Ms Caoimhe de Barra:

I will deal with the questions on humanitarian issues, beginning with the situation in Syria. I welcome the opportunity to have this discussion with members. The crisis in Syria has been ongoing for three years and the peace negotiations have not made a great deal of progress. There has been some small progress in terms of humanitarian access, an issue raised specifically by members. We can put the situation in context by taking the example of the city of Homs, which was besieged for 300 days. Even during the six-day ceasefire, when goods were going in and people were being evacuated, the ceasefire was violated on several occasions. The context is extremely volatile and there is huge fragility around ceasefires.

Without a formal and final peace settlement, we will see a continuation of the fragility of the current situation. Out of a population of 21 million, more than 9 million are directly affected, whether because of displacement - there are more than 2 million refugees externally displaced beyond Syria's borders, the vast majority in neighbouring countries, and some 6 million people internally displaced - or because they are stuck and cannot leave their current location. Trócaire works with several agencies inside Syria to access places like Aleppo and Homs. We have found that aid workers and civilians are being directly targeted and men are being disappeared. It is extremely difficult to access the areas we need to access.

An issue on which the Government must reinforce its advocacy at all international fora to which we have access is in calling for the implementation of the recent UN Security Council resolution on humanitarian access. That important resolution will be monitored on a monthly basis. If we can advocate for that monthly monitoring and provide any support possible for it, it will help to put pressure both on the regime and on all of the forces that are active in Syria to improve their operations. It is also important that we ensure there is accountability in the long term for the crimes against humanity that clearly are taking place in Syria and which are being inflicted by all sides to the conflict. Support for the gathering and documentation of information around crimes against humanity is very important.

Regarding the range of humanitarian crises that are ongoing at any one moment, I remind members of our work in South Kordofan, which is a forgotten emergency. Several hundred thousand people are suffering aerial bombardment there but the world knows very little about it. The way in which the UN system operates is that there are early warning systems and very good data which tell the humanitarian community and the world at large about what is happening. The tragedy is that very often these early warning systems are ignored. For example, in 2011, we knew up to six months in advance of the looming famine conditions in east Africa. It was only when the situation became critical, however, that there was a response. At that point many people had died, livestock were lost and so on. It was just not possible to go back and recover all that was lost.

In terms of the Government's response, we work extremely well with Irish Aid. The latter has a very useful tool in terms of identifying the countries that should be the priority because of their need and not because of the profile they have internationally at any one time. We must constantly question ourselves on whether or not we are giving visibility to the crises that are forgotten by the international media and whether we are making enough use of the UN's data to identify the locations where we should be operational and active.