ADDRESS BY THE PRESIDENT OF IRELAND MARY ROBINSON TO THE UN ASSOCIATION OF GREATER BOSTON IRELAND
ADDRESS BY THE PRESIDENT OF IRELAND MARY ROBINSON TO THE UN ASSOCIATION OF GREATER BOSTON IRELAND AND THE U.N
I am delighted to have this opportunity to speak to you about Ireland and the United Nations, and to consider the role of small countries in third world development. The World Federation of UN Associations, to which you are affiliated through the American Federation of UN Associations, has been described as "the people's voice of the UN".
Its affiliate associations, including your own and the Irish United Nations Association, of which as President of Ireland I am proud to be patron, play a valuable role in promoting awareness of the aims, activities and achievements of the United Nations and its specialised agencies.
We are all deeply saddened by the recent death of Erskine Childers, an Irishman who had a distinguished career as a UN diplomat. He will be greatly missed by the World Federation of United Nations Associations of which he was Secretary-General.
Since its establishment, the United Nations has provided the universal framework in which states can co-operate in pursuit of peace and prosperity. The organisation has been a cornerstone of Irish foreign policy ever since we joined it in 1955 and Ireland is an active and committed participant in the work of the UN across the full spectrum of its activities. We are currently members of the Economic and Social Committee and were recently elected to the Commissions on Human Rights and Sustainable Development. We served a split term on the Security Council in 1962 and a full term in 1981-82. The Irish Government has declared our candidature for a seat on the Council for the term 2001-2002. It is important that the opportunities for smaller countries, such as Ireland, to serve on the Security Council should be maintained.
We believe that our experience in peacekeeping and conflict resolution equips us to make a valuable contribution to the deliberations of the Council.
Ireland's extensive participation in peace-keeping is perhaps the clearest practical expression of our engagement in the United Nations and our support for the organisation's role in the maintenance of international peace and security. We have been continuously involved in peacekeeping operations since 1958. Over that period, more that 42,000 members of the Irish Defence Forces and Police Force have served with distinction as UN peacekeepers. Like many countries, we have suffered casualties - 75 Irish personnel have been killed on UN service.
Currently, Ireland is the 17th highest troop contributor among UN Member States, with a peacekeeping participation on a world-wide basis. Relative to our resources, our contribution is even more impressive. The 743 personnel we are providing to current UN missions represent 5.8% of the strength of our Defence Forces.
The Irish people are, I believe, justly proud of the commitment and professionalism of our peacekeepers and the high regard in which they are held internationally.
Our involvement in peacekeeping reflects the importance we attach to the UN role in conflict resolution. Peacekeeping, however is but one of a range of options required to respond to threats to peace and security.
One of the many bitter lessons to be drawn from the recent experience in Rwanda and Bosnia is that the traditional deployment of peacekeeping units is no longer, on its own, a sufficient response to the type of crises which we now face. As you know, the great majority of the peacekeeping operations established over the past five years have involved internal conflicts within states. Such operations have become politically and logistically more complex and financially more onerous. There is an urgent need to improve the response capability of the United Nations in dealing with sudden or complex emergencies. In circumstances where deployment of UN peacekeeping may not be feasible or acceptable, intervention may nevertheless be required in order to deal with major humanitarian crises.
Drawing on the experience of the Rwandan refugee crisis in 1994, Ireland is actively exploring the possibility of establishing a national emergency relief mechanism. This would take the form of a humanitarian liaison group, which would be available to respond to requests from the UN, the international Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) or from regional organisations operating under a UN mandate in such emergency situations.
As well as dealing with actual manifestations of conflict, we need to strengthen the mechanisms available to us to anticipate and forestall conflict- recent tragic experience has underlined the urgent need for more effective international strategies which encompass all stages of conflict from its origins to its resolution.
Ireland welcomes, therefore, the growing emphasis which is being placed on the development of the capacity of the organisation in the area of conflict prevention. The efforts of the Irish Government are particularly focused on ensuring early consideration of disputes likely to lead to conflict, developing the mediation capacity of the United Nations and utilising the potential of the International Court of Justice.
