Ruairi Quinn (Dublin South East, Labour)

I wish to share time with Deputy Burton.

I offer my congratulations to the Minister of State, Deputy Conor Lenihan, and the Government on the production of the White Paper. If we do not deal with the issue of corruption and poor governance, this money will be wasted. The people in the Visitors Gallery and the taxpayers paying €700 million to €1 billion per year and who find it hard to understand why they cannot get remedial teachers for their grandchildren or children in schools will turn on this whole generation of generosity and say it is a waste of funds. I have examined the White Paper and looked particularly at the part which deals with good governance and so on, but it is not strong enough. The Minister's successors will have great difficulty in times of economic hardship persuading Ministers for Finance to give money if everybody knows it will be wasted.

Obviously, the development aid picture is much wider and more sophisticated than the presentation I will make, but the time constraint forces me to focus on one point. I will send the Minister a detailed paper that I offered in 1999 which was a proposal for the establishment of an institute of democracy. I listened to the contribution of Deputy Gay Mitchell, a person with whom I seldom agree, but he was right in what he said. I went to a school run by Irish missionaries, the Holy Ghost Fathers. I had a direct relationship with men who had come back from Nigeria, Sierra Leone or Trinidad. They had first-hand experience of Africa and carried the marks of it, including recurring illnesses. We owned parts of Africa because of their experience and unless that is transposed into the next generation, we will not build the kind of linkages that are necessary. Every county council should be twinned with an equivalent body somewhere in the designated recipient countries to which the Minister of State referred. There should be an institute for democracy focusing on teaching people how to do the business of Government. We have a long record of mistakes and lessons bitterly learned. The Local Appointments Commission, for example, which got rid of corruption and cronyism, and the evidence from the tribunals points to the fact that nobody is perfect and countries must live and relearn the lesson of clean government in every generation.

There is no point in giving money, either directly to recipient nations or to multilateral organisations which do not have the necessary scrutiny to ensure the money given ends up in the right place. Ghana achieved its independence in 1957 and had a higher per capita income than the Republic of South Korea at that time. However, today the Republic of South Korea produces Samsung televisions, Hyundai cars and many other products. Why is Ghana, which is among the few relatively successful African countries, a million miles behind the Republic of South Korea in terms of the quality of life of its citizens? Why does the gap exist and why is it widening? There is a number of explanations in this regard. The Republic of South Korea was a managed democracy for many years. It was a quasi-dictatorship and the recipient of much aid from the United States of America. For a variety of reasons, which time constraints prevent me from elaborating on, Ghana is the measure of the failure of Africa. The dark continent, as Dr. Livingstone described it, has got darker in my life time. It has gone backwards relative to the rest of the world.

The White Paper proposes to identify and prioritise Africa for reasons I broadly support, although there are other parts of the world which also deserve our attention. However, unless we deal with the issues of governance, corruption, honesty and transparency and link it back to people in Ireland, the current popular support for development aid will not be maintained. When Trócaire was established many years ago by the Irish Catholic bishops, a conscious decision was made to devote a certain percentage of total funds to domestic education and awareness raising around development issues. At the time, a number of conservative and relatively unprogressive people argued that this would be a waste of money. They maintained that all moneys raised should be given to the recipient countries. However, that investment in education and awareness has laid the foundations for the kind of generosity and political acceptability which the Department currently enjoys. If we do not nurture and reinforce it, the arguments from people like Mr. John O'Shea of Goal concerning donating money to Uganda, which has a manifestly corrupt regime, will win out. If the Irish people realise we are funding crooks, they will be outraged and horrified. We believe that because we are giving money to the Third World, we are doing the right thing but we are funding gangsters in some parts of the world and unless we begin to deal with that in a variety of ways we will lose the popular political goodwill we currently experience.

I will not go into the arguments in detail, but the evidence is there, chapter and verse. I am aware that Mr. John O'Shea irritates many people because he is so outspoken but he has a track record to prove he has put his money where his mouth is, or his mouth where his money is, depending on one's viewpoint.

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