Mr. Michael Gaffey:

I thank the members of the committee for the range of questions and also for their remarks on the effectiveness and work of Irish Aid. An important point to make here is that Irish Aid is the Irish people's development programme. If it does not connect properly with the Irish people, as well as with the people with whom we work in poor countries in Africa, it will not succeed. We feel a great sense of responsibility to work with the committee, civil society and the Irish people on ensuring that we can explain the programme, that it is responding to the right needs and that we are explaining those properly.

Yesterday we had a big event in Dublin Castle, the Our World Irish Aid Awards, where primary schools won prizes for their projects in explaining sustainable development. Some of those primary school children did a really good job, which was better than some of us have been able to do, of explaining the importance of sustainable development and the sense of global citizenship and interdependence in the world today. This is exactly the point Deputy Bernard Durkan was making that our attitude to climate change in our own lives is directly linked to the effects of climate change on some of the poorest people in Africa. That was very positive and hopeful from the point of view of Ireland and the engagement by young Irish people with this agenda.

Let me go through the questions raised, and if I miss any please remind me. I will try to cover them all. Deputy Brendan Smith referred to the level of our representation at the Addis Ababa conference. The Minister of State at the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Deputy Sean Sherlock, will be on the delegation. The final composition of the delegation is still being discussed. While the UN mentioned the attendance of finance Ministers, it is not a pledging conference. I do not think there will be many finance Ministers from the European Union present. The design, work and negotiation are taking place now. I will be able to inform the committee of the exact level of representation at the political level as soon as that is decided, but definitely the Minister of State, Deputy Sherlock, and all of his development ministers across the EU will be present.

The Foreign Affairs Council of development Ministers which met on 26 May reached agreement on reconfirming the ODA target of 0.7% of gross national income within the timeframe of the post-2015 agenda. The Minister of State, Deputy Sherlock, had to do quite an amount of work to help get that agreement. To be honest, the environment in the European Union has changed a little bit in that different member states have different priorities. The focus we have on ODA and its important role in Africa and in the least developed countries in Africa is not necessarily shared by all member states, because some of them have other priorities. Some of the newer member states have their own concerns about the level of development in their region and also the fragility and conflict in their regions. It is a different debate within the European Union from what it was in 2004 and 2005, as the shape of the European Union is different. It is significant that we have that commitment to 0.7% of gross national income. The question of how Ireland makes progress towards that target, having stabilised the programme in recent years, will be a major issue for the October budget, because that is the context in which decisions on our aid budget are taken.

I have emphasised the importance of ODA and its importance in the work Irish Aid is doing and in the context of the work we are doing with the poorest countries in Africa, but the broad agenda requires the generation of a much greater amount of funding. The private sector is important and has a role. It is clear from the agenda that the really critical element will be domestic resource mobilisation and taxation. The changes and the work that is necessary can only be achieved through proper taxation policies. Here the linkages become clear in the SDGs. Taxes cannot be raised effectively without the consent of the people, good governance, democracy and peace and security. While the SDG agenda is challenging in the sense of being so broad, it is bringing the whole context together. It would not really work by stating that one must raise more taxes without looking at governance issues, because it would not be achievable. However, it raises challenges in the negotiations because it is difficult for some of the countries and some of the governments involved to address these issues as openly as others. It has been challenging to negotiate some of these goals. It will be even more challenging to implement them, but at least if they are negotiated there is good governance and peace and security in the goals, and the next challenge is out to implement that.

Obviously, there was resistance to including some of those elements. The question of taxation will be huge. We have made much progress with some of our partners in developing countries on increasing the level of taxation they can raise for development, but much more work needs to be done. The question of illicit flows is massive. It was estimated that the amount of money lost in illicit flows out of Africa last year was of the order of $50 billion, yet total ODA provided for poverty reduction across the world was $135 billion. That shows the scale of the challenge of illicit flows and corruption. The attempt here is to start a process whereby we have a comprehensive development agenda which takes account of these challenges.

The summit takes places from 25 to 27 September. We will not wake on 1 October in a new world, transformed to the agenda of sustainable development. That will take time and strong political will. It is a voluntary process. The vital element will be the political will. The summit in September will be incredibly important in starting the process. Often it takes a generation to make these changes. We have done much in the past decade under the MDGs. More was achieved than predicted. When the MDGs were first adopted there was not the same sense of ownership that they have now. They came out of an experts' group with the Secretary General. In the first year or two there was much criticism that they were not being translated into policies, and it took a few years for governments to realise that this was an agenda that they could work on and deliver on. The progress made is significant, but still the gaps remain. There are certain particular issues where progress has been slower than we would have wanted. Large numbers of people have been lifted out of poverty, yet nearly 800 million people suffer from hunger. That 300,000 women still die every year in childbirth is unacceptable. Yet much progress has been made.

One of the really important things about the sustainable development goals is that if we are to work with them we have to be much more coherent in our own policies. That term, policy coherence for development, is an ugly one but a really important one. What it really needs is a whole-of-government approach to our development policy.

The OECD recognised that we need to make more progress. In fact, it recognised that every donor needs to make more progress. One of the most useful things we can do development-wise is to achieve coherence in development policy. We have made progress.

The meeting we had with the review team, which involved representatives of a wide range of Departments, is one which they said they had not experienced before when they reviewed a donor country. One of the Departments which has become much more engaged is the Department of Finance. Again, the role of taxation is really important. The Department of Finance has commissioned a spillover analysis of the effect of Ireland's taxation policies on developing countries. We, in the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, are on the steering committee on that and I hope that report will be completed and published in the near future.

We are making progress on a whole of government approach but we have a long way to go. The One World, One Future has been important in that regard and the commitment to give a report to Parliament through this committee stands. We will prepare a report but the precise timing of which, to be honest, I cannot say. The Minister answered a parliamentary question on this recently and I can come back to the committee with information on when we will have the report.

The whole process of developing positions for the intergovernmental negotiations on the SDGs has been really important in helping to build coherence across government. We have led an interdepartmental committee on that which meets very regularly. That committee has been developing Irish positions and has helped bring together the sense of coherence that we have worked on for several years