Conor Lenihan (Dublin South West, Fianna Fail)

I welcome the Senator's intervention regarding Burma and the other countries he mentioned earlier. I will deal with the last one first. As I indicated on the previous occasion when the Bill came before the House, Ireland is one of the foremost countries in utterly condemning the terrible acts of the Burmese junta. As the Senator is aware, Europe applies some element of exclusion on senior officials from that country travelling to Europe and we participate in that scheme. We are extremely concerned about the ongoing suggestions or allegations of genocide in that country. A number of NGOs have urged me and other European governments to consider initiating a legal case against Burma over allegations of genocide. Obviously no such case would be initiated unless we felt it had a good chance of success before the International Criminal Court in The Hague. This is one of a number of matters that some of our EU partners are considering.

Obviously, it would be catastrophic for any country or group of countries to begin such an action, creating the expectation that it might succeed. Were it to fail, it would have a negative effect and would be used by the unscrupulous regime in Burma to discredit generally international campaigns designed to bring it to account for human rights abuses there. We would not intend expanding diplomatic relations with that country by extending the courtesy of having ambassadors accredited to it. While we have diplomatic relations with Burma, these were established during our EU Presidency as it was necessary to communicate EU concerns directly to the regime, but it did not confer any level of approval on the regime.

We are sending a signal to both Ethiopia and Uganda that we will not extend the title of ambassador to our representatives in those countries as it could be interpreted wrongly as some signal of approval of what is going on in those countries. As we have done in Mozambique, Tanzania, Zambia and Lesotho we would be willing to upgrade our diplomatic representation in those countries to full embassy status should we see discernible signs of improvement and redressing the wrongs that have occurred in those countries in recent months. There are no easy solutions to this issue.

This week I spent time in Paris with the OECD's development committee where 22 of the richest donors in the world were gathered. We had a significant discussion about Ethiopia. The 22 donors came from Asia, Europe and the continent of America. All of them are as perplexed and challenged as we are regarding involvement in Ethiopia. There are no easy solutions. Some people would like us simply to pull the plug on our aid programme. However, doing so would cause serious damage to some of the poorest people in the world.

The issues that have been considered are what are called the "aid modalities". Many of our donor colleagues in Europe and beyond are now switching the nature of their support in that country. The UK, which had commenced direct budget support, has now withdrawn it. As Ireland had never extended full budget support to Ethiopia, we never needed to withdraw it. We will certainly not extend direct budget support to either Ethiopia or Uganda until we see improvements there.

Other countries are considering aid modalities which Ireland was involved in setting up. We participated in the establishment of a programme of safety nets that prevents 7 million people in Ethiopia from starving every year. Along with other donor countries, Ireland funds the basic social support net in question. We actually designed this particular social net and we were very involved in its creation. It helps to eliminate the potential for the deaths of approximately 7 million people in Ethiopia. The United Kingdom is switching much of the money that it formerly allocated as direct budget support to the mechanism that we were involved in creating and fund on an ongoing basis. I do not want to sound too patriotic by calling it "our mechanism".

There are significant issues in this regard. The chairman of the OECD development assistance committee has recommended that we should continue to engage with Ethiopia and Uganda. The committee acts like a referee on matters of development policy — it makes recommendations of best practice and tries to encourage other members of the OECD to adopt best practice. The chairman of the committee, Mr. Richard Manning, has advised us that large donors and slightly smaller donors like Ireland should retain our engagements in both countries, while intensifying the level of diplomatic pressure we put on the regimes there to change and to rectify the damage they may have done. He also said we should consider changing the underlying systems of financial support that we offer to Ethiopia and Uganda, for example by ring-fencing our funds in a manner that ensures they cannot be tampered or interfered with by the relevant governments. We have been given that advice by the chairman of a committee, of which Ireland is a member, which is the most important body in the development sphere. We will take that course of action — we certainly do not intend to disengage ourselves from either country in the short term.

Disengagement from Ethiopia and Uganda remains a possibility if the circumstances there deteriorate, or if we learn that the Prime Ministers of those countries are continuing to ignore the best advice that has been tendered and offered by the international donors with whom we work on the ground. I hope we do not find ourselves knocking on a door when nobody is responding to the suggestions we make, but if that happens it is obvious that we will have to consider the ultimate solution, which is to begin a process of disengagement. We are not ruling out such a solution but for the time being we continue to feel, thankfully, that there is room to exert diplomatic and other pressure to bring the Ethiopian and Ugandan regimes to account for the things which have occurred in those countries.