Professor Patrick P. Walsh:

I agree with the point that was made earlier about the EU aspect. When we are doing our PhD programme for staff in Africa we have the chief statistician in the Central Statistics Office in Rwanda involved. He is young and he will come here on a PhD programme in economics, when he will be here for 13 weeks a year. The idea is that he does the course work and gets supervision here. We appoint his head of school in the University of Rwanda to be his supervisor in Africa. We do not charge fees for that. The idea is that when he is here he also visits our CSO. He talks about what it is doing because he is doing metrics for being part of the African Union and it is the same idea as how we changed our statistical methods when we joined the EU to align ourselves with the European community. They are the same kind of issues.

The committee is right that there has to be a two-way flow. There have to be people working together, whether it is in Africa or here. They will learn from each other and they will contextualise what they want to do. Mobility becomes a bit expensive but what I would argue is that a first contact must involve a meeting to bed down the relationship and what is going to be done. Once people know each other then facilities such as Zoom and Skype play an important role. Then it is possible to start working daily online in today's world or even on the phone. It is so much easier. There has to be some element of contact and then it can go forward. The whole spirit of the STGs is that the universities should partner and do it with their own funds. Local authorities, parliamentarians, NGOS and all stakeholders should do it. The private sector should learn to partner and deliver if that is what it is interested in.

However, the big part of the STGs is the working together element, to join the dots between these players. I mentioned earlier that our peacekeepers are in Lebanon and Syria. Perhaps they should be in Sudan and other such areas. Irish Aid is in Mozambique, Malawi, Tanzania, Uganda while our universities are in South Africa, and Aid for Trade is in Uganda and South Africa. The key element is how we engage with Africa. Even the diaspora, those who live in Ireland, the Irish Africans, are from different countries from where we are programming. That is a mistake in the sense that if we were in a similar area or in similar countries we would get more synergies and we could do more together, interacting humanitarian elements with development, etc.

On the question of Ireland's reputation, I said there are two aspects. Not being on the upper scale of the 0.7% GNP target damages Ireland's reputation on aid. Being down to 0.3% has really not been good enough.

The sustainable development agenda is not just about overseas aid but engaging in global challenges. The big examples currently include climate change. The committee has seen this with COP23 etc and its report. Ireland, as a result of burning peat and its land use in intensive agriculture, is a disaster. People now know it is a disaster and it is recorded as such.

With the tax haven issue, particularly with Apple, people are getting very frustrated with multinationals and value chains not paying tax. They are just seeing Ireland as one of the most clever actors in terms of the double-this or triple-that, with people not paying taxes. We cannot afford that reputation. We need to say everybody is headquartered here as a gateway to Europe and we will get them together to support the sustainable development goal project. We want to be an epicentre that drives respect for society and the environment, rather than just driving efficiency on some of the key products out there like mobile phones or computers. We must be careful. We have set IDA Ireland loose. It was brilliant in many ways but now it seems to have autonomy and distance from the Government to be able to negotiate these types of deals, and that is not good enough. There are other sides to Ireland's reputation, not least getting back to the question about Irish Aid. It is hard to sell Ireland. We have Bob Geldof, Mary Robinson and U2 and Bono; we have sold ourselves and our famine past as caring about famine and the developing world but in this era, when there has been a shift to environmental matters and bigger social inequality matters, we are now getting a reputation on the other side. These are competing stories that are not helping us.

The committee might ask what I think is good about the Irish Aid programme. I come from UCD, which has the legacy of missionaries. Everybody in parliament or every civil servant in Africa would tell me they had an Irish teacher. They know what UCD is and where those teachers came from. Those days are gone a bit. I learned from this that there is an importance in being there with those people. There is a great thing about going out, setting up a church and staying there. If there is something great about Irish Aid, it is that. There is a long history of being in one part of Tanzania. It is a case of being friends forever and we are staying there. It is where our flag is and we are partners in the delivery of schools, for example. That resonates very strongly. It is not a cheque being helicoptered in and the people do not know who is giving it to them. These people really understand that the Irish are good craic and good friends. They have the ability to really want to chip in and help whatever activity is there, whether it is for a local authority or something else. It is the cornerstone of Irish Aid.