Charles Flanagan (Laois-Offaly, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I will return to the members of the committee who may be offering to speak. I have received apologies from Deputy Stanton who had to leave a moment ago. Do any members wish to make further contributions at this stage?

Before returning to Ms Van Lieshout for closing comments, I want to acknowledge the work of Dóchas and the importance of Irish Aid and its team in ensuring that its priorities are kept very much to the fore. I also acknowledge the work that Ireland continues to do with the UN, notwithstanding our membership of the Security Council, but also in its hosting of recent meetings on the matter of girls' education and acknowledging the fact that during the pandemic alone, almost 20 million girls have been denied schooling and have left education. There continue to be an enormous number, some 130 million girls, out of school worldwide, and I stress the importance of education. I thank Ms Abbas for her focus, particularly on Jordan and Lebanon, having regard to the refugee situation there and the need to ensure that education standards are kept up. She spoke about online education and courses and ensuring that they are of a certain standard that will allow for a situation where school accreditations are given and that education can be resumed at some stage in the future.

Unless our witnesses would like to come back in to comment further on any of those points, I will ask Ms Van Lieshout to proceed to her closing comments. If any of her guests would like to prioritise issues for our committee after this meeting, we will obviously be in contact with our Government and the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Deputy Coveney, and the Departments of Foreign Affairs and the Taoiseach. We have been working, as Deputy Brady said, on the whole area of Covid-19 vaccine equity but our witnesses have raised a number of important issues this morning that we would be keen to continue to highlight across the wider civil society here in Ireland and to also ensure that the Government keeps these issues high on its agenda.