Ireland’s Overseas Development Aid (ODA) Facilitating African and Asian Defence Budgets?

 2013 to 2022, €2,236.55 Bn ODA sent to 12 Countries below. Are we being taken for fools?

It’s Long Overdue Ireland’s NGO Driven ODA is Reviewed in Forensic Detail

I cited earlier then Taoiseach Leo Varadkar’s embarrassing interview during the recent Munich Security Conference. It highlighted his attempt to deflect the reality of Ireland’s ‘lowest in the EU’ Defence Budget by bigging up Ireland’s large ODA in a vain attempt to suggest that ODA was some form of alternative defence budget. An informed Munich audience found his suggestion, of course, “very typically Irish”!!

While our Defence Forces are in disarray, evidence shows militaries in counties benefitting from our ODA are exponentially expanding and appropriately equipping their forces.  Our ODA increasingly helps fund areas their own domestic budgets should. Ireland’s ODA funding model focuses extensively, and appropriately, on food security, clean water, sanitation, health, hospitals, schools and education.

 Ireland’s Long-Established ODA Commitment

In 2019, Ireland published its most recent policy update on ODA.  Titled, A Better World; Ireland’s Policy for International Development, this followed on from Global Ireland 2025, launched in 2018, itself a “multi-annual, whole-of-government strategy to double the scope and impact of Ireland’s global engagement by 2025”. And, help secure a seat on the UN Security Council, when we contest it next.

Global Ireland represented, “the most ambitious renewal/expansion of Ireland’s international presence ever undertaken in terms of diplomacy, culture, business, overseas development assistance, tourism and trade”. In 2018, Government reaffirmed its commitment to the UN target of 0.7% of Gross National Income (GNI) to ODA by 2030. This commitment followed 32% increased ODA funding since 2014. As ODA funding rose alarmingly, Defence Forces budgets, in real terms, decreased to the lowest in Europe.

Our ODA builds on 150-year legacy foundations of our missionaries, volunteers and NGOs in developing, failed and recovering states. These, along with Defence Forces overseas deployments since 1958, help Ireland’s soft power projection abroad. It’s regrettable a greatly reduced missionaries footprint, and worryingly, fewer Defence Forces overseas deployments, can but reduce this influence.

The question might be asked, is this ODA model of continuously “providing the fish rather than the fishing rod” well and truly broken and self-perpetuating? Is ODA as a concept, with its umbilical cord to NGOs for programme delivery, a worrying, less than authentic, outdated and stale business model?

Does Ireland’s ODA surreptitiously increase military expenditure in impoverished recipient countries?

ODA funding of Ireland’s magnitude to the twelve countries listed above, combined with ODA from other countries in Europe and beyond, allows their governments divert domestic budgets that should correctly fund to a greater degree their food security, medical and education provision. These governments do so with full knowledge ODA fills the void domestic funding doesn’t. This domestic de-funding is a factor in increasing their military budgets, but worryingly, enables, clientelism, personal and clique enrichment.

All countries listed above have long-term internal and regional security challenges requiring military forces, armaments and continuous logistical support. Rising military expenditure, in turn, directly influences a country’s level of violence and conflict. It’s overdue Ireland shining a questioning light on the military forces/military hardware in service in these listed countries, eleven in Africa, and one in Asia.

Military Budgets, Force Strength and Equipment in these 12 ODA recipient countries

Military budgets are funded from national exchequers, donations of military equipment from friendly states, or reduced cost procurement “most favoured nations” from allies. In a yearly journal entitled, The Military Balance, listings are provided of state’s military strengths of their armies, air and naval forces, and paramilitary forces like France’s Gendarmerie, Italy’s Carabinieri, or Spain’s Guardia Civile.

Listed above are the 2022 national defence budgets in USD of the identified ODA countries, key headline military hardware items such as main battle tanks, armoured vehicles, military aircraft and naval ships and vessels. The Military Balance is a comprehensive, reliable, trusted and prestigious publication. It’s a revealing comparative contrast of the derisory strength and equipment of the Defence Forces across its three services, Army, Air Corps and Naval Service, and the now barely alive Defence Forces Reserve.

