Bruton insists Republic could take 2,000 refugees

The irresponsibility of NATO's bombing campaign in Yugoslavia strengthened rather than weakened the case for Ireland's membership of Partnership for Peace, the Fine Gael leader has claimed.

Speaking at the publication of a party policy document on development aid and Third World debt, Mr John Bruton said if the State had not been "sitting on the sidelines" when the decisions were being made, it might have had more influence in countering the "simplistic view" which had led NATO to attack.

He also repeated his view that the Republic could take 2,000 Kosovan refugees, saying the facilities already existed at Army installations to deal with such a number.

However, he conceded that there was a strong argument that the refugees should be kept as close to Kosovo as possible.

Among the main points of Fine Gael's latest foreign policy document is that legislation should be passed obliging the State to meet the UN target for overseas development aid (ODA) by 2007.

One of the document's authors, Mr Gay Mitchell TD, said such a step would remove the ODA figure from the "annual estimates wrangle" which the Government had "brashly" claimed was a thing of the past.

The new law would require the State to meet the interim target of 0.45 per cent of GNP by 2002, with annual 0.05 per cent increases thereafter, bringing it to the UN target of 0.7 per cent by 2007.

Mr Mitchell said a precedent existed in the way in which national debt servicing was met directly from the central Exchequer by legislative authority, meaning the Government did not have to come back to the Dail each year to vote the money.

He said since the party envisaged ODA increasing to £600 million a year by 2007, Fine Gael also wanted to see much more rigorous control systems put in place.

For instance, the ministers responsible would be required to account to the Joint Oireachtas Foreign Affairs Committee on where the ODA allocation would go. Furthermore, there needed to be a review of whether funding for the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and other such agencies was the best way to spend the money.

Mr Mitchell said that in 1995, when half of the State's ODA went to the UN, World Bank or EU, figures showed that 80 per cent of the budget for UNESCO, the UN's education and science body, was spent within the walls of its Paris headquarters.

Mr Bruton said some of the statistics accompanying the document made an unanswerable case for massively increased funding.

He said the most startling figure was the 17 million people who died each year from entirely preventable diseases, such as malaria, diarrhoea and tuberculosis. The reality was that while multimillion-dollar sums were being spent on programmes such as the development of Viagra, almost nothing was being spent on tackling these diseases in the developing world.

This was despite the fact that enlightened self-interest dictated that we needed to fight the diseases in developing countries, which were incubators for new, antibiotic-resistant strains. "This problem can come home to haunt us in the developed world."