The US development economist Jeffrey Sachs, one of the architects of the UN's Millennium Goals strategy, has characterised the belief by Americans that their nation is one of the most generous donors of development aid as "one of our great national myths". A recent poll has shown that most Americans believe that the US spends a quarter of its budget on aid; it actually spends well under a quarter of 1 per cent.
And so, in the absence of significant domestic political pressure, it was not altogether surprising that President Bush felt unable to come up with more than the vaguest of promises on debt relief for developing nations when his closest international ally, the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, was in Washington on Tuesday. Mr Bush's announcement that the US will give €550 million in humanitarian aid to countries threatened by famine was a cynical sleight of hand - the cash had already been appropriated by Congress as aid funding and was simply awaiting designation to particular projects.
Crucially, Mr Bush refused to back Mr Blair's more ambitious plan to see the forthcoming Gleneagles G8 summit announce a doubling of aid from rich nations to $25 billion each year and starting in 2015, $50 billion annually. The summit is also hoped to announce a major programme of debt cancellation.
Currently the US gives a mere 0.16 per cent of GNP every year to help the developing world despite its ostensible commitment to the UN target of reaching 0.7 per cent of GNP by 2015. Yet on current projections from the UN Development Programme there will be five million deaths of children under five in Africa between now and 2015 - that is three million more than if the targets to which the UN member-states in 2000 committed themselves in their Millennium Goals were being met. One hundred and fifteen million children will have lost the chance of a decent basic education, while 219 million more people will have been condemned to continue to live in poverty.
"Helping those who suffer and preventing the senseless death of millions of people in Africa is a central commitment of my administration's foreign policy," Mr Bush told reporters on Tuesday. But fine words butter no parsnips.
Clearly, the US alone is not responsible for the broken promises to Africa. And the Taoiseach and his Government must honour their commitments to reaching 0.7 per cent of GNP.
The challenge of eradicating poverty cannot be met without the US, the richest country in the world and one with an aspiration to global moral leadership, stepping up to the plate. As the New York Times noted yesterday, 0.7 per cent of the US economy amounts to about $80 billion. That is broadly equivalent to the figure just approved by the Senate for additional military spending, mostly in Iraq, and is significantly short of last year's $140 billion corporate tax cut.