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

I will respond to Senator Joe O'Reilly's questions. He spoke on Afghanistan. I will follow up on what the Chair has just said and give an update on the number of Irish citizens, as well as Irish residents who may be Afghan citizens still in Afghanistan but who want to come home. So far, 106 Irish citizens, that is, Irish passport-holders, have managed to get out. We have helped them do that. There are 14 remaining and 12 would like to get out. The other two want to stay. Some people are extremely committed to the work they do with humanitarian organisations and want to stay and make a contribution. I have extraordinary admiration for people in those situations.

We have had some success in recent weeks in getting places on planes organised by Qatar out of Kabul airport. The Qataris have been helpful partners in terms of making, normally, 14 to 30 seats available, depending on the numbers, the size of the plane and so on. We have 12 who want to leave and 106 out so we have made good progress. Hopefully, we will get the remaining dozen people out soon. I have made it clear to our team that I want Irish residents who may be Afghan citizens but who effectively live in Ireland and want to come home to their families, to be treated as Irish citizens in terms of helping them to get out. Twenty Irish residents are out and about 12 remain. We will do what we can to get them out.

Then there are the refugee visa waiver cases. Just under 500 people have been given refugee status to come to Ireland. Some 300 of those are either on their way or already here. Another 190 still need to get out. It is often much more complicated to get Afghan refugees out of Afghanistan because it is difficult to get them on planes out of Kabul and many will cross the border into Pakistan. We have a good relationship and agreement with Pakistan to get them on planes to Ireland under the visa waiver programme.

The Minister for Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth, Deputy O'Gorman, has been remarkably helpful through this period. His team and Department have turned around applications for visas quickly on the advice and recommendation of NGOs we trust. If we had chosen to go through a long interview process structure, which some countries do and which we normally do, many of the 300 people now out of Afghanistan would still be there and many of them would be in real danger.

Ireland has received a significant amount of international recognition for the pace at which we have turned around refugee applications, specifically those of vulnerable groups such as journalists or teachers. They are mostly women who were working, some of whom may have been translators in the past for western forces or NATO forces in Afghanistan, but all of whom have good reason to get out and cannot do so unless there is a country willing to accept them. That is why we have done as much as we can there and will do more. The biggest challenge for us is accommodation once they come to Ireland. I would like to see us working more with communities and organisations, and potentially with employers, because many of these people have real skills and speak fluent English. Some of them are nurses, surgeons, teachers or journalists who could make a very positive contribution here and we should be doing everything we can to help them.

To give members a sense of the scale of the humanitarian situation in Afghanistan, I am gravely concerned in respect of the potentially catastrophic humanitarian situation. The food crisis in Afghanistan has reached unprecedented levels, with more than half the population, or 22.8 million people, expected to face acute food insecurity by the end of the year. We can expect that figure to increase due to prolonged drought, continuing conflict and the possibility of near-total economic collapse. In September, Ireland confirmed an additional €2 million to UNICEF and the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, OCHA, humanitarian funds for Afghanistan, bringing our funding this year to more than €4 million. I suspect we will end up doing a lot again next year. Irish Aid is supporting the work in Afghanistan of some long-standing NGO partners such as Concern and the HALO Trust. Irish Aid will discuss with our NGO partners their plans for continuing engagement in the country. It has a large population, 50% of whom are suffering significant food insecurity and, unfortunately, more and more of them are facing the potential for famine-type conditions. It is in that context that the international community is engaging with the Taliban. It is not recognising the Taliban as a government but it is certainly engaging with it in order to get aid in there and take a pragmatic approach towards-----