Michael D Higgins (Galway West, Labour)

I want to use the 15 minutes available in the most positive way possible to deal with the important meetings that will take place at the United Nations in September, to discuss the general issue of UN reform. There is a recurring theme, which is entirely misleading, in some speeches that have been circulating in the build-up to the review of the reform of the United Nations. It is that the United Nations failed in some respect at the time immediately prior to the latest invasion of Iraq. This is to confuse matters and I have not the time to delay on it this afternoon. However, the United Nations Charter was broken. There was no opportunity — and neither does it now exist — for the exercise of pre-emptive strike in the UN Charter. In addition, the process of design of resolution at the United Nations was seriously impaired by the production of a resolution that was interpreted by those who wanted it as a charter for war. However, it was described here, as elsewhere as a resolution that would avoid war. In the context of that there is an entire misrepresentation of the French position in the Security Council. Thus the "failure" as it was called of the United Nations to be of one mind to go to war became construed as a type of failure of the United Nations.

The United Nations was degraded by the production before it in the speech of Mr. ColinPowell, of a tissue of fiction and worse, carefully constructed untruths. Some of us had access to bits and pieces of this, which was not based on primary intelligence and much of which was provided by the United Kingdom. Let us say that it was that which destroyed the United Nations in that period and an appalling consequence continues to be paid for it to this day.

I turn to the more positive side because on the subject of reform a number of fundamental issues will have to be discussed. It would be a pity if they are all distracted into a discussion on reform of the Security Council, because there are more fundamental issues to be discussed. It is a fundamental issue but it is not the sole one. Perhaps the concentration the Secretary General, Mr. Kofi Annan, has placed on the world millennium development goals is correct. Our Minister for Foreign Affairs, when speaking abroad has, in fact, taken up the divisions Mr. Kofi Annan has in his presentation as a cluster of freedoms. Certainly, freedom from want and insecurity is best achieved by the meeting of the world millennium development goals.

We have been here before, however. In the 1970s there was a significant appeal to self-interest in the Brandt report. Then, in 1989 — it seems a long time ago, now — a fine report by UNICEF pointed out what it would cost simply to meet the basic needs. At that time the figure was put as between $30 billion and $50 billion, which was the equivalent of one 20th of military spending. In that year the UNICEF report estimated the cost of providing primary education as $5 per person, basic education literacy $25 per person and sanitation as $6 per person. There are times when the world has missed opportunities to make a significant intervention where it matters — where 2 billion people live in poverty, 30,000 children die every day and half a million mothers die in pregnancy.

Professor Geoffrey Sachs, when writing to the Secretary General of the UN, makes the point in his Investing in Development: A Practical Plan to Achieve the Millennium Development Goals. He suggests that the cost of achieving the goals are entirely affordable, well within the promises of 0.7% of GNP made at Monterrey and Johannesburg:

The required doubling of annual official development assistance to $135 billion in 2006, rising to $195 billion by 2015, pales beside the wealth of high income countries — and the world's military budget of $900 billion a year. Indeed, the increased development assistance will make up only half a percent of rich countries' combined income.

When Professor Sachs makes this statement in his report, I would suggest to the Minister that this could be achieved. The achievement of the World Millennium Development Goals between 2005 and 2015 would have the effect of lifting 500 million people out of extreme poverty, 300 million would no longer suffer from hunger and 350 million would have access to clean water. Taking the figures I have quoted, one could say that the 30 million children who otherwise might have died would live, and so forth. The Minister might agree with me that our approach must be an integrated one, combining debt relief with aid, trade and reform of the international financial institutions. It is important that debt relief is not taken out of the funds available for aid. Otherwise one would slide back. Additionality is a fundamental principle.

As regards the conditionalities which may cluster, we must remember that in the case of Uganda, for example, that country was not able take $65 million at one stage for AIDS/HIV because it was in breach of the budget it had agreed with the International Monetary Fund. That is the fourth component, namely, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. We must take the world millennium development goals as the phenomenon to which the other initiatives must adjust themselves. It should be inconceivable that the WMDGs are regarded as anything else. I have given the example of Ghana, before. Ghana, in the original debt relief initiative, post-1999, had imposed on it through an IMF condition the privatisation of Ghana Commercial Bank, which had a number of small depositors. The cost, when the public rejected this, was the loss of $1 billion in debt relief. This type of madness must stop.

Coming to the UN reform, I hope there will be a reassessment, even if it is through the modest reform of the Economic and Social Committee. At least the twin institutions of the IMF and the World Bank must be restored to their origins, within the family of the United Nations. One of the bolder proposals for UN reform was to create a type of economic security council in which the World Millennium Development Goals might be addressed with all the authority of the United Nations.

