Mark Daly (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

The latest survey shows that 88% of people in this country are proud of Ireland's record in the area of international aid. We have been involved in many excellent initiatives which have saved and transformed the lives of millions of people. Our record as a donor country is undoubtedly a legacy of our own past experience of famine and want. We are now in difficult times, however, and people are rightly seeking assurance that our contribution to donor countries is being spent as effectively as possible.

One of the points my party colleagues and I raised in the discussions on the policy paper was that every cent of our overseas aid budget is now being borrowed and most of that money is not, in fact, going directly to donor countries but rather to various European institutions. Irish people might be less proud and supportive of our work in partner countries if they knew that most of the money we are borrowing for this purpose is going to European institutions and countries which are using it for their own programmes. People are hugely supportive of non-governmental organisations such as Concern, but the reality is that most of our overseas aid budget does not go to those bodies which do tangible work that is of real benefit to people in partner countries. Instead, it goes to EU institutions which disburse it in accordance with their own policies.

During our discussions with the Minister of State on the policy paper, I proposed that at the very least, the interest we are being charged on the €600 million we are borrowing for our overseas aid programme should be taken into account when we are giving it back to European Union institutions. What is essentially happening is that we are borrowing the money from one institution in order to give it back to other institutions. We are talking about hundreds of millions of euro here. I would never suggest that we should cease funding for the overseas aid budget, but we should be more targeted in our approach. This will give us confidence that the moneys we provide are benefitting partner countries in the most effective way, such as in those countries where we are taking a lead role in education and health. During a recent visit to Zambia with the Clinton Foundation, for example, I saw how Ireland's aid programme is making a huge difference to the lives of ordinary people. That is how Irish people want to see the overseas aid budget being spent. They do not want it to be eaten up by bureaucracy at European Union level.