Mr. Niall Burgess:

I will start but Mr. de Búrca and I might respond to the questions between us. In response to the question on migration and the 65 million displaced people and the root causes, the complex humanitarian crises we are facing now in the wider Middle East, Yemen, the Horn of Africa, the Lake Chad Basin, north-east Nigeria and even a new fragility around climate and food security in southern Africa are the drivers of displacement but that has become a very significant theme and a pull of funds from Irish Aid. Our total humanitarian assistance is close to €200 million, which is a sizeable percentage of our total aid.

I will make two points on the root causes and how we address them. The first is that the sustainable development goals give us a remarkably comprehensive framework for trying to think about the root causes and the linkage between the causes and the symptoms, which we did not have before. The goals give us a framework to think about how Irish Aid is delivered but in some of the areas I mentioned, in particular in the Horn of Africa, we have a major humanitarian crisis in countries where we also have very significant long-term development programmes, for example, in Uganda and Ethiopia. We have an embassy now in Kenya, which we did not have a number of years ago. We have programmes just across the borders from some of those countries, some of them directly delivered and some through agencies. One of the issues for us in thinking about the future of the programme is how our long-term programmes in those countries can best contribute to the drivers of migration.

One of the things that struck me when I joined the Department is that it was against the backdrop of the famine in Ethiopia, which was the largest humanitarian crisis I had seen in my lifetime. Those were images that drove a lot of people into working with humanitarian agencies and into the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade as well. When I took up this job one of the first visits I made was to go to Ethiopia to look at the work of Irish Aid, in particular in northern Ethiopia. It gives one great pride to see some of the work that we did a couple of decades ago in Ethiopia, experimental work around water management in Tigre, which was then picked up by the Ethiopian Government and mainstreamed across its policies in northern Ethiopia. When one looks at fragility in the region now one can see there is a resilience in that area which was once one of the most vulnerable areas, for reasons in which we can take some considerable pride. It does show that there is a very real connection between what is being done in development programmes today and the kind of humanitarian issues one may or may not have to face in five years' time or a decade hence.

On the Rohingya, obviously most of the displaced Rohingya are in Bangladesh and our own reach in that part of the world is limited enough, and yet the partnerships we have developed with other agencies give us a reach beyond what might be expected. For example, we are a very significant core donor to the International Committee of the Red Cross, ICRC, and to the federation of Red Cross societies. The Minister, Deputy Coveney, met the president of the Red Cross in New York a couple of weeks ago. We have a very deep dialogue and trusting partnership with the Red Cross, which is to the foreground of the relief effort in that region. We have given specific funding to one partner, I think it is Christian Aid-----