Ireland's Foreign Aid in 2016.

This paper reviews Ireland's official development assistance (ODA) programme in 2016. It begins with an overview of the global context for development and aid last year, which was a turbulent one in terms of political and economic events. Forecasts of global growth and trade in 2017 and 2018 are insipid. The results of the Brexit referendum in the UK and the election of Donald Trump in the US pose challenges for global political and economic policies and in the case of the former, particular challenges for Ireland. A number of important conferences took place in 2016, the most important of which was the World Humanitarian Summit held in Istanbul in May, preparations for which had been preceded by an Irish Humanitarian Summit held in Dublin in July 2015. In 2016, total ODA flows from DAC donors reached a peak of US$142.6 billion or 0.32% of their combined gross national income (GNI). This represented a rise of 8.9% compared with 2015 after adjusting for exchange rates and inflation. In euro terms, Irish ODA amounted to €723.7 million in 2016, a rise of over €76 million compared with 2015 and representing 0.33 % of GNI. The paper provides data on total Irish ODA for selected years since 1996 and a breakdown and analysis of bilateral aid expenditures for 2014, 2015 and 2016 by sector, channel of delivery and aid modality. The analysis of the multilateral programme includes data and comments on Ireland's work through the United Nations, the IFIs and the EU. Two notable features about the Irish official aid programme that are becoming increasingly evident from analysis of the data are the apparently inexorable shift from the bilateral side to the multilateral side of the programme and the concomitant shift toward humanitarian aid at the expense of long-term development assistance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]