Mr. David Donoghue:

I thank the Chairman and members of the committee for their questions and comments. Senator Bacik raised the question of multilateral versus bilateral aid. That is an old debate, of course. I was at one point the director general of Irish Aid, so I remember it from then. There are different merits in each form of aid. Multilateral means that one can perhaps get more value for one's money, because ultimately it is put with a lot of others'. The problem, however, is that it is less visible and recognisable as Irish aid. Bilateral aid, on the other hand, is something upon which we clearly have our own imprint. On the sustainable development goals, SDGs, believe it or not, official development assistance, ODA, as such was not particularly examined in the context either of finalising the SDGs or of looking at the funding, which is the subject of a separate agreement. There is an agreement called the Addis Ababa Action Agenda, which was negotiated more or less in parallel with ours. It focused on the financial and non-financial means which we would need to implement the new goals. There was not that much interest expressed, odd as it may seem, in the relative merits of multilateral and bilateral aid, because we are going to need a level of funding for the implementation of these new goals which is so vast that it puts ODA of any kind into the shadow.

For example, about two years ago the World Bank produced a document, called From Billions to Trillions, and even in the title we can see that the billions, roughly speaking, are what one gets by adding up the current levels of ODA of whatever kind and the potential for further ODA, for example, from the Gulf States, who up to now have not done very much. However, there is a limit to the amount of ODA that can be got from anywhere. If we talk about trillions, on the other hand, that is where we factor in private sector funding. The estimate is that it would take about $4.2 trillion dollars a year for the 15 years to get the SDGs implemented. Of course, that is a very general assessment and it can be debated in many ways. However, if we take that as even halfway accurate, $4.2 trillion, then the total amount that can be supplied by present or future ODA, whether bilateral or multilateral, is relatively insignificant. Far more can be provided through other sources.

For example, and this is something I learned in the subsequent negotiations I did about migration and refugees, to which Deputy Crowe just referred, the level of funding available from remittances is greater than ODA contributions. That is just by way of a general comment that ODA, seen through the UN lens, is relatively, I will not say unimportant, but secondary. Domestic resource mobilisation is another big theme. That means helping developing countries to improve their administrative systems and combat corruption in such a way that they get more of a tax take. Domestic resource mobilisation would be seen as the second biggest objective. ODA would be a main instrument, then domestic resource mobilisation, then there is debt relief, preferential trade arrangements, and then there are many other remittances and forms of financial assistance. That is a general comment.

Coming back to the particular merits of one over the other, I personally have some sympathy with the point which the Trócaire colleague apparently made. I do think that we need to play to our strengths, and Ireland is a country which is known primarily for its bilateral involvement in partner countries. That is where we have built up a reputation. It is for debate whether one would label a particular school "Funded by Irish Aid" or not. While that is another issue, we are known generally for the quality of our bilateral aid. In whatever arrangements are made, I would not want to see that dimension diminished too much. That is just a personal view, and I emphasise I am no longer in any position of responsibility, so this is not necessarily Government policy.

Some balance roughly like what we have at present is probably the right one. Of course, a lot depends on the quantum of aid that we are administering. There could be staff implications if we were putting a lot into the bilateral area. One then has to factor that through. One advantage of emphasising multilateral aid is that it is being left in the hands of others, notably the UN and the EU, to track and demonstrate what is happening with the expenditure. There can be risks attached to it, but on the whole I think it does work. There is no easy answer to this debate, and I would like to see something along the lines of the present balance maintained.

Moving to the reform of the UN development system, since the SDGs came into effect, the entire UN system has been almost revolutionised. Practically every topic which comes up at the UN is prefaced in terms of implementing one of the goals. It is now the bible for the UN across the board. It is even coming into the Security Council, and I will come back to Deputy Crowe's very interesting point in a moment.

The Security Council, strictly speaking, sees itself as the place where decisions are taken about international peace and security, but it is a perfectly reasonable to make the point that we will never get lasting peace and security in any part of the world if problems of serious under-development are not addressed. They are linked, so it is perfectly legitimate for the sustainable development goals, SDGs, to now be discussed in the Security Council. That said, some members of the Security Council prefer to try to keep things separate. However, it is reasonable to imagine that the SDGs should now govern everything that the UN does.

The deputy Secretary General of the UN is Amina Mohammed, who is a former Nigerian Minister of Environment. She was also the special representative of then Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon for the SDG negotiations. She is intimately familiar with the SDGs, and she has the role now, under Secretary General António Guterres, of supervising a whole set of institutional changes at the UN to follow through on the logic of the SDGs and overcome the silo thinking. That applies to the UN agencies, in particular. Some agencies are better than others at recognising that we are now in a much more interconnected world, where no agency can operate on its own. This has implications for the field, as they say, because one has an in-country UN presence which has had a rather loose co-ordination up to now. However, one consequence of the SDGs is that in, for example, Liberia or Nigeria, the so-called resident co-ordinator, overseeing the ten or 12 UN agencies, which would typically be there, would have a far greater role, including with the local government, in order to help it to implement the SDGs. Both the changes being made at headquarters to give effect to the new logic of the SDGs, and the changes being made to field operations, are attracting a lot of attention at the moment at the UN.

I have to say that the UN has never been a particularly effective organisation. One of the many strange things about it is that there is very little movement between headquarters and the field. I come from a national diplomatic service where it was par for the course to go abroad every couple of years. The UN does not operate that way. Certain countries establish what are almost national rights to particular positions at the headquarters. It is very hard for the reformers to break that up, and to get the mobility between headquarters and the field which we, in a national context, would regard as vital. Obviously, bad habits develop if somebody has been in the same post for 20 years. I will let that go for the moment, but transparency and accountability are the key words at the moment at the UN, particularly because we have a new Secretary General who is very able and very committed to improving its functioning, and the SDGs are the context for him to attempt that.

