Foreign Aid
Ireland's aid program was founded in 1974, and in 2006 its budget amounted to €734 million. The government has set a target of reaching the Millennium Development Goal of 0.7% of Gross National Product in aid by 2012, a target which is projected to amount to €1.5 billion based on current GNP growth. Irish development aid is concentrated on eight priority countries: Lesotho, Mozambique, Tanzania, Ethiopia, Zambia, Uganda, Vietnam and East Timor. in 2006, Malawi was announced as the ninth priority country, with a tenth country to follow. Aid has had to be reduced because of the 2008–2011 Irish financial crisis.
As of 2012, Joe Costello is the Minister of State for Trade and Development at the Department of Foreign Affairs.
Read more about this topic: Foreign Relations Of The Republic Of Ireland
Famous quotes containing the words foreign and/or aid:
“A foreign minister, I will maintain it, can never be a good man of business if he is not an agreeable man of pleasure too. Half his business is done by the help of his pleasures: his views are carried on, and perhaps best, and most unsuspectedly, at balls, suppers, assemblies, and parties of pleasure; by intrigues with women, and connections insensibly formed with men, at those unguarded hours of amusement.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)
“Frustrate a Frenchman, he will drink himself to death; an Irishman, he will die of angry hypertension; a Dane, he will shoot himself; an American, he will get drunk, shoot you, then establish a million dollar aid program for your relatives. Then he will die of an ulcer.”
—Stanley Rudin. The New York Times (August 22, 1963)