Mr. Michael Gaffey:

Yes. The first country that would come to mind is Ethiopia. If one looks at the real progress that has been made in Ethiopia, and it is a bit of a cliche, but we always can draw attention to the situation in Tigray. Irish Aid has been active for the past 20 years in Tigray and has worked closely with local communities and government. Tigray was where the 1984 famine happened. Its people were completely devastated and there was a vast number of deaths from hunger. We, working with the Ethiopian Government, have been very active in helping rebuild life there in terms of education, essential services and in moving to the next phase of economic opportunity. Huge progress has been made in Ethiopia. The big challenge is that as one proceeds with progress, as Ethiopia has overall growth rates of between 9% and 11%, there is also the issue of population growth. In many cases, the progress in basic numbers, made under the MDGs, is challenged by the ever rising population.

The other issue in Africa is that quite a number of countries have very high GNP growth rates that are sustained but the question of inequality remains, that is, income inequality and inequality between different sectors. That is a huge agenda for the SDGs and inequality is at the heart of it. We have recognised that inequalities have to be addressed rather than sheer basic numbers. In case anyone thinks I have singled out Ethiopia, I would say that in virtually all of our key partner countries, if one looks back at the statistics and life on the ground over the past ten years, one can see that the MDG process helped to generate resources specifically directed at poverty reduction and the provision of essential services. MDGs have made a very big difference to the lives of people and that situation is reflected in the statistics for Mozambique, Uganda, Ethiopia and Tanzania.

The challenge that we face more now in some of the big countries, where we have worked for 20, 30 and 40 years as Irish Aid, is not so much how we work to address the provision of essential services like health and education, but how we work with countries that now have high growth rates, that have businessmen and prosperity in the cities and where people drive Mercedes. They have a lot of progress but they also have a lot of extreme poverty. All of that brings to the fore the question of inequalities and how we work with countries to ensure that this term that will be used - we are determined it will be used and will appear in the outcome document for the SDGs in September - is that no one is left behind. We must ensure that we do not measure development on the basis of just overall statistics and that they are disaggregated.

There is a data challenge because we do not have good statistics in Africa. We have better statistics than we had but there is still a data challenge and it is one that was recognised by the high level panel last year. The data challenge is one issue on which we want to work on with a number of partners. When the President Higgins visited Ethiopia last November, we had some very good discussions with the UN Economic Commission for Africa on the challenge of getting good statistics in Africa. I will now quickly run through some of the other issues raised.

Deputy Durkan mentioned the challenge of explaining climate change at home and in the developed world. We agree it is a challenge for us all. The SDG agenda is trying to incorporate the effect of climate change across the world and the co-responsibility that we all share. We, through our programme, can see very clearly the effect of climate change on the poorest countries in Africa and in the poorest communities. That aspect was brought to Ireland in our conference in April 2013. Irish Aid provides between €33 million and €35 million annually specifically for climate change actions, working with communities in Africa. I agree that there is still a job to do in explaining this and the linkages to our own practices at home. I understand that the Pope will join in the effort to explain climate change in the next day or two, which will be an important intervention in the debate.

Deputy Durkan also mentioned the Irish role and how we explain it to other donors. It has been recognised clearly in the EU, and the OECD, the role that Ireland has played in how the Government handled the protection of the aid programme and how it kept the aid programme alive while under a serious economic challenge at home. In the initial years of the crisis we still were lectured a little bit by others on what we should be doing until they looked across the board at how Ireland's performance contrasted with some others. Ireland is held out as an example to those developed countries that face their own challenges and economic crises on how to make the aid or development programme still relevant and how to maintain same. I concede that the challenge now is not so much the protection but it is how we strengthen the aid programme as our economy strengthens.

Deputy Byrne asked how two co-facilitators engage at the UN which has 193 members that all want to have their say and negotiate. I understand the committee will have an opportunity to discuss this point with Ambassador Donoghue when he appears before the committee in advance of attending the conference in Addis Ababa. The co-facilitation, or co-chairing, role is a really important diplomatic role. Crucially, it gives the co-facilitators what is called an opportunity "to hold the pen". They are able to drive the drafting, not so much of the goals which were agreed by the Open Working Group, but of the declarations and the way they are presented. That is crucial work that is under way at the moment and that is the crucial role that co-facilitators will play. It is important that the co-facilitators be allowed to maintain that role because if one starts trying to negotiate the actual declaration, which is to give political will and explain what we are doing here to 193 people, no matter how brilliant and diplomatically experienced they might be, one will not get a very coherent text. Ambassador Donoghue will look forward to explaining the details of that role to the committee.

Deputy Byrne also mentioned the issue of corruption. The issue is absolutely critical. A public opinion survey on attitudes to development was carried out in Ireland in recent years which showed that Irish people are very supportive of the provision of development assistance and understand our role as co-global citizens with the poor in Africa. The one question that Irish people always ask is how can one be sure that aid will be delivered due to corruption. Therefore, corruption is the challenge and we saw it with what happened in Uganda.

The framework of the SDGs is designed to be able to deal with corruption, to build societies where corruption becomes intolerable, to strengthen the role of parliaments and to strengthen the role of oversight institutions and audit, which we are clearly doing. The Uganda fraud came to the fore because the Auditor General of Uganda discovered it and he had received a lot of his support from Ireland.

It is a big problem and it is really important therefore that the goals address issues of governance, accountability and the role of parliaments. The role of parliaments is absolutely critical in the fight against corruption. The role the Oireachtas and parliaments in other developing countries in co-operation with parliaments in Africa is absolutely critical because we will not be able to bridge the gap of what funding is needed for sustainable development if governments are not able to raise taxes from their people which will go towards development. Overseas development aid, ODA, will never do that but it can help.

Deputy Mitchell drew attention to a really important issue, namely, that we have a document which is full of good words and good intentions, including goals, peace and security and governments but let us look at the real world. The Deputy has just come from the Turkish border. That is always the challenge; that one negotiates one's framework and then one has to implement it. Senator Mullins mentioned that if one does not have peace and security, one will undermine all of the gains one makes. Not one of the countries that we call fragile states, countries in conflict, has achieved the millennium development goals, and they will not achieve sustainable development goals. Let us look at the situation in Syria. There has been a failure of analysis in the international community. Ten years ago, we would have all classified Syria as an authoritarian but stable state in an unstable region. Since the start of the crisis in Syria four years ago to the end of this year, Ireland will have provided approximately €41 million in humanitarian emergency assistance, including to the work GOAL is doing on the Turkish border.

One of our statistics from last year showed that approximately 15% of our emergency humanitarian budget went to Syria. Nobody would have predicted that ten years ago. There are massive needs in South Sudan, Somalia, the Central African Republic, and across the Horn of Africa and 15% of the funding available in emergency assistance went last year to Syria because of the need and the suffering. That is a global political failure because the regional solution in the Middle East will have to be a political solution and when that happens it will obviate the need for emergency humanitarian assistance. It really highlights the absolutely critical role of peace. There was resistance to the inclusion of a goal on peaceful societies and well-governed societies in what was seen as a development agenda because in the past there has been a tendency, first, to define development as aid, but second, to define development as something that is separate from politics and governance. Unwieldy as it may seem at times, the benefit of this new sustainable development agenda is that it attempts to bring these factors together because without peace and security one just cannot have development. If we have to devote more of our development funding to emergency humanitarian assistance we will not be able to help with the long-term development of society. That kind of explains why this agenda has to be so complex, but the real challenge for all of us is going to be how we work together to implement the agenda when the summit adopts it in September so that it does not become another document on the shelf.