Cutting €32 million from the foreign aid budget will not solve Ireland's economic problems, but it will have devastating implications for the starving, says Dr Mary Condren
Just imagine. Your country has been brought to its knees by famine: the children, the elderly and the vulnerable are starving. Even where some food is available, a plague has enveloped the land. The once young and able-bodied are weak and dispirited. Many will die through lack of the medicines freely available in the West. Economists predict that in 20 years the population will have decreased by four-fifths.
Surely aid will soon be at hand. For generations missionaries have come believing in a Redeemer, a God who values the weak, vulnerable, sick and infirm.
They built schools, orphanages, churches and hospitals. They lived on the frugal diets of the local people. Some were jailed, tortured for these beliefs: some paid the ultimate price. Some died in their beds, their bodies laid to rest in their adopted countries - their memories cherished by those they served. Surely such a people, such a God will come to their aid. Surely they must know of our plight?
The Jews too must have wondered, when they were facing persecution and virtual extinction in one of Europe's greatest moral trials. Surely, if only people knew, help would be at hand? In the half-century since then, all that separates Europeans from the charge of moral barbarism is the scarcely credible claim of ignorance.
In a globalised world this fragile moral outpost - ignorance of the facts - is no more. Daily, the images of starving children fill our television screens. Much of Africa teeters on the brink of destruction.
Whatever peoples AIDS and famine fail to wipe out will be devastated by the incessant wars, made even worse by the arms supplied by Western nations.
When the Minister for Finance cut €32 million from the Irish contribution to overseas development, he must have been gambling that the people of Ireland were, as Camus put it, "distracted by distraction by distraction". Was he hoping that our newly found wealth had psychically numbed us into amnesia, into moral turpitude?
Certainly the bread and circus economics of the pre-election times had to come to an end. But in the economies of scale, surely not on matters of life and death, and surely not without even a feeble stab at moral rectitude, otherwise known as a referendum?
Think of the possibilities. Please check one of the following boxes: "The Irish people, respecting the right to life of unnamed starving children in the four-fifths world, resolve to put an extra penny on the top rate of tax, to curtail the life-span of the SSIA scheme by a month, or even a year, or even curtail the bonus by one per cent."
In the face of starving children, who among us would have ticked the last box entitled, "No, we demand business as usual"?
Today, in our advanced world, 25,000 children die daily of starvation, malnutrition or preventable diseases. How would the Minister's claim stand up in history: "we needed to balance the books"? Ireland is among the richest nations. Whatever moral standing we might still have among the world's poor derives from the lives and witness of those women and men who cast caution to the wind, trusted in the mercy of Providence, and gambled - what Pascal called "a divine wager" - that their lives of commitment were ultimately meaningful.
Kiltegan, Killeshandra, Kimmage, Mount Oliver, Monasterevin, Dalgan Park - these names have circled the globe way out of proportion to their humble origins. Their bearers bore witness to a wisdom that was not the wisdom of this world: the quick stroke and the easy profit. Hannah Arendt concluded that in our time evil does not come complete with cloven hooves, breathing fire. If anything, evil is banal, technical, rational and systemic: mere social bookkeeping.
Cutting €32 million from Ireland's aid budget will not solve Ireland's economic problems, but it will have devastating implications for the starving poor whose plight might otherwise have been alleviated. If there is an ounce of moral fibre left in us, we must stand up and be counted.
Mary Condren teaches at the Centre for Gender and Women's Studies, Trinity College, Dublin