Dr. Walt Kilroy:

I thank the committee for the attention it has given to this and for the very interesting, searching, hard and good questions which have been asked. We are very happy to have an opportunity to engage in this kind of dialogue.

Senator Joe O'Reilly asked a very interesting question about culture. We have experienced this in our own country. We have gone through a lot of change, including a lot of social change, and our own culture has in a way evolved. That is an experience we can call on. It is very important. Looking from afar, we can see a culture as if it is a monolith, but every society has many different strands within it, and many cultures have contradictory parts to them. All these societies such as the Middle East and Europe are all evolving and changing all the time. In many ways, for better or worse, the pace of that change is increasing all the time, driven by technology, globalisation, Covid more recently and all the other things which in many ways seem to be accelerating. We are not dealing with a monolith or something static. If the progressive change we would like to see, such as the empowerment of women and a decrease in discrimination, is seen to be driven by outsiders, it is always much easier to reject it as being the agenda of the outsiders. We have seen that in this country. That is not the only reason for the model but it is why the model of working through partnership with indigenous organisations that have credibility on the ground is a really powerful one. Often the actions, the funding or the programmes we talk about are devised, designed and implemented by organisations from the country in question. The role of the international community in such cases is to try to empower those organisations, to make connections and, if necessary, to provide resources. Having myself worked in development briefly, I have often been incredibly impressed by the quality of these national or local organisations on the ground that might not have the brand leader of being a UN agency but which are deeply rooted in their own cultures, providing incredible and often very courageous, inspirational and strong leadership, with many of the leaders being women. That is a very positive model to try to bring about the right kind of change in what is already a changing environment. Senator O'Reilly's question is a very good one. There is not a simple answer to it, but this is one of the ways forward.

Senator O'Reilly asked another question about the very important and very worrying situation in Tigray. Everything we are hearing coming out of Tigray is extremely worrying: the level of violence, the violence against civilians in general, conflict-related sexual violence and violence against women. This is highly credible and comes from well-documented sources, but this is with humanitarian access and access for journalists severely restricted. That is one of the first demands, apart from reducing or stopping the violence, especially by the Eritrean forces, which have been brought into or allowed to operate in the area and which seem to have carried out some of the worst atrocities. Apart from stopping the violence, humanitarian access is one of the key demands in order to provide relief and that monitoring, accountability and access for journalists. There are a lot of regional tensions. Ethiopia is a very strong and independent nation and, speaking of actions by outsiders being dismissed, a very proud nation with a very long tradition and a country which was never colonised formally. There are also a lot of regional tensions we need to be aware of, especially over the filling of the dam on the Blue Nile, which is causing huge sensitivities and anxieties in Egypt, which, along with Sudan, gets almost all its water from the Nile. The most important things are humanitarian access, ending the violence and addressing the question of impunity for the actions which have already happened.