ADDRESS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE ON THE OCCASION OF THE ANNUAL TRÓCAIRE LECTURE ST. PATRICK’S COLLEGE
ADDRESS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE ON THE OCCASION OF THE ANNUAL TRÓCAIRE LECTURE ST. PATRICK’S COLLEGE, MAYNOOTH
Your Eminence Cardinal Desmond Connell, Monsignor Farrell, Ladies and Gentlemen,
I am delighted to have been invited to deliver this year’s Annual Trócaire Lecture. Being here today gives me a very welcome opportunity to acknowledge the hugely important work done by Trócaire for the overlooked people of our world, the millions, whose talents and energies are ground down daily by the relentless forces of poverty, corruption, war, disease and hunger. The world is waiting for those talents to blossom. We are cursed by so much waste, so much unnecessary misery but we are blessed in those who bring hope, who refuse to accept the inevitability of the squandering of so much human life. Your response to the needs of the world’s poorest gives us much to be proud of and it strikes a particularly deep chord with Irish people, who can speak still of great grandparents and indeed grandparents who knew the agony of living in a third world country, where their lives were disregarded and where hunger was familiar company. That memory keeps us alive to the transcendent power of the helping hand, how it nurtures ambition and determination, how it gathers the energy to have faith in the future and belief in the self.
There are many different models of outreach to the developing world but Trócaire has pioneered its own uniquely effective charisma. Fundamental to your work is the promotion of a culture of independence in which both the dignity and life–opportunity of the individual is enhanced by building up personal skills and local capacity, a hand up not a hand out. Your programmes are guided by a deep respect for human rights, an unshakeable belief in the effective harnessing of the potential of each human being. Trócaire rightly places great emphasis on participation and empowerment as the key to unlocking that potential. Yours is difficult work because your agenda sees far beyond today’s hunger to a radically reshaped political, economic and social landscape where people exercise choices they never dreamt they would have, where the overlooked people create their own forces of relevance, make themselves an unmistakeable centre of gravity. You reach into their dreams and tell them the impossible is possible. The poignant and well-known words of WB Yeats seem apt:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
These are people whose dreams have been trampled on for so long that you may even have to introduce people to them anew. Trócaire has been a champion of those who dream of social justice, equal opportunity, of an end to slavery, of a real childhood for children, of regular food on the table, a school to go to, fresh water to drink, affordable medicines, a sustainable livelihood, a permanent home, a life with real meaningful choices. Each year your Lenten Campaigns remind us how distant those things are from the lived reality of millions of lives. It is a time to reflect on how lucky we in Ireland are to have so much and among the many marvellous things we enjoy today is the opportunity to share what we have so that others may know a time when abject poverty and powerlessness are consigned to history.
Like all opportunities it can be used or it can be thrown away. Each generation is custodian of its own opportunities and as the parable of the talents teaches us, to be confronted with opportunity is to be tried and tested. Because the work of outreach to the poor has been undertaken so often by people of heroic unselfishness, and in our own case, undertaken for generations, by talented, well-educated missionaries who turned their backs on more comfortable lives at home, who deliberately chose discomfort, who drew no salaries, who never dreamt of thanks, it has become deceptively easy to see this work as essentially altruistic, as work of giving rather than receiving. Today that myth is dangerous, for investment in development work is not an optional extra, it is not something which has ring-fenced consequences for people many miles away and little or none for us. U.N. Secretary General Koffi Annan put it well in a recent speech when he compared our planet to a small boat driven by a fierce gale through uncharted waters with more and more people crowded on board, desperately seeking to survive. In his words, “None of us can ignore the condition of our fellow passengers on this little boat. If they are sick, all of us risk infection. And if they are angry, all of us can easily get hurt.”
Somehow that message seems easier to comprehend after that grim day on September 11th when the baleful hand of terrorism shocked the world to an extent few had seriously contemplated. An avalanche of emotions followed with an outpouring of grief for the dead, the injured, the bereaved and the frightened and an uneasy wobble which ran through the pillars of global commerce and global politics.
Today that overwhelming wave of horror is provoking many questions about the root causes of such inhuman violence and about effective responses to it. Our vulnerability to each other has been sharply and appallingly highlighted, our parochial blinkers have been removed and the sweep of our gaze now embraces parts of the world only dimly acknowledged before September 11th. We now know with a dramatic clarity that we cannot hermetically seal ourselves from the effects of things that happen thousands of miles away. We are a global human family - and most of that family is living in great pools of poverty and hopelessness, fertile breeding grounds for political or religious fundamentalism, for ignorance about transmissible disease, for chronic corruption that corrodes the rule of law, for the frustration of talented men and women who never know the joy of their own talents revealed and whose anger ferments into distilled hatred, the most powerful weapon on the planet.
