Mr. Éamonn Meehan:

I reiterate that we value multilateralism. Ireland's involvement in multilateral agencies is critical for a variety of reasons, including our political and diplomatic influence. From our perspective, the NGO community, civil society in Ireland, and the missionary community as Ms Foster-Breslin spoke about, have lots of capacity, and we feel we have the potential to do more, deliver more, grow our programmes and respond in very practical and immediate ways to the needs of vulnerable people. Irish Aid recognises this. The issue for us is not that the money is being misdirected, it is about balance and appropriate levels of support to multilateral organisations and appropriate levels of support to the Irish NGO community. We have shown our ability to respond effectively. As Mr. MacSorley pointed out, many of the places where we work are failed states or states that are extremely vulnerable. More and more, the emphasis, the funding and our time and energy are going into those places. We have the capacity to respond in these countries. We have relationships and sophisticated mechanisms of response, and we believe Irish Aid already knows this. As I stated in my opening statement, we believe Irish Aid should review the balance of that spend.