Mr. David Donoghue:

I thank the Chair and fully understand the constraints that all of the committee members have to operate under. It is a pleasure to be back here in a new capacity.

As was said, I have recently retired from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. I will make a few opening remarks about the importance of the 2030 Agenda for sustainable development and about the role Ireland can potentially play and the leadership which we can continue to exercise in regard to implementation of the new agenda.

It was a great honour and privilege for Ireland to have been asked to take on this role and I can safely say that it has enhanced our standing at the UN and that is good for a number of reasons. We are in the phase now of implementation and the important thing is to keep momentum going worldwide in terms of getting early progress on the 17 goals and the 169 targets. Targets are the subsidiary goals under each of the headline goals. The entire package or agenda also contains an important political declaration and a set of detailed arrangements about how we are going to monitor and review implementation of the STGs worldwide, at regional level and nationally. The entire package is called the 2030 Agenda.

In each country arrangements are being, or have already been, made to co-ordinate their own input into the worldwide monitoring and review exercise. It is not for me to set out the arrangements which have been made in this jurisdiction, but I am aware of them and they follow the pattern set in other countries - in other words, a couple of government ministries take the lead but their mandate is to ensure that there is a whole-of-government approach to implementation of the STGs. I have to say that this time around, it is not just for governments. There are many other stakeholders - I am sorry to use the jargon - but I cannot find any alternative to it. The UN refers to them as stakeholders and that really means in no particular order, civil society, the private sector, parliaments, both national and local, and the scientific and research community. There is a vast array of partners which will be called upon to help implement the goals, so it is not simply a government-to-government exercise. It could not be as the scale of the goals is so big and the scale of the funding required is so big that one has to have private sector involvement, although on carefully agreed terms that reflect the concept of sustainability. It is a huge enterprise in every country but it is for governments in the first instance to establish arrangements to ensure coherence and effective co-ordination across the board. It is also expected that in each jurisdiction there would be arrangements to bring the voice of civil society into the process. Again, it is not for me to comment on that but I know that Coalition 2030 has been founded here which brings together 100 NGOs that are interested in different aspects of the STGs, and I welcome that. It is a very good move and I hope that Coalition 2030 will be able to play its part in the preparation of Ireland's report.

Perhaps I should say at this stage, although I am sure the committee is aware of it, that next July Ireland will be one of a number of countries that will present a review of its own performance in implementing the STGs so far. Again at the risk of telling the committee something it is already aware of, there is a UN organisation called the High Level Political Forum. It is a gathering that takes place every year. It involves minsters, representing all the member states, who come together to do a number of things. They review one big theme relating to the STGs, but they also give the opportunity to UN member states to carry out so-called voluntary national reviews, that is, to present an account of how they have fared so far, what challenges they are finding and what opportunities that they see. The point is to encourage mutual learning. It is not meant to be a process of putting countries into the sin bin. It is meant to help weaker administrations, in particular, to learn from their neighbours, to pick up good ideas and to come away encouraged in terms of the further implementation.

I emphasis the word "voluntary" national review. Although a country like Ireland would have had no problem in presenting its account, there are many developing countries that were fearful about the global north, as it were, imposing its own standards and expectations on them, in particular against a background where many of these countries have tiny, or even no, bureaucracies. They did not want to find themselves forced to account for insufficient performance so that is why in the STGs document we had to emphasise at every stage the voluntary nature of the these national reviews. However, Ireland's review will be next July. So far, approximately 66 countries have made voluntary reviews in the two sessions of the High Level Political Forum that have occurred since the STGs were adopted. It meets every July for approximately eight days with Ministers there for most of that time.

A key moment for Ireland is the presentation of its national report and its national action plan. I understand that the Department of Community, Climate Action and Environment will be in the lead in preparing for that process. That is a very good thing and I would hope that it would be as inclusive as possible, and I have no reason to imagine that it would not be. If Ireland can set a good example by having an arrangement which allows civil society and other key stakeholders to have an input into it, that would be a very good thing.