Ireland’s ODA foreign policy requires an inquisitive ‘look under the bonnet’ analysis. This questioning should be not so much what our ODA is achieving in recipient countries, but equally what, perhaps, our ODA is enabling, by default, in them that may not be to Ireland’s liking, wishes or intent. Or more potently, with what this short analysis can reveal, should Ireland be sending ODA to some those countries at all?

Senator Gerard Craughwell

+ posts

Independent Senator & member of the Labour Vocational Panel of Seanad Éireann.

Autobiography

I was born in Galway in 1953 and am one of eleven children.  I am married to Helen, and I have two children David and Rebecca and one grandchild Ellie. I started work at the age of 16 as a bar man in London but was always drawn to a military life and a few months after starting work in London I joined the Kings Division Depot of the Royal Irish Rangers as a boy soldier. The training was tough but by the time I   was 17 I   was a first class signals operator, the youngest Lance Corporal in the regiment and  had completed my   first instructors course. Life was good.

I  stayed in the British Army until 1974 when I   was forced to make a choice between the British Army and a return to Ireland and I  choose the latter. I  was fortunate to be able to join the Irish Army and having survived the ordeal of recruit basic training for the second time and this time as Gaeilge,  I   was soon transferred to the Non Commissioned Officers training school for  the Western Command where I   was appointed as Corporal and later Sergeant and a instructor in the training school.

In 1980 an opportunity came to allow me   to leave the army and take over a contract my   father had with Calor Gas. Three  days after I   finished with the army,  Calor Gas took a decision to dispense with external contractors.  I   was out of the army and had no contract.  I  formed a Limited Company GAS Ltd (Galway Appliance Services Ltd) and very soon secured a contract with Flo Gas.  The business grew rapidly we moved from domestic work into industrial work. Despite working every hour God sent me the Company failed and in 1983 it went into Liquidation.  This was a very tough time for our family as we lost our home and everything we had.

Encouraged by my wife Helen I looked for work everywhere and got a job as a Part-time Driver with Underfoot Distributors Ltd Athlone, Co. Westmeath.  The work was hard and the hours long but I was grateful to be able to provide for my family again. As luck would have it I  was blessed to  get a good job with Aughinish Alumina Ltd in 1986. The company paid for our re-location to Limerick where we began a whole new life. In 1990 as a result of a serious back injury my career with Aughinish came to an end.  I was 37 and without qualifications. Once again fate intervened and an ad in the The Limerick Post’  offering a BSc in Economics jumped off the page at me.  My early days at Limerick Senior College  were among the most stressful days of my life, but unlike my earlier educational experiences,  LSC was not like school.  I will never forget the kindness and professionalism of those who taught there.

Despite  many pressures  I succeeded in my course  and  one of the proudest days of my life was my graduation from the London School of Economics in  the Barbican Centre London.  Following my graduation I was given 11 hours teaching at LSC  while undertaking a Post Graduate Diploma in Computing at the University of Limerick.  In 1995 having qualified with a Graduate Diploma in Computing I started work at the Senior College Dun Laoghaire and my family made another move, this time to Dublin.

From the moment I arrived at SCD I was aware of the “can-do” ethos just like I had experienced  at LSC.  However now the shoe was on the other foot and I was the one at the blackboard.  The level of collegiately I experienced at SCD was incredible. I became an  Assistant Principal in the school and an active member of the Teachers Union of Ireland  where I was   Chairman of the Further education Committee for the TUI Executive Committee and a Board Member of the TUI Credit Union.  I was the sole Irish Committee Member of the Information Technology Certifying Organisation CompTIA. In 2012 I was thrilled to become  the President of the TUI a post I held until 2014.

 

• It’ll take a seismic kinetic event for Ireland to take national security/defence seriously.
• Ireland’s Foreign Policy Incomplete Until It Embraces Credible Defence Policy
• Ireland is Dangerously Negligent on National Security and in Safeguarding its Sovereignty?
• Has Britain No Selfish Economic Interest In Northern Ireland