Given Ireland's very positive attitude to the role of the United Nations itself, your invitation has encourged me to reflect on whether there are particular characteristics of small countries which may be relevant to their involvement in third world development.
I welcome the opportunity to offer my personal perspective, not as an expert, or as a policy maker, but as someone who has been privileged to see first hand the practical engagement by Irish people both in sustainable development and in coping with situations of deep crisis in developing countries.
It has been a learning experience and an enriching one. I have found it natural to relate that experience to the context of local community self-development in Ireland today, and to the fact that we are commemorating - both on the island of Ireland and worldwide - the great Irish potato famine, perhaps the darkest period in our history. How we revisit our past is of crucial importance to our self-awareness, both past and present.
When we look at the terrible figures of more than a million dying of starvation or related diseases, and more than that emigrating, in the five year period from 1845-1850, we realise that the Irish people have endured an experience similar to a significant number of developing countries - the combination of being a colony, of suffering a devastating famine and of enduring a huge dispersal of people through mass emigration.
I believe that a people is shaped and defined by such an experience, and that it can lead to a particular empathy with the suffering of others. That, it seems to me, is what was at the heart of the generosity shown to the Irish by the Choctaw Native American people in 1847. Some years earlier they had been removed from their own tribal lands in a long walk which they commemorate as the Trail of Tears.
In April 1847 members of the Choctaw people heard of the devastating famine on a small island very far away and raised a collection of $170 - a huge sum in the context of their own hardship - for the relief of those Irish famine victims. It seemed that there was no obvious link, but the Choctaw people perceived the real link out of their own empathy with others who were suffering. No more and no less than a shared humanity.
Let me relate this to the context in which international development aid policy is evolving as we near the end of this century. On the resource side, the very concept of development assistance seems under unprecedented attack from many quarters. There are alarming reports of looming and severe cuts in the aid budgets of some of the world's richest countries. The current material and financial problems confronting the United Nations agencies, recipient Governments in developing countries and NGOs are a cause of deep anxiety to all who believe that commitments made must be honoured and that all of us have a responsibility for the welfare and well being of others.
There seems to be a growing unease among many as to future directions of development policy in the third world. What is to be done about the spiralling demand for conflict related humanitarian assistance? How can our development policies and approaches respond to the complex and interrelated tasks required to rebuild war torn societies and disintegrated states? How can we assure coherence between efforts in the areas of humanitarian aid, socio-economic development aid, the protection of human rights and the growth of civil society?
How do all of these activities relate to traditional peace keeping, preventive diplomacy and conflict prevention? How can we explain the apparent failures of development policy to accelerate and promote human security?
I speak frankly here of issues which have been brought home to me from my ongoing contacts with national and international NGOs, my visits to Somalia and Rwanda, and my visits to some of the priority countries of the Irish Government's aid programme. What role can small countries play in bringing greater coherence, greater clarity, greater effectiveness and greater international commitment to third world development?
In examining the possible role for small countries, it is appropriate to remind ourselves of some characteristics which small countries share and why these characteristics may give them even a comparative advantage in some important respects over larger countries. However, despite this I in no way ignore the fact that large countries have special responsibilities, and indeed particular advantages, given the range of resources at their disposal. They must, however, also have the political will to mobilise them in this area. And yet, perhaps because of greater pressures from within their body politic, large countries have sometimes found it difficult to muster political will for disinterested objectives. Smaller countries seem to be able to generate public support for development more readily. What, then, are the characteristics which may encourage the engagement of small countries? By definition, many small countries are used to living with larger neighbours. Larger neighbours tend to be dominant influences economically, politically and even culturally. Maintaining friendly relations with the larger neighbour is a vital task. Equally vital is the self confident effort to reach beyond dominant neighbours in search of friendly relations with other countries.
