Ireland for reforms but against a reduction in UN's role

Ireland fully supports plans to reform the United Nations but will oppose any attempt at cost-cutting or reducing its role, according to the Minister of State at the Department of Foreign Affairs, Ms Liz O'Donnell.

In a speech outlining her support for the reform plans of the UN Secretary General, Mr Kofi Annan, Ms O'Donnell said Ireland's aim would be to enhance and strengthen the UN.

"Safeguarding the peace and advancing the economic and social rights of all peoples is beyond the capacity of any single individual state. The UN is there to fulfil this task," she told a forum on development aid organised by the Department in UCD yesterday.

Ms O'Donnell conceded that the UN had not always worked as well as it should. It had "a somewhat fragmented range of structures with at times overlapping responsibilities and confused lines of authority". It could be "overly bureaucratic", and some of its agencies had tended to resist change.

She said Mr Annan's reforms would significantly strengthen the effectiveness and efficiency of the UN.

The executive director of UNICEF, Ms Carol Bellamy, told the forum that a continuing sharp decline in aid was having a devastating effect on the well-being of the world's children.

"There has never been a time when development aid has been more needed - or the evidence of its past success more compelling," she said.

Despite a £15 trillion global economy, 1.3 billion people - one-quarter of the human race - were living in conditions of "almost unimaginable suffering and want". More than 650 million of these were children.

"Never in history have we seen such numbers. And never in history have we seen overall aid to the world's neediest countries fall to such shameful levels as they have in the last year," she said.

The international response to conflict had been an utter failure because it was limited to emergency relief and aid, according to Ms Mary van Lieshout, a policy adviser with Oxfam. She said the result of that policy vacuum had been incredible suffering and destruction, from Bosnia to Zaire.

The appointment of Mr Kofi Annan as UN Secretary General provided an ideal opportunity for re-examining the UN's role. But to grasp this, governments would have to display greater political will than they had to date.

Ms van Lieshout suggested the UN should consider amalgamating the humanitarian functions of UN agencies into a single body, staffed by senior professionals.

Oxfam was calling for "conflict impact assessments" to be carried out on all interventions in situations prone to conflict, she said. These would cover trade and investment policies, as well as aid, in order to determine whether the risk of conflict would be heightened or reduced by a particular intervention.

Mr David Begg, chief executive of Concern, said the development community needed "leverage" in order to be effective in arguing for change at home. Moral authority was not enough; the various development organisations needed to act together to argue their case.

Ms Anne Makinda, a regional commissioner from Tanzania, said the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund were becoming increasingly "domineering" in the social sector of her country.

These institutions were now overshadowing the UN bodies. Yet the World Bank and the IMF had always operated according to commercial criteria and had no involvement in the social sector until a few years ago.

Much international aid never reached the recipient and was spent in the home country, she said. This explained why although Tanzania had received over £6 billion in aid between 1970 and 1992, the quality of life had not improved commensurately.