Caoimhghín Ó Caoláin (Cavan-Monaghan, Sinn Fein)

I accord appreciation to the Green Party for allowing the House the opportunity to debate and formally endorse the Make Poverty History campaign which is unconditionally and enthusiastically supported by my party from the beginning. Sinn Féin activists are preparing to hit the streets of Dublin where, together with others committed to global social and economic justice, we will gather on Thursday evening at 6.30 p.m. in Parnell Square. I encourage every one who believes in the universality of human rights, that poverty and hunger are human rights violations and that another world is possible to join us and the other demonstrators in an endorsement of this historic objective of the total elimination of poverty and our expression of an alternative vision of global social and economic justice.

I wholeheartedly endorse and share the approach that the Green Party has taken in this motion to emphasise the interlinked measures required to achieve our stated objective. With 100% debt cancellation for all heavily indebted poor countries, we need significantly increased, targeted and untied official development aid. We need fair trade rules, trade justice and the European Union to stop standing in the way of this and start acting like a real ally to the Group of 77.

We need states to stop spending obscene amounts of money on militarisation. Just as Sinn Féin's commitment to the total eradication of poverty does not stop at our borders, our commitment to the demilitarisation of conflict does not stop with our island but is one of the core objectives of our international relations policy. To truly make poverty history, the world needs a global peace dividend through the diversion of arms spending to spending on human security — food, shelter, clean water, access to healthcare, education, dignified employment, a living wage and full human rights.

What will the Taoiseach do when he attends the UN summit this autumn, representing the people of this State? Will he once again make aid or other commitments he has no intention of keeping, even though he also claims that our economy is stronger than ever and boasts that Ireland now ranks as the fourth wealthiest state in the world? Will he trot out the standard weak excuses for breaking his promise to allocate 0.7% of GNP to ODA spending by 2007 — that we are the ninth largest per capita donor of ODA and that we will honour the EU deadline by 2015? Why should we not aspire to be at the very top of the generosity league rather than lagging behind the Nordic states? Why must we be satisfied with reaching only 0.5%, possibly but not definitely by 2007, when other countries now give 1%?

Per capita spending is not relevant to the UN's proposal to contribute a fixed percentage of the nation's wealth. Under the Government, despite our unprecedented Celtic tiger wealth, Ireland has failed and will continue to fail into the foreseeable future to commit just over 0.5% of our income per year to eradicating global poverty. To make matters worse, in the most unscrupulous and duplicitous way the Government and the Taoiseach misled our friends in the developing world to get votes for a seat on the UN Security Council. The Government took advantage of the vulnerability of many of those countries for its own aggrandisement. The word "shameful" cannot even scratch the surface. The Taoiseach promised the world on behalf of the Irish people. We supported him and felt proud of that commitment, on which the Government does not have the right to renege unilaterally. Sinn Féin will not give up on it; we will continue to press the Government to keep its promise on behalf of the citizens of the State.

By now, we are all familiar with the facts and figures: the 600 million children living in absolute poverty and the one child who dies every three seconds from hunger and preventable disease. We can all in our mind's eye see the contrast with the obscene, unspendable wealth amassed and wasted by an elite few. The poorest countries' share of world trade has dropped by almost half since 1981 and is now as low as 0.4%. Under the current unjust world trade rules, poor countries must pay back 14 times what they receive in aid. The world, despite agreeing the UN millennium development goal to halve world poverty by 2015, is not following through on its commitments. At the current rate of progress, we will not even halve the number living in absolute poverty until 2147.

The message with which we need to really come to grips today is a simple one. Nelson Mandela expressed it perfectly when he recently said, "Poverty is not natural. It is man made and it can be overcome and eradicated by the actions of human beings." I have said it in the past and will repeat myself as often as necessary: all we really need to do to make poverty history is to muster the collective political will. Who could disagree with this?

We are keeping it simple because our message does not need to be complicated. We do not need to commission more studies because we already know the actions we have to take to make this shared vision a reality. As the leaders of the world's richest countries gather in Scotland for the G8 summit, we and millions like us the world over, in every region and on every continent, demand trade justice, total debt cancellation and more and better aid for the world's poorest countries. As republicans, socialists and internationalists, we are fully committed to making poverty history for everyone on this island and all our brothers and sisters in every nation.

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