1.2 billion people live on less than one dollar a day while just across the way the one billion people living in developed countries earn 60% of the world’s total income, have over 70% of global trade and attract almost 60% of all foreign direct investment. That is one very unbalanced seesaw looked at in cold statistical terms. Lived day in and day out, in the slums of Kenya, or the bare hillsides of Honduras, or the bloodstained streets of Palestine, or in any number of lowlights on the spectrum of the contemporary human condition, it is lived by human beings with hearts to be broken by the unfairness of it all and heads to wonder at how fairness can ever be achieved. We in Ireland know those human beings well. In another generation they were our people and we know the many, many ways in which they adapted. Some simply gave up, caving in to despair. Others embraced stoicism and unquestioning acceptance. Yet others found the courage and energy to use what little they had to make achingly slow progress. Some chose principled, purposive resistance and still others the frightening path of obsessive resentment. Today all over the world men and women are wakening up in circumstances of appalling misery which confront them with a limited range of choices and a limited range of responses. What is more, while the range of choices for those of us in the developed world widens exponentially, the exact opposite is the case in the world’s poorer places.
It is as telling as it is sickening that over the last decade the overall volume of development assistance from rich countries has fallen to an historic low. Instead of increasing to meet the UN target of 0.7% of GNP, aid has fallen back to an average of just 0.22% of GNP for all donors. This sharp decline in development assistance is having enormous effects on the peoples of those countries most in need of direct assistance, particularly in sub Saharan Africa. While many countries in Asia and Latin America have managed to compensate somewhat for the decline in development assistance through increased flows of private investment, this has not been the case in that part of Africa. The region attracts just one per cent of total global foreign direct investment. It has been bypassed by the information and telecommunications revolution and it remains critically dependent on the generosity of rich country Governments and on the support of NGOs.
One of the lessons beginning to emerge from the search for explanations in the aftermath of 11 September, is that development assistance should not be and must not be seen as an entirely altruistic phenomenon. Yes, our development aid support is a crucial expression of concern and solidarity but it is also an essential investment in our own security. Every human being who is helped to grow strong and self-sufficient is a person whose harnessed talents build up the fabric of global civic society. Every person who is helped to avoid Aids, who is given a chance for a decent education, whose skills attract credible employers who pay proper wages, is a person who is a leaven in a community helping it to transcend the deficit of history’s legacy and to build a better future. Every country helped to close the income gap and put on the road towards participation in international trade and investment, every country nudged towards democracy and respect for human rights, increases the stability of our globe and lays the foundations for both peace and shared prosperity.
What makes the historic decline in levels of international development aid even more frustrating is the clear evidence that aid works. Infant and under five child mortality rates fell by more than half over the past thirty years. It is remarkable that a child born today is expected to live eight years longer than one born thirty years ago and many more will know the liberation of education as literacy rates increase apace around the world. These and many other reassuring statistics show that globally there has been a steady and welcome improvement in human development. Properly targeted aid does give enormous value for money. The evidence is in that it works and so we now face both the challenge and the opportunity in our generation to keep driving those statistics in the right direction.
The UN Millennium Summit in September 2000 adopted a set of simple targets - the
so-called Millennium Development Goals based on the work of a series of UN Conferences throughout the 1990s. The over-arching development goal is the relatively modest ambition to cut the number of people living in extreme poverty by half by 2015 with others relating to improvements in the spheres of health, education and the environment. It would be profoundly wrong to characterise such goals as the kind of thing we aspire to without expecting to achieve. The World Bank has now costed the Millennium Development Goals suggesting that a doubling of international development assistance, that is an additional $50 billion of aid per year, would provide the necessary financial basis. It sounds a lot until you contrast it with current levels of international expenditure on armaments, or even expenditure on non-essential consumer goods in the developed world. Suddenly it seems like a reasonable price to pay for a world where talent is unlocked, not wasted, where we begin to see our true strength and worth as a species, as country after country delivers real opportunity to its people and where a self-confident people harvests that opportunity with enthusiasm and imagination.
Ireland has already given a strong international lead on the question of increased resources for overseas development aid through its commitment to meet the UN target in relation to Overseas Development Aid expenditure by 2007 and of course little Luxembourg, the smallest and wealthiest country in the European Union, no bigger than Limerick, whose Head of Sate was here last week, has given us all a lead by meeting the 0.7% target two years ago. This work needs champions, for the forces of narrow self-interest are powerfully seductive and the home demands on national funds grow ever-greater year on year. At the same time though, the man or woman whose hard earned taxes or donations are sent abroad as development aid are perfectly entitled to query the ways in which the money is spent, to demand open accountability and to insist on evidence that the money is being used effectively.
