Dr. Vincent O'Neill:

We have a statement on the emergency in the Philippines. I thank members for their supportive comments and questions. Senator Walsh and Deputy Byrne raised the issue of human rights. They are correct that this is a core consideration in planning for co-operation with partner countries. It is an interesting issue because in the report of the high level panel that David Cameron and the Liberian and Indonesian presidents chaired, it came across as one of the flaws of the MDGs as they are currently constituted, and a commitment to human rights is a prerequisite to development and poverty reduction. One of their strong recommendations is that human rights should be centre stage in any post-2015 framework.

This issue also came up in many discussions about the review of the White Paper and the development of a new policy in Ireland. There were many submissions, including from the committee, and other organisations made the case strongly that a commitment to human rights needs to feature much more centrally in the way Ireland's new policy is put together. Human rights has been inserted as one of the six core principles in the new policy, which will underpin everything we do. I refer to the Vice Chairman's comment on accountability. The importance of human rights governance and accountability is one of the three major goals that shapes how Ireland's future programme needs to be co-ordinated.

The fear we have is that following the HIPC programme, we are witnessing worrying tends in some of these countries where levels of indebtedness are increasing at a time ODA levels are not adequate or other forms of financing are not available and government revenue is not adequate. There is a fear we will go down this path again of countries becoming indebted and sometimes being loaned money by emerging economies.

Ireland supports the key principles mentioned through UNCTAD and other multilateral arenas to try to work with our partner governments on understanding what constitutes sustainable lending and what are the pitfalls countries need to avoid. It is easy to say we need our partners to comply with principles. We also have to work equally hard to help them access the resources they need to finance their national development programmes. That links to an issue raised by Deputy Byrne about the importance of revenue, which is reflected well in the Commission's communication. In many of the countries in which we are working, the potential for them to generate revenue for development is ten times that what they could ever hope to access through international development co-operation. This also came up in our discussions about the new aid policy and it is reflected in the policy but it is also integral to the discussion on financing for development.

How the international community can work with key partners to help them to boost their revenue generation is one of the issues of long-term capacity building mentioned by Deputy Eric Byrne. We have some programmes with Revenue which has been very enthusiastic about engaging more with us. The key political message in the new policy is that we will work with our partners, but we will help to wean them off a reliance on overseas development aid over time. The way in which we can do this is to boost national revenue generation. We have a programme of support focused on Rwanda; we have just produced a guidance note for all of our missions on how to support better domestic revenue generation in our partner countries; and we are examining deeper partnership with the Irish revenue authorities with a view to building on the positive experience we have had to date. We also support some of the work on taxation done through the OECD.

The issues of evaluation and value for money were raised and they are very important. We have had a strong culture of evaluation in development and co-operation for the reasons mentioned by the Vice Chairman and this is absolutely necessary when working in high-risk environments at a time in Ireland when people are rightly asking questions about whether we know what we are getting back and whether we are getting value for money or being defrauded. We must demonstrate not only that we can be accountable for every cent invested in the aid programme but what we are getting for the money we are investing in health, education, water and sanitation services, in other words, what are the returns.

A feature of Ireland's membership of the OECD is it subjects the official programme to scrutiny every five years. In January 2014 the development assistance committee will undertake a formal evaluation of Ireland's commitment to development and co-operation. It will be interested in meeting the committee as part of its deliberations. It nominates two peer reviewers, in our case Austria and Portugal, and Lithuania will also attend as an observer. They will identify one of our partner countries to visit. They will come to Ireland and meet the Houses of the Oireachtas, non-governmental organisations, the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and other Departments. They will make a judgment call on whether Ireland's aid programme adheres to good international practice, whether we are focused on the needs of the poorest countries and what recommendations they might make on strengthening our performance in the years ahead. It is an important issue in giving assurance to the Oireachtas and Irish citizens that somebody is keeping an eye on this issue. The report will be made available in the public domain.

I thank Deputy Eric Byrne for his comments on the Dublin Castle event which several of us attended. For the reasons he mentioned, it was an important moment. We brought many participants from local communities from throughout the world and gave them a say. Their message is always that they are not being consulted. Everybody speaks about these issues in the corridors of Geneva, Brussels and New York, but local communities are not being consulted. They had an opportunity to give a view. The Tánaiste and the Minister of State gave a guarantee at the meeting that they would take these messages to the United Nations and the Tánaiste honoured this guarantee. He brought these messages to the United Nations General Assembly in September and they are continuing to inform. We see ongoing participation and dialogue with representative groups and beneficiaries as important for financing development and shaping a post-2015 agenda.

With regard to capacity building, the example of Uganda was mentioned. This has been an issue, with more failures than successes. We speak about supporting our partners in capacity building and know how long it took Ireland to establish good effectively functioning key institutions such as the National Statistics Office, the Comptroller and Auditor General, the Parliament and parliamentary committees. This matter is related to the accountability issue raised by the Vice Chairman. It takes a long time and sustained effort to work with these entities to help to build results. We are in a position to do this through the bilateral aid programme. It is also an issue which arose as a weakness in the millennium development goals. Everybody was focusing on what we wanted to achieve without focusing on what institutions should be provided with in order to have long-term gains in these areas. We have tried to reflect this in the policy approach, but we are under no illusions about how difficult it can be. It is also an area in which we are learning. We can have better linkages between Irish institutions and institutions in our partner countries. We have a very good long-term partnership between the ESRI and the equivalent entity in Vietnam. The ESRI relates its experience of generating useful data on economics and social development which can inform policy development over time.

To answer Senator Deirdre Clune, we are concerned about overseas development aid, but we are not specifically concerned about major changes taking place in the Council conclusions next month. There is recognition that the overseas development aid concept fashioned in the 1970s is no longer as relevant as it was, but major elements of it remain absolutely relevant today. The essential elements of overseas development aid relate to official giving from OECD countries. It also relates to whether it is given as grants or loans. It relates to the countries to which it is given and the activities for which it is given. There are elements in the debate who would like to see the definition changed to justify a decrease in the allocation of budget and other reasons. From our perspective, it remains absolutely valid to plan to give grants to least developed countries provided there is dialogue about their usage. Ireland's assistance is 100% untied and we believe we have some solid ground to work on, given our history. We will engage in the coming years as the debate unfolds, coming at it from a strong position of defending what is very positive about overseas development aid and trying to ensure these positives are not diluted by other interests which would try to justify a decrease in the allocation to their aid budgets.

I hope I have addressed some of the issues raised.