Mark Daly (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

The figures are there in the overseas aid reports. The bottom line is that a huge portion of the budget is going to EU institutions and the World Bank. My party, in common with most people in this country, wants to support the overseas aid programme. The fact that it is being rolled up into the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade probably makes sense in so far as the rate at which many African countries are growing in terms of gross national product means there are huge trade opportunities for Ireland. We do not, however, want to go down the route of our neighbour jurisdiction, which insists on aid and trade being tightly linked. We certainly do not support the notion that the sale of military weapons in certain countries is a form of aid.

In regard to the abuse of aid moneys, the misappropriation of State funding is something that unfortunately happens in Governments throughout the world. In the case of Malawi, we saw the President and Prime Minister appropriating lavish amounts of money for personal expenditure such as weddings. Such reckless spending by recipient countries undermines our overseas aid budget. Likewise, the Minister of State referred to the purchase of fighter jets in Uganda. That these abuses were picked up by our auditing system tells us it is working. These types of abuses will unfortunately arise from time to time, which is why we have an auditing system. My party will not stand over using the exposure of such abuse as a reason to pull back on overseas aid. It would make an easy headline for anybody to declare that we should withdraw our funding for Uganda because moneys already donated have been misappropriated. What is required is an auditing system which ensures that all moneys going into the system are properly allocated and spent.

To return to my first point, will the Minister of State comment on the portion of overseas aid that is going directly to help ordinary people in partner countries?

Everyone wants to see it hitting the ground and being used effectively.

Although the amount of money that we allocate to overseas aid is decreasing due to our situation, we still have commitments to various programmes at EU level. The Minister of State might correct me, but we must contribute 1.7% to a particular fund. I am a member of the foreign affairs committee. Every so often, the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade's allocation of €120 million to a certain EU fund over five years is discussed. This money comes out of our overseas aid budget and is given to an EU institution into which we have some input but over which we have little control. I suggest that we target funding towards non-governmental organisations, NGOs, and partner countries. We have control over that funding and can achieve better outcomes that are visible to the public, whose support is critical to the-----