Mr. Éamonn Meehan:

Ireland has a proud tradition of principled engagement in development, humanitarian aid, UN peacekeeping, disarmament and the protection and fulfilment of human rights internationally. Advancing and protecting a focus on global poverty reduction has high levels of public support in Ireland with 80% of those surveyed supporting an increase in ODA.

The Irish Aid programme is widely recognised as one of the best in the world. In the context of this review, a key emphasis needs to be to protect and build upon the high-quality approach already evident in Irish Aid. That means a focus on poverty for the spend, grant assistance and untied aid. All of these are critically important, and I have no doubt that they will continue. Ireland is well recognised not just because of the nature and quantity of its funding, but the quality of the response provided by Irish Aid that is delivered by Irish NGOs. Aid from Ireland, delivered through Irish civil society and missionary partners, has played a critical role in supporting millions of vulnerable people around the world, helping to meet their basic needs and to attain justice. Those of us here today representing Irish civil society working in the international arena are accountable to the Irish public as supporters of our individual organisations and also as taxpayers. However, Irish Aid funding to civil society organisations decreased from 26% of ODA in 2015 to 23% in 2016.

Focusing on humanitarian funding, that is, funding going to emergency response, the situation was even more striking. In 2016, Ireland's humanitarian assistance programme grew to €194 million to respond to the unprecedented level of humanitarian need. Only 12% of the humanitarian budget in 2016 was allocated to NGOs. This is an alarming reduction from 20% in 2015. By contrast, multilateral spend in 2016 was 61% of Irish Aid's overall budget, with increases in funding to the World Food Programme, United Nations Development Programme, UNDP, the United Nations Children's Fund, UNICEF, the United Nations Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs, UNOCHA, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, UNHCR, Central Emergency Response Fund, CERF, and country based pooled funding mechanisms. This absolute and percentage reduction in funding to NGOs is of concern to us. In light of Ireland's commitments under the grand bargain, which is an agreement entered into at the World Humanitarian Summit in Istanbul in May 2016, Ireland is committed, along with 21 other signatories to the grand bargain, to ensuring that 25% of humanitarian aid goes to local and national humanitarian actors by 2020. We would like to see Irish Aid progress this.

While we fully support multi-lateralism and are proud of Ireland's record on the world stage and the influence it holds, we need to ensure that we are focusing funding on where it is needed most and where it will reach those who need it as fast as possible. It is critical to get the correct balance of channels to achieve maximum impact, and in our view, the balance has tipped too far towards multilateral funding. This should be reversed. A recommendation from the Dochás humanitarian working group, which is in the papers presented to the committee, is that a comparative value for money assessment should be undertaken on the humanitarian funding practices of Irish Aid.

Irish Aid is also highly regarded for its development education and public engagement streams of work. We believe that this should be continued and strengthened. Development education is vital to ensuring that we encourage critical analysis of the world around us - we believe this is never more important than it is now - and that we equip Irish people to become engaged global citizens who understand and support how Irish Aid allocates their money overseas. According to recent research from Dochás, figures indicate that Irish Aid allocations to development education have fallen from 0.73% of the ODA budget in 2011 to 0.51% in 2016.

To achieve the SDGs, Irish Aid's programme needs to continue to strengthen its relationships with and support of civil society, including Irish development NGOs and missionaries, and to ensure an enabling environment to allow civil society to flourish across all of the regions we work in.

This means supporting a diverse, international development sector across a range of small, medium and large organisations. It means also ensuring predictable funding to these organisations from Irish Aid.

We know that civil society is under attack in many of the countries in which we are working and yet it has a vital role to play in ensuring good governance. Civil society has an important advocacy role in holding duty bearers to account and in ensuring pro-poor and sustainable policies are implemented. There were 281 killings of human rights defenders in 2016. Those who stand up for the rights of vulnerable communities often do so at the risk of their own safety. In March 2016 Berta Cáceres, a Honduran environmental activist and human rights worker, who was a partner of Trócaire was murdered because of her opposition to a hydroelectric dam which was to be built on the land of indigenous communities in the Agúan Valley. She is just one example of an emerging global trend towards restrictions, threats and violence against organisations and individuals who speak up against the powerful in their societies. Building up civil society therefore is an important part of development programming. Irish Aid and the wider Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade should be commended on this country's support to human rights defenders. Ireland is rightly seen as a global leader on the issue of protecting civil society space and should continue this vital work.

There is undoubtedly a growing trend toward the manipulation of aid away from poverty reduction and towards the security, commercial and migration policies of many donor countries. Ireland has not gone in this direction and is to be commended on that. The key message we have this morning is that the quality of Irish aid, which has been evident since the programme's inception in the 1970s must be protected at all costs.