More than one-third of Irish overseas aid is spent in the State rather than in the developing world, according to a new report.
Ireland now ranks 10th out of 22 Western donors in the volume of aid it gives to poorer countries, the Reality of Aid report says. It has the fastest-growing development aid programme in the OECD, but because of the economic boom it has made only limited progress towards the United Nations target for aid spending.
The report, an annual survey on development published by international aid agencies, was compiled before the Government announced steep increases in Irish aid late last year.
The report says Ireland spent £178 million on aid in 1999; of this, £1.2 million was spent on supporting refugees in the State, almost 11 per cent went on administration and almost £54 million was spent on providing experts, usually Irish, for developing countries.
The report questions how much of the £41 billion the West donated in aid in 1999 was "real aid" that reached poor people. Increasingly, aid is seen as a small part of a wider economic order that tolerates absolute poverty, it claims.
"This international order systematically marginalises poor people and countries - often with the complicity of small Southern elites who benefit from it - and it undermines both the will and the ability to reduce poverty".
Large amounts of aid are still being used to advance commercial, political and diplomatic interests and not to reduce poverty, according to the report. Aid has been used to prop up dictatorial regimes seen as strategically useful, such as in Peru and Zaire. The desire of rich countries to open up markets also skews aid priorities; the focus of EU aid on Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia - three of the top five recipients of EU aid - "clearly has more to do with politics than poverty".
"Much aid never gets anywhere near a developing country, let alone close to the 1.5 billion people living in absolute poverty. Billions of dollars contributed by donors as "aid" is actually spent within the donor country, on things like hosting refugees and paying the 100,000-plus expatriate experts for technical assistance."
The Irish aid agency, Concern, said the report showed the EU was providing the lion's share of its aid to the better off in the developing world, while poorer countries got "the crumbs from the table". It called on the Government to use its influence within Europe to reverse this practice.
Concern's chief executive, Mr David Begg, said aid budgets had not increased in line with greater donor country prosperity. And wealthy countries still spend much more on arms than on people. "For every dollar spent on arms a mere 10 cents is spent on overseas aid. And although military spending declined by 6 per cent over the 1990s, the fall in aid was much greater, at 23 per cent."
The report calls for the writing off of the unpayable debts of poor countries, the reform of the International Monetary Fund and separation of aid from the commercial objectives of donors.