There is a meeting of the High Level Political Forum at Head of Government level every four years. The first such meeting will be in 2019. The purpose of that is to enable governments at the highest level to have an overall strategic view of what needs to be done globally and regionally. We will be working up to 2019 when every government will be expected to field its Head of Government. It is important that Ireland puts its best foot forward not only because of our particular association with the negotiations but, more importantly, because this is a country which is valued at the UN for its strong commitment to development, to human rights, to equality and inclusion and to all the key themes in the document. It is important that we, even as a small country with limited resources, do the best we can to demonstrate the seriousness with which we are taking this new agenda.

I will take another European example. Germany was one of the star performers in the early stages, partly because Chancellor Merkel, as a former environment minister, was particularly keen on the STGs. In various ways, the German system has moved quite rapidly to provide momentum nationally. There are other counties that also see themselves as market leaders and I hope that Ireland would be able to take its place there.

One of the early things that had to be done by every country was to align the STGs with its national development plan and-or its national strategy on sustainability. That was done in the first year or so in most countries. One can imagine that for developing counties the national development plan is the bible for their government activity, so the STGs now inform and underpin the national development plan in those countries.

I imagine that process will be completed over the next couple of years. Leaving aside what we are doing domestically to meet the goals, which will be the subject of the report, we also have an opportunity through the Irish Aid programme and our other international interactions to help developing countries to reach the goals. I imagine that will also be a big theme of our national report. The Irish Aid programme, which the committee has been discussing lately, is highly respected at the UN. It is one our assets, and I daresay that it may have been one of the reasons Ireland was asked to take on this role to begin with. We have a fair amount of standing in regard to sustainable development, and therefore we should use the potential of the Irish Aid programme to help our partner countries reach the goals.

Of course, it is a utopian agenda. It is made up of 17 goals which cover almost everything under the sun. It is hard to think of anything which is omitted from the SDGs, and it is breathtaking, in a way, to imagine that each country will have achieved the complete agenda by 2030. If I can be allowed a personal reflection, however, having been through the process, the key factor was that no country in the world wanted to be left out of this project. A country may have been afraid of some of its aspects or expectations, but on balance each country felt that it had to be inside the tent rather than outside. I am thinking here not just of tiny developing countries that have almost no administration and no capacity, but also of larger countries which might have had - I am picking my words carefully - questionable human rights records. They might have felt that they would not be able to live up to the high standards set in the document, but even those countries decided that they had to be in.

To use my own phrase, I think that part of it is the risk of political embarrassment. To put it in a more positive way, we need to use political peer pressure in order to get the goals achieved. Let me come up with a hypothetical example, and this really is a hypothetical. Let us imagine that we are talking about the Central American countries. Mexico is a regional leader. However, it might be the case that Guatemala is doing better under the education goal than Mexico. Mexico then has an incentive to pull its socks up and to sprint ahead on the education front in order not to be embarrassed regionally. I know that is a bit basic, or perhaps a bit human, but that is the glue that keeps the entire project together. No country wants to be embarrassed, humiliated or, in some way, isolated and, therefore, every country has signed up, and has signed up without reservation. I was relieved that we managed to get the document through in August 2015 without any country entering reservation, which would have hamstrung us from the beginning.

Every country has signed up to the exact same document without variation or reservation. The test will be delivery, and whether we can get the completion of all the goals by 2030. In practice, some countries will decide that they want to prioritise. Wearing my official hat as the father of the SDGs, as it were, I would have to say that is not valid. All 17 goals are equally important and interconnected. However, I sometimes use the example that Austria is unlikely to focus too much on the oceans goal, being a landlocked country. That is an example of how there will inevitably be some differences. In the case of Ireland, there will be official expectations that we achieve all the goals or show that we have done our best to do so, but in practice I imagine that at the outset we will pick a number of them where we have a pretty good story to tell. I am only just imagining that. Officially, however, I would have to say that we will need to show that we are addressing every goal and all the interconnections between them.

Of course, those interconnections are a challenge for our governmental system as we know it. If one accepts that health and education, for example, are deeply interconnected and if one throws in nutrition and access to water, then one must find ways to ensure all relevant Government Departments must be able to capture and work on those interconnections and avoid thinking in silos. It is said at the UN that above all, the agenda has to be held together. There can be no cherry-picking and no division of the agenda into one set of goals versus two others. It is a highly ambitious, perhaps utopian agenda, but the fact that every country in the world has agreed to it is unprecedented, and we need to build on that.