Ireland’s Long-Established ODA Commitment
In 2019, Ireland published its most recent policy update on Overseas Development Aid (ODA). Titled, A Better World; Ireland’s Policy for International Development, this followed on from Global Ireland 2025, launched in 2018, itself a “multi-annual, whole-of-government strategy to double the scope and impact of Ireland’s global engagement by 2025”. And, help secure a seat on the UN Security Council, when we contest it next.
Global Ireland represented, “the most ambitious renewal/expansion of Ireland’s international presence ever undertaken in terms of diplomacy, culture, business, overseas development assistance, tourism and trade”. In 2018, Government reaffirmed its commitment to the UN target of 0.7% of Gross National Income (GNI) to ODA by 2030. This commitment followed 32% increased ODA funding since 2014. As ODA funding rose alarmingly, Defence Forces budgets, in real terms, decreased to the lowest in Europe.
Our ODA builds on 150-year legacy foundations of our missionaries, volunteers and NGOs in developing, failed and recovering states. These, along with Defence Forces overseas deployments since 1958, help Ireland’s soft power projection abroad. It’s regrettable a greatly reduced missionaries footprint, and worryingly, fewer Defence Forces overseas deployments, can but reduce this influence.
The question might be asked, is this ODA model of continuously “providing the fish rather than the fishing rod” well and truly broken and self-perpetuating? Is ODA as a concept, with its umbilical cord to NGOs for programme delivery, a worrying, less than authentic, outdated and stale business model.
It’s Long Overdue Ireland’s NGO Driven ODA is Reviewed in Forensic Detail
Taoiseach Leo Varadkar’s embarrassing interview during the recent Munich Security Conference highlighted his attempt to deflect the reality of Ireland’s ‘lowest in the EU’ Defence Budget by bigging up Ireland’s large ODA in a vain attempt to suggest that ODA was some form of alternative defence budget. An informed Munich audience found his suggestion, of course, “very typically Irish”!!
While our Defence Forces are in disarray, evidence shows militaries in counties benefitting from our ODA are exponentially expanding and appropriately equipping their forces. Our ODA increasingly helps fund areas their own domestic budgets should. Ireland’s ODA funding model focuses extensively, and appropriately, on food security, clean water, sanitation, health, hospitals, schools and education.
Does Ireland’s ODA surreptitiously increase military expenditure in impoverished recipient countries?
ODA funding of Ireland’s magnitude to the twelve countries listed above, combined with ODA from other countries in Europe and beyond, allows their governments divert domestic budgets that should correctly fund to a greater degree their food security, medical and education provision. These governments do so with full knowledge ODA fills the void domestic funding doesn’t. This domestic de-funding is a factor in increasing their military budgets, but worryingly, enables, clientelism, personal and clique enrichment.
All countries listed above have long-term internal and regional security challenges requiring military forces, armaments and continuous logistical support. Rising military expenditure, in turn, directly influences a country’s level of violence and conflict. It’s overdue Ireland shining a questioning light on the military forces/military hardware in service in these listed countries, eleven in Africa, and one in Asia.
Military Budgets, Force Strength and Equipment in these 12 ODA recipient countries
Military budgets are funded from national exchequers, donations of military equipment from friendly states, or reduced cost procurement “most favoured nations” from allies. In a yearly journal entitled, The Military Balance, listings are provided of state’s military strengths of their armies, air and naval forces, and paramilitary forces like France’s Gendarmerie, Italy’s Carabinieri, or Spain’s Guardia Civile.
Listed above are the 2022 national defence budgets in USD of the identified ODA countries, key headline military hardware items such as main battle tanks, armoured vehicles, military aircraft and naval ships and vessels. The Military Balance is a comprehensive, reliable, trusted and prestigious publication. It’s a revealing comparative contrast of the derisory strength and equipment of the Defence Forces across its three services, Army, Air Corps and Naval Service, and the now barely alive Defence Forces Reserve.
