Simon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I will start with the final question. It is no secret that I think Ireland needs to put a convincing roadmap in place to get us to where we promised we would be, which is to commit 0.7% of our gross national income to development aid funding. To put that into context, we are currently spending €700 million a year on development aid. If we were to get to 0.7% by 2030, which is a target we would like to certainly focus on, we would have to get to spending €2.5 billion by then. That is the kind of scale of increased expenditure that one is talking about. It is not easy to factor that into budgets because it means very significant increases annually, even if one is to do it over a ten-year period or more. We are currently talking to the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform and the Department of the Taoiseach about that.

I have strong views on this issue. We are currently spending below 0.3%, not because we have reduced funding in this area - in fact, we increased our development aid funding in the previous budget by €25 million - but because our economy is growing at such a pace that to simply stand still and not reduce the percentage of GNI that relates to overseas development aid, ODA, one would have to spend between €50 million and €70 million extra. This is a difficult challenge for us. If our economy was standing still it would be much easier to do this but we have an economy that is growing at the fastest pace in Europe for the fourth year in a row. When a country is in deep recession, when we have to make hard choices to support our own people and to provide basic services and supports for them, that is one matter but when we have an economic growth story such as we have right now, in my view, we have an obligation to the poorest of the poor.

We have a good track record in how we spend money on overseas aid programmes. We will launch a White Paper process to review that and to modernise it. In the coming weeks, we will also launch our global footprint plan between now and 2025. One will see much discussion and activity around the role of overseas aid, in terms of Ireland's contribution globally, particularly in the developing world and on the continent of Africa. One will also see commitments, which we will need Opposition parties to support us on, to prioritise increased expenditure at budget time to make a roadmap to 0.7% real because it is easy to promise these goals for 2030 or beyond but not make the financial choices and decisions in advance of the budget for next year. This will require hard choices. Obviously, the more support we get from this committee and from other political parties, the easier it is for us to do that. I am absolutely committed to a credible route to 0.7% and the significant expenditure increases that will be required to get us there.

In terms of Libya, as a former Minister for Defence, I am quite familiar with this issue. As Deputy Niall Collins will be aware, we have had naval ships on and off in the Mediterranean, largely picking up refugees who have come from Libya to the shores around Tripoli. It is a desperately tragic story. The conditions in many of the camps on the shoreline are horrific. There are many stories of sexual abuse and rape of women. There are many horrific stories of people trafficking, basically, people being put into boats that are not at all seaworthy and that everybody knows will not make it 15 miles, never mind across the Mediterranean. This is a tragic situation that the European Union has focused on, and is spending a lot of money and a lot of political capital on trying to help to resolve. In April of last year, the EU approved a €90 million programme to step up protection for migrants and to reinforce migration measures in Libya. The €90 million is in addition to €120 million already announced for migration related support for Libya.

Ireland's contribution is essentially through an EU contribution, which we obviously contribute to. We do not have a bilateral ODA support programme in Libya. The main reason for that is because we do not have any presence in Libya. Normally, when we have priority countries with aid programmes, we have a government that we can negotiate with that we get transparency from, in terms of how funding is spent and how programmes operate, etc. In Libya, it is difficult to do that. There are security and governance issues and we have done it, essentially, by supporting EU funding programmes to date.

The Deputy would have heard me call for an international investigation into the violence in Gaza in recent weeks. I refer to the 110 Palestinians that have been shot, many of them a long way from the border wall. The credible approach here is to insist on an independent inquiry on what happened. Israelis will defend their actions. Palestinians will also make very credible arguments in terms of what happened here and the tragic consequences. We have supported and sponsored a session in the human rights council. We are not a member of the human rights council but we have been supportive of a motion which has supported the setting up of an independent inquiry, which will find it difficult to do its work because I do not think Israel will co-operate. I still think it is a useful exercise. There needs to be accountability when there is this kind of violent engagement where so many people have been killed because of military interventions and the use of live ammunition largely on unarmed crowds, which is what happened.

The cross-party debate we have had in the Dáil on the issue reflects the concern in Ireland in that regard.

History will judge the global powers harshly for what has been allowed to happen and what continues to happen in Syria. There are a number of processes to try to make political progress that will make a ceasefire stick and last. In truth, I am not sure if any of them is working. The one we support strongly is the Geneva process. The ongoing violence in Syria has cost the lives of well over 400,000 people, while countless others have been injured and displaced. The numbers displaced run into millions. I have condemned the violence on numerous occasions in the Dáil and reiterate that condemnation. Together with other countries, Ireland states there is a need to give strong political support to the Geneva process in an effort to try to bring some political stability to a country that has been and continues to be torn apart by war. Since 2012, Ireland has provided more than €109 million in humanitarian assistance for those affected by the conflict, including almost €25 million last year and over €16 million so far this year. It includes the provision of support within Syria and also for countries in the region, including, in particular, Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey which are host countries for large numbers of refugees. At the UN hosted pledge conference for Syria and the region that took place in Brussels on 25 April Ireland pledged a further €25 million in humanitarian assistance in 2018, thus maintaining the same level of assistance we provided last year. Given the very significant level of ongoing need, Ireland also made a commitment to provide multi-year predictable funding beyond 2018.

One of the things I will be doing next week when I am in Jordan is visiting refugee camps. Countries such as Jordan and Libya are doing extraordinary things in trying to incorporate hundreds of thousands of refugees. When European countries talk about trying to manage migrants and refugees, the numbers of thousands are often in single digits. We should spare a thought for countries such as Lebanon where half of the population are refugees. Jordan and Turkey are dealing with enormous numbers of refugees. We have an obligation to assist in any way we can with monetary and policy support. Next Tuesday I am due to leave very early to travel to Jordan. Jordan and Egypt are important strategic countries in the context of the Middle East peace process. I have been to Egypt in recent months. The last time I travelled to Israel and Palestine, I travelled to Egypt first. This time I am visiting Amman in Jordan. We will open an embassy in Jordan before the end of the year which, again, is reinforcing the interest Ireland has in the broader Middle East peace process. We recognise the role Jordan plays as a stabilising country in the broader region. We will then visit Tel Aviv and Ramallah for political meetings in Israel and Palestine. We will then travel to Cyprus, a country which potentially has a strategic role to play in the neighbourhood as an EU member state but also as a country with a coastline that geographically is very close to Gaza and Israel.

I will happily come back to report on the political engagements I will have during the visit. We have engagement at very senior political level with all of the countries mentioned. If I meet the Israeli Prime Minister, it will be the fourth time I will have met him in nine months. We are due to meet the Palestinian Foreign Minister, Mr. Riyad al-Mliki, and the Palestinian chief negotiator, Mr. Saeb Erekat, in Ramallah. Likewise, I am due to meet my counterparts in Cyprus and Jordan. That is the reason I have asked Opposition parties to give us some time and space to try to make diplomacy and politics work in the Middle East, rather than make a radical change of direction in an effort to show solidarity or express frustration at the lack of progress in the past 12 months.