Small countries are, as it were, destined to network with other states. They seek out friendship groupings based on a wide range of common bonds: language, law, culture, religion, history, trade. They instinctively recognise the value of traditional diplomacy in seeking out such relations. They have to be able to listen.
Small countries also readily recognise the central value and importance of collective arrangements such as the United Nations in international politics. Participation in the United Nations system is both an affirmation of the identity of small countries while also being a critical expression of their belief in the unique role which the United Nations has to play as guarantor of peace between nation states and as guardian of universal human rights.
For small countries the world appears very much as a wheel with all points connected and reinforcing one another. For others, less constrained by limitations of geography that same world may appear more like a pyramid than a wheel.
The question of resources is very relevant. Small countries usually have modest resources. This modest supply of material resources promotes at all levels of society a pragmatic approach to problem solving. As societies, we learn early on to make do with what is available to us. We know the importance of coherent strategies if our modest resources are to have maximum impact. We know the importance of aligning resources - governmental and non-governmental - with available external resources so that the job at hand gets done. I would suggest that the tolerance of waste and misuse of resources is surely lower when resources are that much scarcer. In our domestic and international spending there is a strong sense that every penny must be made to count.
Allied with a shared experience of scarcity of resources is the fact that some small countries have direct and recent experience themselves of development. Their experience as successful aid recipients can be of immense benefit when they come to be aid donors. Of particular importance is the likelihood that a direct and recent experience of widespread inequality and poverty will instil a commitment to promoting human rights and focusing on poverty in our cooperation programmes.
This leads me back to the notion of empathy. Small countries tend to have a natural empathy with other small countries.
This empathy may perhaps be related to shared historical experiences, shared experience of the vagaries of the global market, shared experience of the difficulties of sustaining our cultural and other interests in the face of the positioning of larger states, shared attachment to the value of multilateral institutions as a valuable, if imperfect, corrective to such positioning.
Unused to, and perhaps even wary of, the deference which seems to flow spontaneously from military or economic power, we have learned to seek to build partnerships rather than to try to impose particular policies or interests. Our bilateral policies are defined by cooperating and the search for mutual interests by agreement.
In the development context, small countries may be a welcome interlocutor of recipient governments precisely because they have no agenda other than an aid agenda. Such a philosophy of cooperation and partnership at all levels can be put to good effect in the development programmes of many small countries at both the planning and implementation stages.
Logically, in the development context, it might be expected that small countries would favour allocating more aid through multilateral channels, in the expectation that such multilateral aid would be needs based and dictated less by dominant economic or foreign policy concerns of larger states. But that is not the current trend.
The trend of faltering support for multilateral agencies extends to both large and small donors, and is related to legitimate concerns about the effectiveness - including cost effectiveness - of such agencies. This trend may be based on an underestimate of the significant potential which revived and reformed agencies could have in tackling the global problems which face our planet. Certainly, the longer term implications of such a trend were central to the deep concerns expressed at the UN's 50th anniversary commemoration in New York last year. These concerns were shared by countries large and small. The world is looking for leadership, for ideas, for inspiration.
While acknowledging that the nature of the engagement of small countries in wider issues is constrained both by the fact of geographical size and by the modesty of their material resources, this does not at all constrain our capacity for the honest enquiry and imaginative thinking needed for effective policy responses at either a bilateral or multilateral level.
It has been said very often that Ireland's greatest natural resource is our people, particularly our young people. However, I would like to suggest in this context that the greatest gift which we can give is the commitment, compassion and intellectual capabilities of our people marshalled in the right way. And thus, leadership and a clear sense of direction continue to be required to make our great national resource benefit people of developing countries.
In the face of the urgent need to develop more coherent approaches to the complex and interrelated needs of developing countries, particularly in the area of human rights and governance, and to work out practical approaches which link these to classical socio-economic development, might we not demand of ourselves as small countries to work out these policy linkages? This is a challenge for all countries, but it is a challenge which is not apportioned by economic resources. Fortunately, our moral obligations and our potential influence are not measured in terms of GDP. This continues to be Ireland's challenge and our responsibility.