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

As I said earlier, the international contributions to the Horn of Africa are not enough. It is anticipated they could be up to 50% short of what is needed. The €30 million, however, is effectively an extra contribution on top of the €70 million we have already committed this year and another €50 million in new money to which we have committed over the next three years, working with UNICEF and USAID. A number of weeks ago, in New York, we announced, with Samantha Power, who is the head of USAID, and the head of UNICEF, about $250 million focused specifically on child nutrition which, in simple terms, involves the provision of nutritional paste to children to try to keep them alive when they are starving. Deputy Berry might be familiar with that in the context of military food parcels and so on. It is basically high-protein paste for children that is flavoured in order that they will eat it. That aid is focused solely on that for the next few years. We are involved at a number of different levels with international partners supporting our own NGOs, which have done amazing work, and with a number of other UN bodies. We will spend hundreds of millions of euro on the Horn of Africa in the next few years and will encourage other countries to do likewise.

My understanding of our spending on climate finance - I asked this question yesterday - is that next year we think we will spend about €120 million. We have committed that by 2025 we will be spending €225 million a year on climate finance. The maths is obvious. We will need to make big jumps over the next two to three budgets to get to that figure but we will get to it. My Department will do most of the heavy lifting on that, but we need the support of the Government and the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform. The Department of the Minister, Deputy Eamon Ryan, does some climate finance as well. In truth, that €225 million by 2025 will be earmarked specifically for climate finance projects, but a lot of what we do in respect of development aid is also climate finance in the context of loss and damage or adaptation. I know that those are slightly different issues, but the €30 million we are committing to the Horn of Africa is in some ways a response to climate loss. The €70 million we spent on the Horn of Africa this year is partly linked to climate too. Therefore, formal climate finance as part of the overall development budget will be €225 million by 2025 and €120 million next year. In truth, however, we are already spending a lot more than that on problems and human suffering linked to climate change. On the Horn of Africa that is drought, but in the Caribbean it is more extreme hurricanes and in parts of the Pacific it is people literally having to leave islands and relocate to other islands because of rising sea levels. We are already working on those areas.