Conor Lenihan (Dublin South West, Fianna Fail)

The commitment remains to be achieved. For the purposes of discussion on the Estimates, my Department will go into discussions with other Departments and will make the case that the target should be achieved within the time frame outlined.

The idea of needing to incorporate the commitment within legislation is a double-edged instrument. One of the dangers of doing that is that it would lead to calls in other areas, such as health and education, for similar types of commitment. In general, the management of the public service demands a certain amount of flexibility in resource allocation between different Departments. There is also a much used argument against such a particular measure, which is that if the economy was subject to a sharp reduction in growth, then the overall amounts of money available to overseas development aid would sharply reduce in actual amounts. That is a result that most of us would profoundly regret. An instrument designed to guarantee a particular result would actually achieve the exact opposite when our economy went into reverse. For those reasons the Government would discount such a proposal.

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