Ms Isabel Simpson:

I will go back to the funding question first. We did, in fact, stop taking funding from any EU member state in 2016, as Deputy Stanton said. That was a direct response to the EU-Turkey deal, which traded billions in aid for the effective outsourcing of border control and the subsequent measures and policies that were carried out in response to the movement of people. As a humanitarian organisation, we found that incompatible with our principles. Therefore, we decided that as long as the EU-Turkey deal was in operation, we would not received funding from any EU member states. At that time, we were the only international organisation ever to give money back to Irish Aid, which used to fund us generously. As an international organisation, we are 97% privately funded. I am proud to say that we have 100% private income in Ireland from the very generous support of the Irish public.

As Ms Leahy touched on when she was talking about Afghanistan, our principles and independence are important to be able to address the needs of the vulnerable, as we see it. That must not be attached to some government agenda or subject to other people who may try to manipulate funding in ways intended to serve their own agendas. It is very precious to MSF that we are privately funded. It gives us independence in our action and neutrality, and the possibility to treat those who we see as the most in need rather than those who others think are the most in need or groups of people to whom others do not want us to be able to deliver humanitarian assistance.

The very small bit of state funding we have comes largely from Canada and Japan but otherwise 97% of funding is private funding. During Covid, we were in a very fortunate position because Covid has also has been a huge part of our work over the past two years. Again, the public has responded to us in a very positive way so Covid has not had a detrimental effect on our funding. During the Covid response, we had several programmes in Europe that under usual circumstances, we would normally not have considered launching but we had extensive programmes in European countries like Italy and Belgium. We also have a very small intervention in Dublin where we partnered with an Irish organisation called Safetynet. We set up a mobile Covid testing unit for vulnerable populations such as the homeless, those in direct provision and the Traveller community that Safetynet was able to operate and carry out testing on site.

The next question concerned Tigray and Ethiopia. Just over six months ago, three colleagues were killed in Tigray. There is an ongoing investigation into their deaths. For that reason, I am unable to elaborate on the situation in Tigray. I can say that MSF does not have access to Tigray at the moment. We would be open to giving individual briefings to any members of the committee who want to take the current situation in Ethiopia further but unfortunately, it is not something we can address publicly at the moment. The situation relating to our colleagues is the priority and for that reason, I cannot discuss Ethiopia at present. I apologise for that. I will hand over to Ms Ossig, who can expand on the current EU proposal. We also have an ask for this committee, which was in the closing statement but which I am very happy to address the committee after Ms Ossig speaks to it.