We should increase aid budget

The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank hold their annual meetings this week, and one of the themes those powerful organisations will consider is shared prosperity — or to express the idea in another way, tackling growing inequality all around the world.

That those high consistories of capitalism should consider the issue at all is welcome, but as crisis after crisis has shown, good intentions can only achieve so much, direct intervention — usually very expensive — is required.

There are credibility issues too; how can an organisation like the IMF, one that routinely demands a reduction in living standards for baseline workers in countries that need its financial support, win the credibility needed to organise world-changing redistribution of wealth?

How can an organisation like the World Bank, one that has promised to work to lift the incomes of the world’s poorest 40%, inspire confidence when it publishes an annual survey that ranks countries by their efforts to cut corporate taxes, keep minimum wages low, and ensuring that paid holidays and sick pay are not too burdensome for employers?

These are significant questions that must be confronted sooner or later if a serious challenge to inequality is proposed, but in the immediate context of the fairness project, they can be long-fingered.

As those organisations meet this week, the crisis in South Sudan is intensifying. Despite the biggest humanitarian operation ever carried out by the UN in a single country, Oxfam and other agencies have warned that millions face a man-made famine in the early months of 2015 unless immediate action is taken.

Another example of the consequences, non-intervention or inadequate intervention, are the ebola frontline countries Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea. Health services are utterly under-resourced and overwhelmed. In Sierra Leone there are only 327 hospital beds, but 765 new cases of ebola were confirmed last week. Liberia had just 61 doctors and 1,000 nurses before the crisis hit.

Yet another example can be seen in Lebanon where around half a million Syrian child refugees have not had a place in a school for three years. Lebanon has been promised international help on this specific issue, but is still waiting. The crisis grows while Isis gets a new recruiting ground.

In 2013, Ireland spent €637m — 0.46% of GNP — on overseas development aid and even if that figure seems considerable in the light of our own difficulties, it is barely enough to be considered decent. Much of this aid is focussed on countries ravaged by ebola and in trying to help those made homeless by conflict in the Middle East.

While these tragedies deepen, Finance Minister Michael Noonan is finalising Budget 2015. Already we know that spending options are pretty limited, but it would be wrong not to increase our overseas aid budget, because any comparison between the lives of those who depend on aid and our own, no matter how challenging by domestic standards, must acknowledge that we are talking about two different worlds.