The international community has reached a broad consensus both on the fundamental political and economic requirements for development progress and on how to deliver aid effectively. These requirements include good governance, the protection and promotion of human rights and a clear commitment to democracy, the rule of law and the fight against corruption. There is also now an appreciation of the need for donors to coordinate, to avoid the proliferation of projects and to engage with partner Governments in support of nationally owned development plans.
Ireland is a much wealthier country today than it was twenty years ago. Our people have seen this country blossom in ways many would have thought impossible even a generation ago. We have come to expect that things will get better year-on-year and that prosperity will continue to widen its embrace on an upward linear track. We have an expectation that we can and will eliminate poverty not just sometime this century but sometime soon. That expectation is not pie in the sky. It is realistically within our grasp. We have work to do to achieve it but there is an energy in our self-belief that comes from the level of success already achieved and the manifest signs of that success all around us. Pity then the people of
sub-Saharan Africa who are today almost as poor as they were twenty years ago and who watch as the scourge of Aids wipes out decades of development progress. Of the 40 million people infected with AIDS in the world, twenty-eight million are in sub-Saharan Africa - in some southern African countries, one adult in three is infected and even in a country like Uganda which is making a real effort to tackle the problem, two million children out of a total population of just over twenty million people, are Aids orphans. The damage to family and community structures, the wipe-out of income earners, the lostness of so many children, these are already today’s bitter legacy to the future. Those of us who believe so powerfully in the role of education would do well to ponder the fact that in Zambia, more teachers are dying of AIDS than are emerging from teacher training colleges while in Kenya eighteen teachers die of AIDS each day. Africa’s near future is already utterly compromised and anyone who believes the downstream consequences stop at that continent’s shores is sadly misguided.
The spread of HIV/AIDS has been assisted by levels of extreme poverty, ignorance and by conflict. As the UN Security Council has recognised, the spread of the epidemic is, in itself, a new security threat both to the most affected countries and to the rest of the world. It is contributing to the destabilisation of states, to the perpetuation of conflict and to a deepening of the sense of hopelessness and lack of power which lies at the root of conflict and violence. In the worst affected countries, life expectancy has plummeted in recent years because of the HIV/AIDS crisis. Health facilities are stretched to breaking point and communities are forced more and more to rely on themselves. It was heart rending to see in Uganda, the little Aids clinic set up in a very poor little local house in which the family continued to reside, to see the sufferers make long journeys on foot to get tiny amounts of painkillers, to see nothing in their eyes at all except the crushing weight of sorrow. And then to meet the grandmothers raising their grandchildren and to wonder at the fact that, almost three in every four households have taken at least one orphan into their care – families that can barely look after themselves, let alone take care of orphans and yet they do.
We owe them the best energy we can muster for there are enough others who preach the counsel of despair or neglect. Koffi Annan has rightly identified both local and global political leadership as the key to the success in the fight against HIV/AIDS and indeed where that leadership has been forthcoming we have seen considerable progress. In Uganda, I saw at first hand how committed political leadership supporting a well developed national prevention campaign has reduced the rate of adult infection from over 20% to less than 10%. In Senegal, where the Government acted at a very early stage in the epidemic, HIV/AIDS infection has been contained at 2% and recently talking to those involved in Irish Government sponsored work on Aids education in the Gambia, the story was one of measureable success. A sign that the Aids wake up call is beginning to work came in January when after just six months of preparation, a new Global Fund to fight HIV/AIDS, was established. Already it has pledges of over $1 billion and is ready to take applications for support from the most affected countries. Here too Ireland has shown international leadership both through our Development Assistance HIV/AIDS Strategy and our commitment of an additional $30 million per year to the fight against HIV/AIDS.
While the statistics on HIV/AIDS are shocking, the reality is humbling and unforgettable. During my visits to Uganda and Kenya, I had the privilege of witnessing the work of care done by Irish men and women who have invested their skills and their lives in bringing to the poor, the comfort of immediate relief or the hope of long term development assistance. Their work evokes righteous pride at home but they cannot sustain their work on pride. The test of it, the test of us, is the level of support we give both financially and morally in promoting a culture of voluntarism, a culture of generosity and of visible concern for all of God’s human family. It’s a baton of a value system carefully handed to us from generations who had much less than we have but who had big hearts and small egos. That baton has been the bedrock of missionary and NGO activities in Africa for generations. As a wealthier nation with infinitely greater opportunities for self-indulgence, it is essential to the health and vibrancy of our own communal civic sense that we retain and indeed enhance our strong tradition of solidarity with the poor of the developing world.
