Mr. Peter Power:

I thank Deputy Smith for his contribution. I will to address the many points he made. First, the Deputy is correct that there is a large Filipino community in Ireland who are, in my view, highly respected people. The Filipino people are a lovely people. UNICEF has a long-standing connection with them. In many cases, they provide health care services. I know that many Filipino health care workers, in particular home help providers, provide a fantastic and human service. We need to show solidarity with them in their time of crisis.

The Deputy asked the reason the figures as mentioned by the World Food Programme representative versus the figures I have quoted differ, in respect of which I would like to make two points. First, the disaster area is huge and is only really visible from the air. The immediate pictures may have concentrated on the city of Tacloban because it was the only city one could access by aeroplane. The sheer expanse of the destruction when viewed from a helicopter has to be seen to be believed. There is no other way of putting it. I mentioned the other day that it is as if a 20 mile wide steamroller went through the country. That is the scale of the disaster. I make that point because there are so many areas that have not yet been reached and will only be reached via helicopters. The US military has a presence off the coast now and its helicopters are getting food aid and water to the more outlying areas. The point I am making is that it is difficult to be accurate in terms of the numbers affected but certainly many people do not have food. A man who was driving me around Tacloban the other day told me he had looted for food to feed his family. This man was a good man and not a criminal. He told me that was what people were resorting to because all their belongings had been destroyed in this huge disaster. It is difficult to be accurate in terms of reporting facts and figures.

The Deputy also asked if the UN has the capacity to respond to this disaster. Only time will tell. The office of the Secretary General of the United Nations, Ban Ki-moon, and his special adviser on humanitarian affairs gave a final report this morning on the Haiti earthquake, in respect of which the statistics are quite interesting. At the peak of that particular disaster, 2.3 million had been affected and more than 105,000 houses had been destroyed. In the Philippines 4 million children are affected and 243,000 houses have been wiped out. That is the scale of this particular disaster. It is enormous. I know that Valerie Amos, the head of the Organisation for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs, OCHA, recently presented to this committee. She was in the Philippines last week. It will be her responsibility and that of her office to co-ordinate all the individual agencies.

It will be her responsibility and the responsibility of her office to co-ordinate all the individual agencies.

Deputy Durkan asked previously whether we had learned from the failures of the past. I am unsure whether we have, but one failure following the tsunami of 2004, especially in the Banda Aceh region, was that everyone piled in. NGOs and agencies were tripping over each other. This is not unlike that situation, and it should be co-ordinated far better, but the point is well made.

The final point, which I should have mentioned in my script, is that Irish Aid has provided funding, but it has also provided - which is most welcome to organisations such as UNICEF - the rapid response corps, which has been built up in the organisation in recent years. One of the big things in this disaster is that every telephone pole and every piece of communications equipment is down. Irish specialist communications engineers are at the disposal of the larger agencies to provide basic telecommunications infrastructure in order that the aid agencies can start communicating with each other about which will go where and what the situation is here and there. It is difficult to say it but it is almost as important as food and water and medical supplies to get a basic infrastructure of communications in place.

All of these things must be dealt with as matter of urgency before all the fishing boats and the communities are rebuilt. That will take years and years, without question.