Mr. Dominic MacSorley:

I will keep this very brief. I thank members for their comments. We could be here a lot longer but we cannot afford to be. I have one point in response to Deputy Grealish and Senator Bacik. I refer to the scale of the famines and the comparisons. The drivers now are very much around conflict and that is the key change from 20 or 30 years ago. In regard to the US, we are concerned about the budget but at a broader level and at a political level, one just has to look at North Korea to see that diplomacy has been abandoned in favour of militarisation. If we are going to use this, then we have to say that Europe needs to step up and become an alternative voice. Ireland has a role, whether it is in tackling or reducing the tensions which might result in a catastrophe or in dealing with the drivers of conflict at a famine level. The positive thing to take out of this is that it is all preventible. The technology is smarter and the early warnings and the early actions are all there. There is a transformation in that €500,000 can be transferred from Dublin on a Thursday evening and be spent by women in remote isolated villages in Somalia on Saturday morning. It is not always an absence of food but an absence of cash. This is the 21st century. Solutions are there and they have prevented famine in Ethiopia.

We talk about corruption and these governments but zero tolerance is the way to go. We also have to acknowledge and communicate to the public that Ethiopia committed €350 million of its funds, becoming the second largest donor after the USAID, to combatting the food security crisis last year. This is the essence of partnership.