Paudge Connolly (Cavan-Monaghan, Independent)

It is worth remembering that the former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan described the conditions in Darfur as little short of hell on earth. That is probably a mild enough description of what has occurred there. In 1994 the world stood by and watched as the Rwanda genocide claimed hundreds of thousands of lives, yet we are witnessing the same today in Darfur. I wonder what we have learned from previous experience in Rwanda.

This genocide began in 2003 when the Sudanese Government initiated brutal attacks against civilians in Darfur after rebels in the region rose up to demand a greater role in Sudan's leadership. The goal of the killing is ethnic cleansing and the Sudanese are carrying out the genocide to wipe out the ethnically distinctive Darfurians and take over the region. The Arab militia or Janjaweed — the riders from hell — is the primary perpetrator of most genocidal acts in Darfur and is armed and equipped by the Sudanese Government. The Sudanese Government often attacks Darfurian communities with bombers and ground troops in co-ordination with the Janjaweed. The Janjaweed continues to attack black Darfurians who have fled to refugee camps. They wait for the refugees to leave the safety of the camps for desperately needed supplies like firewood. Then they torture and kill the men and women and rape even pregnant women — there are no barriers here.

More than 400,000 civilians have lost their lives in Darfur and maybe this would focus our minds on how we distribute humanitarian aid in the Third World. No doubt getting aid to the targeted need is the big issue. Quite often, as has been mentioned, one is dealing regularly with corrupt people and governments, and it is quite difficult. Rather than trying to deal with every corrupt government, we should concentrate our aid on one country. While there always will be flash points, like Darfur, the tsunami or Hurricane Katrina for which we will need a special reserve fund, we should concentrate our Third World aid. The developed countries should adopt an underdeveloped or Third World country. This is the way forward. Then we can target aid and see where it goes.

I gather that of €1 given in charity, 10 cents is hitting the target. That is not good enough and the position will not improve if we try to change the entire African Continent. We should pick or adopt one of these African countries because we are pumping in hundreds of millions of euro — a certain amount of our GDP — into Third World aid. If we did so, we could take on education, health, infrastructure and food aid projects in that country and monitor them with full-time staff, rather than try to dot our administration across Africa, which cannot work. I would like the Government to foster that idea amongst the developed countries. This notion of providing a little here and there is no good. It does not provide any way of policing the vast amount of money we will be giving and the increased amount we will be asked to give. This would also help to reduce our administration costs. I realise the staff must do their work out there but when one considers all the administration for which we are paying in the Third World, it is not morally right. We should ask ourselves whether we are getting value for money.

We are institutionalising children in Romania. The type of institutional policies that we abhor in this country are coming back to haunt us here. We are funding and recommending the building of orphanages in Romania and it is not the right way forward. We should sit back and examine policies which we now see as wrong. The fruits of that will only come to haunt us in 25 or 30 years time. We should be taking a more critical look at the money that we are giving to Third World countries.

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