The issue of our own national arrangements have been raised. It is not really for me to say, but I think the particular committee involves all relevant Departments, including the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, so I have no doubt that we will have input into the work of that committee. However, I am not privy to the exact arrangements for co-ordination.

Deputy Crowe asked about the lessons learned from the millennium development goals, MDGs. There are a number of key differences between the MDGs and the SDGs. One difference is that there were only eight millennium development goals. They were focused on the traditional development priorities of health, education and so on. They did not go into the environmental area or the economic area. As such, the first major difference is that the SDGs are far wider. As the figure of 17 goals compared to eight implies, they cover a much wider range of policies. The second difference is that the MDGs were dreamed up by a couple of UN officials and announced. They were never negotiated. This time around, the feeling was that every country in the world had to have ownership of the goals for them to work and be accepted. That meant that the likes of my Kenyan colleague and I were needed in order to broker this agreement. We had to produce successive drafts of the document until one day, with the sixth draft, we got it. That meant that every country had a veto on every word of the document. When one bears in mind that there are 193 countries in the world, and one is not just talking about one person per country, but possibly an entire cabinet and civil service. It is formidable. That is another key difference.

The biggest difference between the MDGs and the SDGs is that every country in the world is now operating to the same plan, as it were, for the 15 years. The MDGs were seen as the rich countries saying to the poor countries, "This is what we want you to do if you want to get official development assistance, ODA, from us". I am simplifying a bit. This time, however, we are all on equal terms, so all 193 countries are operating to the same plan, with no special arrangements for any country. We are all setting out together on this journey, as it were, towards 2030. That is called universality. This is the first time the UN has ever done this. It is the first time that every country has agreed to the same vision for what its society should be achieving, and that is unique.

Another important difference is that we built arrangements to monitor and review progress into the SDGs. There were no such arrangements in the MDGs. We also built in a separate agreement, the Addis Ababa action agenda, on the detail of the financial and non-financial means that would be needed to implement the goals. There was no such agreement for the MDGs. Something came along a few years later, but it was separate. Many people said that a weakness of the MDGs was that eight goals were announced, but no funding was announced with them, and therefore they were never likely to be achieved in full. Very roughly speaking, one could argue that we achieved about 60% or 70% of the MDGs. I am making a sweeping generalisation here. However, that is mainly because China was able to lift itself out of extreme poverty within a generation. That achieved one of the goals handsomely, but then some of the other specific goals fell short - I emphasise that 60% or 70% is just my very vague indication. We included in the SDGs the remaining work that has to be done to complete the MDGs. They were folded into the new agenda. I am fairly certain that when it comes to 2030 there will be a further set of goals for the next 15 years. I think this approach is now here to stay.

A member made a very good point about monitoring. Given the breadth of stakeholders involved, and all the people I mentioned earlier, it is difficult to see how each country will do it. One could have, say, a national council for sustainable development or for the SDGs, which would try to bring the key players, government and others, under one roof. That is an option which some countries have gone for.

Strictly speaking, the question of the Security Council and the veto is off to one side as an issue, but I am happy to deal with it. The veto available to the five permanent members of the Security Council is an old chestnut that has been debated backwards and forwards for more than 20 years. The basic issue of reforming the membership of the Security Council has also been debated for 20 years, and I am afraid we are no further along today. This is partly because there is no particular deadline which would force the permanent five to agree to widen the Council in a particular way.

Different models are available, each of which brings in major regional players. In one model they would have permanent seats. In another they would have almost permanent or semi-permanent seats. The rest of us have not made up our minds, but there is no particular guillotine or deadline by which we should make up our minds. This means this unhappy state of affairs continues, whereas with the strategic development goals, for example, my Kenyan colleague and I were able to say that a summit coming up in September 2015 to announce new goals for the next 15 years was a deadline we could not let slip. We then created an artificial deadline of 31 July that year by which we stated we had to have the negotiations finished. People told it would leave us with six weeks and asked what would we do then. Even though it was artificial, we insisted on a deadline and we said we would finish on 31 July. We actually finished on 2 August. We need deadlines and it is as simple as that. The Security Council matter will drag on because there is not that pressure.

On migration and refugees, I was asked to co-facilitate, that is, co-chair, a separate process last year which led to the New York Declaration. This is the first global agreement ever on migrants and refugees. This may seem strange, but the reason is that refugees are already well covered by the UN in a strict sense. We have an agency that deals with them, the UN refugee agency, UNHCR. We also have the Refugee Convention of 1951. Up until now, migrants, as in the 244 million people in the world deemed to be migrants, have not been seen as a matter for the UN because some countries maintain the degree to which they take in migrants is a matter for themselves and that it should not be the basis of an agreement at UN level. However, that thinking has been superseded. The New York Declaration involved 193 member states and they all agreed to a set of commitments about the most vulnerable migrants. Economic migrants who might go from Ireland to Australia do not particularly need assistance at UN level, but the thousands of people leaving Syria certainly do, and this is what the New York Declaration is about. It was a very difficult negotiation because there were so many conflicting points of view. I was teamed with Jordan, which had its own issues and particular needs as one of the two or three host countries which carry unbelievable burdens. One third of the population of Jordan consists of refugees. We got an agreement, which I think is a good one, and there are now follow-up processes to come up with a specific global agreement on migration and another specific agreement on refugees.

To answer the Vice Chairman, I do not have any particular role in the oversight of the strategic development goals. I will follow them with great interest. Internationally, I am asked to speak from time to time about certain aspects of them. In a vague way I am seen as a kind of godfather of them, rightly or wrongly. My Kenyan colleague is approached in the same way. I do not have any particular role in Ireland's implementation of them, at least not so far.