There is nothing abstract about human solidarity. There is nothing easy about it either. It takes effort to seed-bed and sustain. Some day and in some way or another, we all need it and because we do, the best way of guaranteeing it is there for us when we do need it, is to make our own contribution to the great reservoir of human goodness while we can.
Few countries are as fortunate as Ireland in the many champions we have produced whose lives have been given to creating and promoting not just the idea of human solidarity but the lived reality of it. It is their relentless focus on the poorest and most marginalized of peoples and countries which provides a soft human counterpoint to the impersonal hand of the markets. Their hands, voices and smiles are the conduits to hope. The transfer of their skills gives people a newfound control over their own destiny. Their lobbying fosters international debate about the key issues facing the developing world and it integrates the developed and developing world into the dialogue about solutions. The civic conscience of the developed world is being challenged about its responsibilities just as the civic imagination of the developing world is being introduced to its own latent possibilities. An agenda is being set for a global consciousness which is driven by the values of the gentle human heart and not the tight fist, by a thirst for justice and equality which cannot be quenched while so many people live lives of manifest and unnecessary grimness.
Trócaire’s Lenten campaign, with its spotlight on the fight against child exploitation and child labour, is a good case in point. In May 2002, the UN General Assembly will hold a Special Session to review progress since the UN Summit on Children last year. Last year’s story will not be good enough for those who care. This year’s story has to be better and next year’s better again. Trócaire’s campaign is part of that dynamic that is nudging a wider audience to care passionately about these issues and making a personal quest, of their resolution. There is a job to do in forging a functioning global constituency, which promotes and supports increased overseas aid and sees it as an investment in our common future. NGOs have an important role to play in fostering the growth of that constituency and feeding the agenda already set by the Millennium Development Goals, ensuring that we meet those goals and move beyond them in a meaningful time frame.
Trócaire’s partnership of endeavour with the Irish people tells us a lot about ourselves. There are proven wells of compassion and generosity, which are tapped into every year and which never dry up, thankfully. The work undertaken in fifty countries around the world could not happen without the certainty that Irish people will always come through for Trócaire and for the poor. Time and time again they do and when they do the pervasive unease we feel about so much of what goes on in our world, ebbs a little and we begin to see a light shining through the darkness.
The reassurance of that light is needed all the more in these days when immigrants from poor parts of the world arrive in Ireland seeking the chance to live a decent life. They test us just as others have been tested by the arrival of needy strangers on their shores. Its a story we know well precisely because for generations we were the arriving strangers, the poor, the destitute arriving in the hope that in this foreign land we could find the space to put our talents to work .Out of the distilled wisdom of the bitter experience of our own history of emigration the Irish should have little to learn about the dangers of racism, of malicious stereotyping, of slammed doors, of being alone. Yet we know that there are those in our society on whom those lessons have been lost. Ireland is sadly not immune to those base human instincts that conduce to bullying, to contempt and hatred, to jealousy and conflict but there are always been a much stronger, much more resilient instinct for good , an instinct which has drawn deeply on the forces which oppressed so many of our ancestors and out of which has come a rocksolid faith in the human rights and dignity of all human beings, a manifest solidarity with the suffering people of the world and a history of championing the underdog which has earned us respect worldwide. That is precisely why instances of racist behaviour are so utterly offensive. In a well-to-do Ireland they mock and replicate the suffering of our own ancestors driven by poverty from an Ireland which was a forgotten and neglected third world country, they offend the sensibilities of the majority of our people whose strongest instinct is towards kindness and who prove that year in and year out, by their willingness to dig into their pockets not just for Trócaire but for the many other good causes which rely on the consistency and constancy of that instinct.
The people of today’s third world take hope from Ireland’s rags to riches story. They take hope from the fact that we continue to make their future our concern. They want to work with us to make a new future for all of us. There is a pathos in their gratitude which should not blind us to the fact that our outreach to the developing world is an investment as much in Ireland’s future as it is in the future of Africa or South America. The tangible benefits of peace, stability and prosperity need no enunciation but the intangible benefits of stretching the reach of human conscience, of linking human beings from one side of the globe with those on the other in a network of human solidarity based on mysterious things, like mercy and love, are miraculous gifts to all of us. They multiply and fill the earth with things which hearten us, things which smooth the raw jagged edges of life, which reconcile us to the chaos and chart a pathway through its perplexing vale of tears to a future not yet arrived at but held in our imaginations. In that world the work of Trócaire would be over. I would sorely like to be around for such a day but I’ll settle for being on the bumpy road to it, a long journey ahead but at least a journey started. There is an Irish saying that “Two shortens the road.” Trócaire has been the steadfast travelling companion on life’s journey to many, many suffering people and I wish it well in shortening the road to the final triumph of love.
Thank you.