Paschal Donohoe (Dublin Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

The witnesses are all welcome here today. My view on what happened in Uganda and our overseas aid programme was fundamentally changed by going to Malawi during the summer. I wish to underscore heavily the comments Deputy Deasy ended with. I spent one week at the end of August with Trócaire. It was an interesting experience to go with an NGO as opposed to going as part of an official body such as Irish Aid or the Department of Foreign Affairs. I found it extraordinarily upsetting when I saw the conditions my fellow humans are in. I found it even more upsetting that the people I was with informed me that what I saw represented great progress from where they had been five and ten years previously.

I met several people, including our ambassador to Malawi, Liz Higgins. I also met Anne Conroy from Irish Aid and I spent a good deal of time with the civil servants from the Malawian Ministry of Agriculture and Food Security in particular. I was most impressed. I followed some of the work that Anne Conroy and some of her colleagues carried out. In many ways their work is embedded into the Malawian ministry. When she was introducing me to people, I got the impression that she was almost part of the Malawian Ministry of Agriculture and Food Security organisational tree. She did not suggest that she reported into a particular person but she said a certain person was someone she worked with closely. He was a Malawian civil servant; I believe he was the head of the Ministry of Agriculture and Food Security. I took two things from all of this. The first was the degree of embeddedness, which I had not expected to see when I went over and I found it rather impressive. The second point only made an appearance in our discussions when Mr. Rogers raised it. He suggested that we should be mindful that we are discussing the developing world where they have particular difficulties. The natural climate plays a large part but the remarkable misgovernance difficulties these countries have had for decades are a core contributory factor to the current difficulty.

It is also the reason they are in such desperate circumstances. We need to adopt a policy of appropriate realism about the situation in such countries. My comment is not directed specifically at Malawi. I only spent a week there but I noted that corruption, the use of taxpayers' money in ways we would regard as mind-boggling, is embedded in the governance systems and culture of these countries. We must put in place the strongest systems possible with the understanding that some of the activities at government level in some of these countries are fundamentally unacceptable to us and they contribute to the difficulties in the first place.

Deputy Deasy finished his contribution with a speech and I am beginning with one. What I regard as a good outcome of the Uganda situation is that the Ugandan comptroller and auditor general discovered it. I agree that it is not all that possible to be positive because the situation was appalling. However, the fact that it was uncovered by a Ugandan state official is very positive.

I am open to correction from the delegates on any of my comments. During my visit I saw the Irish Aid operation which is very small but very professional and hard-working. Irish Aid has a policy of including the local population and training them. Would this involvement inhibit the ability of Irish Aid to highlight the kind of difficulty it may encounter in these environments? If I were a local young person operating in one of these environments and I became aware of corrupt activities being perpetrated by the most powerful people in my own country, I would think carefully before putting up my hand. We have seen the difficulty encountered by whistleblowers in Ireland. It is an entirely different scenario in some other countries. I acknowledge that the delegates are the experts in this regard and I am open to correction. My question is about the strategy of localisation and whether this creates difficulties for calling out the kind of problems that may be there or are suspected.