Mr. Michael Gaffey:

We have put gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls at the heart of our development programme. We have recognised that there is no way the SDGs can be achieved without such empowerment. We also have to ensure we focus on disabled women in the programme. We have programmes that specifically target the employment of women. We announced one with the Irish League of Credit Unions and the International Fund for Agricultural Development during the UN General Assembly to help women in the developing world get businesses started. It is going to need a lot of targeted action.

One of the most difficult issues is how to act in conflict zones. It is an enormous challenge to be able to do development work while providing immediate humanitarian assistance. In recent years we have learned that we have to integrate our work much more effectively. In the past, humanitarian response and long-term development work were somehow separate. The challenge now is to be more integrated in doing both at the same time, up to a point.

Ukraine is a very good example of this. The situation in Ukraine regarding refugees is disastrous. There are 95,000 Ukrainian refugees in Ireland alone. Within Ukraine a huge number of people have been displaced and made refugees. This affects everything, from their health to their employment and, once again, disabled people often end up at the bottom of the pile. We are working specifically on marginalised communities through the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, the UN Population Fund and the World Health Organization to try to reach the most marginalised, but it is tough and difficult work.

Institutionalisation was mentioned and it is a big issue. It has been a big issue particularly in Ukraine and other areas of eastern Europe. There is a real need to work to de-institutionalise. However, it is more difficult in some settings than in others. In settings where populations are displaced and people become refugees and internally displaced persons, it is hugely difficult. Our challenge in humanitarian action is to try to ensure there is a specific focus on disabled people. We have a lot more to do. Ten years ago, in our development and humanitarian work, Ireland was pretty far behind in understanding. As Mr. Roughneen would say, disabled people were invisible. We are making progress on that.

We are among one of the first countries in the OECD to adopt the organisation's new disability policy marker, which sounds a bit technical but it enables us to identify what needs to be done and how we can do things better. It also enables us to measure, in a way we could never do in the past, what our focus on disabled people and disability inclusion is. If I had been asked these questions ten years ago, I would have been put to the pin of my collar to talk about where we were working on disability. I would have been able to say we were working with the International Labour Organization in Vietnam on disability but I probably would not have been able to say much more. We have a much more integrated approach now, but we recognise we have a lot more to do and that, if we are to apply this principle we are working on, of reaching the furthest behind first, we need to act differently. That is what we are designing and trying to do at the moment.