THE LAST year has been a terrible one, both for Ireland’s image in the wider world and for our own sense of national pride. These are not merely abstract considerations. The damage to Ireland’s reputation has a real cost in terms of higher interest rates on borrowing and doubts about inward investment. The loss of self-confidence makes it harder to summon the collective belief that we can tackle the current crisis.
One of the few areas in which national pride has not been a matter of sentimental rhetoric or inflated self-importance has been Ireland’s relationship with the developing world. We have had three things to be proud of. The Government has made significant progress towards reaching the UN target of devoting 0.7 per cent of GNP to overseas development aid (ODA). The public has been extremely generous in adding its voluntary contributions to Irish aid agencies. And those agencies have been, on the whole, world-class organisations, extremely effective and innovative in delivering real benefits to the poorest of the poor. There has never been a time when these achievements were more necessary.
As Fintan O’Toole’s reports from Kenya have shown, the forces that are bearing down on the poorest people cannot be divorced from those that are shaping our own lives. The climate change that is having such drastic effects on Masai pastoralists is a portent of a world we are helping to create. The vast urban slums that are the fastest growing type of human habitation are the results of the same forces of economic globalisation with which we are struggling. The phrase “common humanity” has never had such a direct and simple meaning: we are in this together.
It is a regrettable reality that, as the economy shrinks, overseas aid, set as a proportion of GNP, automatically shrinks. However, the Government has gone well beyond this built-in decline and has chosen to cut it in 2009 by 24 per cent, or €220 million in cash terms. At the same time, the Irish public, wracked by its own anxieties and turning its gaze inwards, has been significantly less generous with its voluntary donations.
The results of this pincer move are brutally predictable. Irish aid agencies are ending programmes, sacking front-line staff and in some cases pulling out of particular countries completely. This is happening at a time when the poorest of the poor are being squeezed by rising food prices, the continuing devastation of diseases including HIV and the effects of climate change. The billion hungry people in the world do not have cushions or safety nets – what to us are tiny shifts in resources can be quite literally matters of life and death.
The least that needs to happen on the Government side is a freezing of the aid budget at its current level. More cuts would turn painful necessity into callous indifference. Equally, the Irish public needs to remember that in much tougher times than today, it took pride in being the world’s most generous contributor to aid organisations. If we are to hold our heads up high again, we must not avert our eyes from suffering far greater than our own.