Gerard Craughwell (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I thank our guests for being with us today.

Looking at the presentations that were made and the written work that was sent in, I have to say it is utterly depressing. As the brother of eight sisters, the father of a daughter and the grandfather of two beautiful granddaughters, it is utterly depressing to think that sexual violence is the way we fight wars and the way we deal with these things.

On the positive side, as a teacher I engaged with many Nigerian students in particular, and the work ethic that I saw from them was way above the average. That is great. It strikes me, when we are talking about funding, that the days of funding education alone are over as that is no longer a solution to the problem because there is personal security involved. One has an image of young women travelling to and from school and constantly in danger of being assaulted or kidnapped. There were 276 girls taken from a school. It strikes me that not only do we need to fund the teachers, we need also to fund secure environments and secure transport. I am not even sure if they should travel home. Perhaps we should be looking at some form of boarding school for safe education. That is something I would like them to address.

Do they have any evidence today of the take up between male and female students? I am aware, for example, here in Ireland among certain ethnic groups that there is male engagement in the education system up to approximately the age of 16 at which stage they withdraw totally, but the females continue on. I have seen some wonderful work among some of the ethnic groups, but mainly from females. The males seem to have departed by 16. I wonder does that follow through when we are talking about Somalia, Nigeria and other such countries.

The speaker from Somalia spoke about outcomes. Every time I hear the word "outcomes" the hair on the back of my neck stands up. As a former teacher, something that really bothered me about the way EU funding in education in Ireland was going was it was based on outcomes. Funding would follow based on how many students did you take, how many modules did they study and how many they pass whereas for some of us to survive a year attending school, maybe three days a week rather than five, would be a massive achievement. Over a period of time, it might take a student three years to achieve what another student could achieve in one academic year. With all due respect to the presenter from Somalia who I fully understand, I worry when I hear statistics on outcomes and that sort of thing. For me, it is far more important that a student would attend and start to develop an educational programme which might take longer than one year or two. Going back to my own education days, it was my experience that some of the worst students I had in first year in further education turned out to be the most dedicated students by third year.

Our guests mentioned the vaccine programme. They will be aware that we had a fairly significant debate in the Seanad on the issue of vaccine equality throughout the world. I am still horrified, and it still bothers me every day, that one of the major drug companies is making $65,000 a minute on the vaccine while we have tens of millions of people in the world who cannot be vaccinated. I say that because I think our guests need to say that all day, every day. They need to get that out there. The animal instincts of capitalism in the case of vaccine are utterly sickening.

On the issue of Afghanistan, when we took over the UN Security Council seat our ambassador made a statement about how we stand with the women and girls of Afghanistan. I was quite critical of that at the time because words are easy to say. I wonder have our guests any knowledge as to what is happening in that part of the world. Where are we with girls, particularly girls' education? I stated here previously that I cannot imagine what it must be like to be 17 years of age, having been through the education system in Afghanistan and suddenly have it all taken away from you. I cannot begin to understand it.

My final question is about multinationals which have, for the want of a better description, raped these countries of their resources. How much funding is coming from multinationals? Does anything come the way of our guests from multinationals that are involved in these areas?

I thank our guests very much for the work they do.