Rónán Mullen (Independent)

I welcome the Minister of State to the House. The idea of the Irish Government spending money for these declared purposes is laudable. The millennium development goals commit us to reducing maternal mortality by 75% between 1990 and 2015. Any money we spend seeking to prevent female genital mutilation and maternal mortality and on the campaign to end fistula is money well spent. I commend the Government on its right intention in contributing generously to these purposes.

What is less clear, however, is whether the UNFPA is the organisation that should receive this funding. I acknowledge that the Minister of State has inherited a situation here. He is not long in the brief. As Senator Cummins mentioned, concerns have been expressed about whether the UNFPA is the correct organisation to be trusted with funds for these very sensitive purposes. Its activities in regard to the promotion of abortion in different parts of the world have been documented. I wonder whether Senator Cummins was asking if that had been disproved or merely disputed. The voices that have expressed concern about the UNFPA's activities are very respectable. I understand they are the right aims but I put the Minister of State on notice that I will be visiting him in his Dublin office and in his home constituency to talk about whether the UNFPA should be in receipt of Irish funding without guarantees that we have not had to date.

Let me say a little more about what I mean. I shall start by talking about two cases. Magna Morales was a Peruvian woman. Government officials in that country, as part of its controversial policy of population control, took her from her village in Northern Peru and subjected her to tubal ligation. Essentially, it entailed the tying up of her fallopian tubes in order to stop her having any more children killed her. The mother of five children died ten days after the operation due to the lack of follow-up medical care.

On the other side of the world, in Sihui county in China, women are routinely forced to have abortions and sterilisations under that country's horrific one-child policy. Women who have had more than one child, or two in rural areas, are subject to fines, and can have their houses destroyed if they attempt to flee. This policy, which is almost 30 years old, was intended to curb population growth in that country. It has certainly achieved that but at a huge cost, as in Peru, to women's rights and human dignity generally. These barbaric practices may seem to belong to a more brutal era but they are happening now and we in Ireland may well bear some responsibility for them.

As we debate this motion congratulating the Government for giving an extra €3 million for these purposes, most of it to the United Nations Fund for Population Activities, we have to ask about the UNFPA's performance to date. This is an organisation that received €4.5 million in core funding last year in addition to funding of TRUS. It is assumed, therefore, that they will receive between €5 million and €8 million this year. The UNFPA insist, as do its many defenders, that it does not promote or support coercive population policies. It points to its statutes which forbid the funding of abortion, involuntary sterilisation or coercive practices of any kind. It limits its reproductive health promotion to the provision of contraception, or so we are told. For over a decade, evidence has been building up to show that it is intimately involved in promoting abortion, in terms of providing equipment and pressurising countries whose laws forbid abortion to legalise the practice. It is no consolation to me that Senator Fitzgerald mentioned that the enforcing agency — I think she used the interesting term the "collaborating agency" — in Ireland of the UNFPA is the Irish Family Planning Association because it does not have a good record when it comes to honouring the constitutional values of the dignity of all persons born and unborn.

In 1998, an investigation by the US Congress found that UNFPA activity in China amounted to effective support for China's notorious forced abortion and sterilisation policies. Evidence was recorded of forced sterilisation, forced abortions and extra judicial detentions for those who did not comply with the Chinese government's policy. All this was happening while the UNFPA was aiding the Chinese population programme and denying there was any coercion. In 2001, a further hearing determined that coercion was still a key part of Chinese policy. People who like to close their eyes to these facts like to claim that the people who make these claims are right wingers.

Congressman Chris Smith in the United Stated is no right winger. He is a champion of various human rights causes, from the rights of immigrants to the rights of people with autism to the prevention of torture. In fact he should run for the presidency of the United States some time. He would make a refreshing change from those who seem to advocate torture as a necessary part of keeping their country safe. He says that the UNFPA has worked hand in glove with China's repressive population policy. He points to the fact that the UNFPA has repeatedly defended the Chinese one-child policy, even praising it on some occasions. In 1981, the then executive director of the organisation, Rafael Salas called the one-child policy "a superb example of integrating population programs with the goals of national development". In 1983, the UNFPA established a new honour called the United Nations Population Award, a sort of Nobel Prize for population control programmes. One of its inaugural recipients was the Chinese state family planning commission, which was responsible for all I have outlined.

In 1998, UNFPA changed tack, condemning the coercion so crucial to Chinese policy. However, it still maintained its close ties with the Chinese regime. According to UNFPA and its allies, UNFPA only resumed operations in China after Chinese officials agreed to end all quotas and birth restrictions. Former US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, no right winger, declared in 2002——