Brendan Howlin (Wexford, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I thank both witnesses for their contributions. I welcome Barry Andrews, an acknowledged champion of this area, to the committee. I think we have all committed to achieve the SDGs set out. Although Mr. Donoghue's is more optimistic in setting out the structures of the reporting mechanisms, both presentations we have received report very modest advances on any of them. Mr. Donoghue says that the rate of achievement is modest and, more starkly, Ms Carmody says the EU has not achieved any overall SDGs. It is well and good to talk about advocacy and suggest that we must work harder and do more. I sat in a government during very great difficulty here. There is an argument about what should be done and then we need to talk about the political reality within which we are working. I ask both witnesses to address that net issue.

The overarching geopolitical context in which we are operating means that there is growing nationalism across Europe and across the world. There is a retreat generally from multilateralism. We can talk about needing to do more but the reality is that world politics and voters are moving in the opposite direction. In Europe, many of the countries we traditionally looked to as leaders, particularly the Nordic countries, are refocusing away from the continent of Africa, for example. That is the reality. How can that be addressed? What are the witnesses' solutions to that? It is hard to be advocates for doing things while the political ground is moving ever rightwards and ever against the idea of multilateralism that we had assumed, particularly when the millennium development goals, or MDGs, were originally envisaged, to be a pathway that would be one way. It is now in retreat. What is the witnesses' take on that?

We need to have this conversation with a sense of reality as opposed to having a sense of let us all just do better and march forwards. There are growing forces across Europe and across the world - we see what is happening in the United States - working mightily in the opposite direction. Those forces are not only in the developed world. We see what is happening in Africa with the retreat of democracy and the growth of autocracy, coups across the Sahel in recent times, the expulsion of European influences and the growing influence of bad actors, particularly Russia and China, and in Russia's case its commercial military offshoots. Rather than dealing with the specifics, I would be interested in hearing the witnesses' take on how we can steady the ship while dealing with the political realities we are facing.

Barry Andrews will have a better take on this than I would. The expectation across Europe is that we will not have a more progressive European Parliament after the next set of elections. We will probably have a more nationalist and regressive parliament and that will obviously also be represented in all the institutions of the European Union.