Ireland’s ODA foreign policy requires an inquisitive ‘look under the bonnet’ analysis. This questioning should be not so much what our ODA is achieving in recipient countries, but equally what, perhaps, our ODA is enabling, by default, in them that may not be to Ireland’s liking, wishes or intent. Or more potently, with what this short analysis can reveal, should Ireland be sending ODA to some those countries at all?
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Another informative article in Gript that gives us information that we would never get from the MSM.
These are money laundering schemes and nothing more, this is our money and we have no visibility on what happens to the money and there fore I protest any money being sent abroad unless we get a breakdown on its spending before it leaves the country. I dont think coveney got his mansion on a private island on a ministers wage, not by a bloody long shot.
As I have commented previously all these countries squander many times the aid they receive through corruption, fraud, mismanagement and incompetence. It is not that all their citizens are corrupt and incompetent but those citizens who are honest and competent usually do not get the jobs that can direct their countries in the right direction. It would be better to push for trade rather than giving aid and support Irish citizens with the skills and competence to work in these countries for a few years with a select group in their field of specialization. Many small self supporting pilot projects with no government links or control would be of great benefit.
Trade not aid, Dambisa Moyo
How is it remotely in our interests to shovel cash at former British colonies?
It’s not in our interest but what has the interest of the Irish got to do with the way we are governed ?. Name one policy pursued by this government that is in our interest?.
Would it be possible to add a line showing Ireland’s defence spending along with the other comparatives?
Happy to read this article. Thanks.
very dangerous times just now, micheal martin is saying that if you do not agree with their way of goverment we are in trouble,you have no right to your apinion ,interview today friday on main stream news sites ,no need to send money overseas as most countries are not poor no more,
I have always questioned ODA since my late teens, when my aunt, working in Zambia, told me of a scheme that she supervised. She questioned her budget of 200,000 Zambian pounds, which she saw as excessive. However, she was soon provided with a list of people who had to be rewarded or compensated for allowing the scheme go ahead. It total, they received 155,000 between them, while the actual project cost about 45,000.
Officials and local chiefs were paid large sums, while those who worked on the scheme were paid a pittance. She could have refused to pay the bribes but then the project would not have proceeded. These men and women didn’t care that she was providing a network of clinics aimed at reducing infant and maternal deaths at child birth.
The more I read about foreign aid the more corruption and waste I saw. More recently, I questioned our continued aid to Ethiopia, as they bombed Tigrayan villages, using the latest aircraft and tanks. In my view, we were partly paying for every bomb and bullet used to kill civilians. As the Ethiopian army masses on the border with Eritrea, ready for invasion, we are enabling much of the spending involved and bare some of the blame for the deaths that will certainly follow.
More recently still, we saw Mick Martin touring a secondary school in Gaza, paid for by Irish tax payers, while their government spent their limited resources on tunnels and weapons and their leader lived a life of luxury in Dubai.
It’s time we stopped giving foreign aid, in it’s current form. Emergency aid is justified, for example, after an earthquake but financing schools, clinics, etc., while their government spends on military equipment and does nothing to stop corruption, is not.
so the answer to the question is YES, we as a country are being taken as fools
Gerard Craughwell’s pieces and his insights are a good addition to this site I have to say.
Hope he runs as TD next year if he’s no longer in running for the Seanad since his refusal to muffle his conscience and ‘toe-the-line’
He towed the line for a good few years before he began to have doubts.
Yeah. He messed up very badly with a few things, but has been honest with his retractions and admissions of failure. Unlike, say, O’Dea ‘ah, I didn’t read it’, or the outright lies from sinn féin.
I don’t expect to agree with him everywhere, or expect him to be an avatar of every political position I hold.
But, with where we are today, sincerity and honesty and the intent to do what you genuinely believe to be the right thing is vanishingly rare among reps and is a bloody good place for us to start !
If Shell BP Riotinto de Beers Dupont and every country which extracts resources from Africa and developing nations were to pay a fair wage to tge workers, we might have fewer migrants. But again, perhaps their hands are sojewhat tied