The burden of debt imposes a serious constraint on the least developed countries, including the African priority countries for Irish aid. I am personally aware of the campaign referred to by the Deputy, which is aimed at increasing public awareness of the debt burden faced by the developing world, and in particular calling for serious action to be taken on the matter by the year 2000.
Ireland has consistently used the relevant international fora to stress the need to seriously address the debt problem of the poorest countries and to indicate our openness to innovative solutions. Successive Ministers for Finance, in their capacity as Ireland's representative on the Board of Governors of the World Bank and the IMF, have highlighted the difficult situation of heavily indebted developing countries and have pressed the case for significant alleviation of their debt burden.
There has been considerable progress on this problem over the past year. The HIPC Initiative, the debt initiative for highly indebted poor countries which was agreed at the annual meeting of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank in October 1996, represents a significant step forward in the international community's response to the debt problem of the poorest countries. This initiative is committed to co-ordinating relief from all creditors — bilateral, commercial and multilateral — to bring a highly indebted country's debt down to a sustainable level. It is directed at highly indebted poor countries which have demonstrated, through a track record of good economic management, that they have the capacity to use debt relief to resume the process of economic growth and development.