€4 million to Uganda?

Chinasea wrote: »

We all know that some of the money in ALL charities could be better spent. If you don't want to donate than don't, but lay off trying to tell us we have people starving in this country.

To compare the so called 'poverty' in Ireland with the sheer and utter deprivation in Africa is just quite frankly shameful.

With respect, bollocks and V8 powered bollocks with it on a few points. For a start we have no choice in whether we "donate" these foreign aid moneys. Just so we're clear it's over Six Hundred Million coming out of the exchequer. That would go a long way in this country. Why aren't the Germans paying the same per capita amount? Good sense it seems.

Secondly this sheer and utter deprivation you speak of, how is this money helping when in Uganda's case they can afford to splash out nearly twice what we give(overall in foreign aid) on air defence? Against who FFS? It's patently insane. Would you donate money to a family where the parents are actually quite well off and have more than enough to run the family home, but are drinking that money away every night in the pub? You'd be insane to say yes and yet this is what we've been doing with various African(among others) states* for generations. Sure, rattle a few pennies in the Trocaire box, or for the full effect build breezeblock houses on guilt holidays to assuage the old white guilt when faced with the famine/poverty porn blistered into our eyeballs for generations and guess what? Fcuk all has changed to any effective degree across those generations. Many of these basket case states are worse than they were. Doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result is the definition of what?

Ireland is like a family that have lost their job or are on a three day week, mortgaged to the gills and outgoings are not being covered by incomings. Now if said family went to their bank/accountant/financial adviser looking for advice and said advisor discovered they had a standing order to a profligate overseas relative of a 100 quid a month what would the advisor suggest? And no, the answer isn't they should keep doing it.

As for your list of what we have(or some of us may have) I'd set against the facts that Uganda has numerous natural resources(including oil reserves), regular rainfall across most of the country, hell, they're even in economic growth and their inflation is dropping. Getting a debt right off helped. Pity we didn't, but anyway... There is no good reason why they shouldn't be doing much better. Other African states have managed it.

As the film quote goes, "show me the money", if you can afford hundreds of millions on just one arm of your military, are getting lucrative contracts from outside(from China mostly) and have pretty decent natural resources and still want money from us, then my original take stands, GTFO. It would have been daft enough when we thought we had a few quid, but now since we're looking down the barrel of more recession to come and another lost generation heading overseas, I really think GTFO. That's just Uganda. If we're ploughing money into places like Zimbabwe then we really need our collective heads read.



*not all African states. It's a huge continent and there are states doing pretty well thank you, it's the basket cases I'm referring to.