I want to make some practical points as well, because that is my purpose, today. I hope in time those three reports that came out in the early 1990s from Mr. Erskine Childers and Mr. Brian Urquhart on administrative reform within the United Nations, will be looked at. I liked the structure of their reports. They dealt, for example, with a much stronger proposal for reform of the administration of the United Nations. If Mr. Kofi Annan is to float across the world, quite rightly, trying to build up regional structures and so forth, there is a great case to be made for an assistant General Secretary of the United Nations running the organisation. Again, what was originally envisaged for the United Nations was that it was all to be in one building, not necessarily in the location where it is now. The scattering of its offices has given rise to some inefficiency.

It is a criticism not just of this Government, but of many Governments, that the tiniest UN organisation gets the smallest funding in Ireland, namely, the United Nations Association. It should be far stronger and built into the education system at primary and secondary levels. It should be properly and better organised in terms of having someone able to speak about the work of the United Nations, because there is great public interest in that. As regards the history of the General Assembly, there was an enormous influx of countries in the 1960s. One of the powerful forums is the UN Decolonisation Committee. We now move into this new atmosphere in which we find ourselves, with an enlarged UN membership.

I want to address the important issue as regards the way the Labour Party has to review its policy on the UN and move it on. In the Minister's speech today, there is a discussion, for example, on the right to protect. I have spoken on this before. It is the difference between humanitarian protection and intervention. Humanitarian intervention has been abused since Mussolini invaded North Africa. It is seen as the person deciding he or she has the right to intervene in a country and it has had different justifications.

Humanitarian protection is the idea that a vulnerable minority cannot be protected by those who should do so and a vulnerable minority is not being protected by those who should do so. On what basis have they been invited in? I admit it means that significant progress on the work of establishing universal rights must be achieved. Universal rights do not just mean western-sourced rights based on the individual but rights based on communities and rights drawing on fundamental principles of Islam. The failure to make progress on what was there as the dialogue between civilisations which might have yielded a rights framework is serving as a missing backdrop to that set of principles around which could be constructed what Dr. Sanoon has described as humanitarian protection.

I certainly am willing to go into that dialogue and it is something we must do. The cynics who are criticising Africa in so many different ways are not being helpful towards us. I challenge some of those who suggest that I, who support the right of school children to attend school in any country in Africa or to have clean water, do not want to put the imposition that I will not deliver aid until I am in a position to approve of the Government. That is too easy, and other ways exist. One can make the reasonable demand that the moneys given by Ireland go to help those in desperate need of health care and primary education. I assure the House the money is used in that way because I have been to Africa.

After 1999 the most heavily indebted countries received different forms of debt relief with appalling conditionalities. This has been empirically studied by Hinchcliffe in his notes on the impact of the HIPC initiative on education and health public expenditures in African countries and in Relief Works: African Proposals for Debt Cancellation and Debt Relief Works, by Romilly Greenwood and Sasha Blackmore. They examined how the money was spent and showed that in Benin, 43% of such debt relief was expended on education in 2002 and allowed for the recruitment of teachers for vacant posts in rural areas. A total of 54% of the aid went to health, of which one fifth was used to recruit health staff for rural clinics and the remainder was allocated to implementing HIV-Aids programmes.

In Mali, 5,000 community teachers were hired. In Niger the money was spent on rural education, health, food security and water systems. In Malawi, 3,600 new teachers were trained every year. In Burkina Faso, 39% of HIPC relief was spent on education, 33% on health and a further amount on rural roads.

I say to those who raise questions to look at the whole continent of Africa and the tapestry of different conditions, and read the studies before making criticisms. To strike a rhetorical stance will they say we should not spend our money until this, that and the other is perfect? This is a very serious issue. Not all countries are in favour of the integrated approach on debt, aid and reform of the international financial institutions we might wish to advance. Such countries would be very glad to seize on an excuse to suggest that governance is impossible and that corruption is endemic. This would be an appalling, cynical evasion and it must be stamped out immediately. The decade to 2015 will be a great time and a moral test in which we will see how much progress we have made.

Some issues are missing from the report which has been made available to Kofi Annan, Secretary General of the United Nations. These include the issue of bonded labour. It is very important that this House debates the issue — not on a Friday — to include changes at the level of the Department of Finance. I suggest people from Development Co-operation Ireland go to the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. At trade level, anything we do in December in Hong Kong must not contradict what is being debated now. The EPAs negotiated between the European Union and Africa must be examined. For all those reasons I hope that when the House resumes it will be on a day when the Chamber will be full and many more Deputies will be interested in what will be the last great opportunity for us to do something moral, necessary and important for the world.

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