varied audience of non-governmental organisations, missionaries, volunteers, diplomats and policy consultants at the Mansion House in Dublin last Monday. Many of those present had an input to the document through a series of consultation meetings over the last few years, stressing the need for more public engagement with the official aid programme. They represent its primary domestic constituency.
But politically the principles voiced have much wider political resonance and public support. The presence of Bertie Ahern at the launch, along with Dermot Ahern and Conor Lenihan from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Tom Kitt, the chief whip who previously had Lenihan's portfolio, clearly signified this. The fact that the White Paper was endorsed by the Cabinet and circulated through all Government departments (including especially the Department of Finance) makes its financial and policy commitments much harder to change. It is more solemn and binding as a result, short of legislation.
Nevertheless it will remain up to subsequent Governments to implement the increases in spending from some €800 million next year (0.5 per cent of GNP) to 0.6 per cent in 2010 and a doubling of the existing budget to €1.5 billion per annum by 2012. This will bring development aid well into the middle rank of spending departments. The commitment is bound to pinch in another economic downturn. But the issue is most unlikely to figure in the election campaign because Opposition parties are politically committed to its goals.
Just how large they are can be gauged from the fact that 10 years ago the figure was £106 million (nearly 0.3 per cent of GNP). Thus the commitment to increase it has grown with overall economic growth, fitfully and unevenly through the 0.4 per cent barrier, and is now on stream to hit 0.5 per cent next year.
Rising through international rankings brings international esteem and creates its own momentum. Ministers and officials are proud to underline good reports on Irish aid from the OECD, which monitors and measures aid flows. Ireland has figured eighth and second in its recent comparative international evaluations. Bringing the State towards the UN goal by 2012 compares with the EU commitment to do so on average by 2015; but the respective commitments of the EU 25 vary a lot, with the new member-states giving less than 1 per cent of GNP so far, whereas the Nordic group and the Netherlands have exceeded the UN figure for a number of years.
Another notable international benchmark for Irish aid comes from the annual Human Development Reports published by the UN Development Programme. Ireland regularly figures in the top 10 nations (out of 177) in its index of human development on measures of life expectancy at birth, adult literacy, educational enrolment and per capita income - but has fared less well on its measure of social equality. And even though the Government has disputed these findings they show that development priorities can be projected back home into political controversy just as much as abroad.
Dermot Ahern invited such comparisons when he said that this signifies a third phase of Irish foreign policy. After achieving political sovereignty and independence, then peace and prosperity Ireland can be a bridge between the developing and developed worlds, having made the transition from one to the other.
Helen O'Neill, professor emeritus of economics at UCD and the doyen of expert analysts of the Irish development aid programme, has since 1994 provided an annual commentary on it in the journal Irish Studies in International Affairs published by the Royal Irish Academy. She welcomes the renewed commitment to the programme in the current issue, and urges especially that it be brought more to the attention of the Irish public.
That would be helped if the values it is based on were brought more into Irish public debate about this State's development priorities. Helping the poorest of the poor, stressing health and education and encouraging public participation in development are universal values, after all.
Several authors in a fine festschrift published this year for Helen O'Neill (Trade, Aid and Development, University College Dublin Press) take up this challenge. One of them, Peadar Kirby, examines Ireland's economic "miracle" through the lens of three insights from development theory: that sustainable development arises from an endogenous or internal growth dynamic; that greater social equality is a key criterion of successful development; and that the state plays a key role in fostering and sustaining development.
He finds, via a good survey of the various theories of Ireland's recent economic history and using Amartya Sen's definition of the objective of development as allowing people "to live the kind of lives that people have reason to value", that Ireland falls well short of achieving these three conditions.
These are interesting insights from a field which is now more theoretically disputed than before, as other contributors such as Frank Barry and Bjorn Hettne make clear. But they confirm that development policy, like comparable initiatives on active citizenship and social capital, can only benefit from vigorous argument about its relevance and application.
pgillespie@irish-times.ie