Professor Patrick Fitzpatrick:

It is a great pleasure to be here. I thank the Chairman for facilitating this meeting. We are pleased to have an opportunity to engage with the joint committee. Mr. Groves has given us some strict instructions to the effect that we should keep our opening remarks short. We will do that. I will make some introductory remarks about the centre and each of us will make a brief contribution to outline our specific areas of interest. The Centre for Global Development was established on foot of the first strategic plan for UCC, which covered the period from 2008 to 2012. The centre is explicitly recognised in the most recent strategic plan, which has just been published and covers the period from 2013 to 2017, as part of UCC's strategy for the next five years and beyond. Over 110 academic and non-academic staff of the university are members of the Centre for Global Development. They come from all four of UCC's colleges - arts and humanities, business and law, medicine and health, and science, engineering and food science. I am the head of the last of those colleges.

It is important to note that the Centre for Global Development captures a wide range of activity that is already going on. It holds within it the potential to generate new interactions and stimulate new perspectives. As the Chairman mentioned, the core vision of the centre as set out in the strategic plan is to seek a "global context" for everything we do in UCC. We are facing some of the challenges of the 21st century, including food production and distribution, health care, disease eradication, energy supply, climate change and environmental protection and the effects of technological change in developing countries. We also have expertise in some of the areas that arise on the non-scientific side, including social integration, democratic governance, human rights and education. We regard them as part of what we do. All of our activity can be summarised in the phrase "sustainable global development".

We have a particular focus on things that might not be at the front line of traditional international development. Irish aid policy has a particular focus on the alleviation of hunger. As we are concerned with the development of infrastructure in developing countries, we focus on areas like energy, transport and information and communications technology. The development of sustainable societies depends on such things and on economic development. We are working in the context of the Government's strategy of developing a range of further relationships with developing countries. For that reason, we are very conscious of the Africa strategy. We are integrated into the national agenda. I am a member of the Irish Aid expert advisory group. The UCC Centre for Global Development was integrally involved in providing a response to the review of the White Paper. I understand that went to the Cabinet yesterday and will be published next week. We are delighted with that. I will not delay the committee further. We look forward to engaging with the committee. We would like that engagement to be as conversational as possible. Each of my colleagues will say a brief word about their particular areas of interest.