Mr. Dominic MacSorley:

I will take members back to the Central African Republic. When I was there I asked the head of United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, UNOCHA, how it managed a 63% shortfall in its budget. I appreciate that I am talking to people who manage budgets all the time. He said to cut pretty much everything, which is costly, and in that case it brought down the food rations by half. He said that they had become firefighters, they only went for the most acute cases and they had to leave the moderate cases today, which, in turn, become the most acute cases tomorrow. That goes back to the message of prevention.

The second point is that traditionally, when different appeals are considered, what tends to be funded are food, shelter and water. What does not get funded are protection, gender-based violence, GBV, and education. This is where Ireland comes in. I mention the example of kids in Syria getting the schooling they had missed out on for four or five years. Ireland is supporting 6,000 such kids with a view that when they go back there will be a generation that has not completely lost out and that will have the capability to go back. The Foreign and Commonwealth Development Office, FCDO, is a brutal reminder of how cuts should never happen. The hardest conversations are when talking to partners in communities about cuts in funding, having built up a level of trust and confidence and having asked them to go on this journey together. Nobody understands why. That is the toughest thing about dealing with cuts.

We are not in that position. We have learned a lot from the 2008 crisis, as agencies, around efficiencies. We have learned about the importance of cash and how to spend money more astutely. Ms de Barra will talk about fundraising but the relationship with the Irish public has been phenomenal. Ballybofey is one example of a fundraising team that has been going for 20 years. When they could not go out and do their Christmas bazaar, they did all the online activities that everyone has been doing such as jumping, skipping and God knows what. The people of Ireland have stayed and they are a key part of this package.