Mr. Michael Gaffey:

I will answer the easy question first on whether we work across Departments. That has been a challenge on the sustainable development goals, SDGs. The SDGs do challenge every Government system to work in a more integrated manner and to tackle the silos that did exist before. All the goals are interdependent. The achievement of the SDGs is only possible if all the goals are achieved. They are interdependent, which is a very important point. It is not good for anyone to say "We have achieved SDGs 3, 6 and 9." We cannot achieve one without achieving them all. This pushes the administrative system in all governments to co-operate and work together more effectively. When we adopted the goals in 2015, and with the very strong role that Ireland played, we then had a period internally in the system of trying to work out how to do that. It was a challenge and every country had to do it in a different way. The Department of the Environment, Climate and Communications has the overall co-ordinating lead and then every Department has to work towards reporting on what we are doing on the SDGs, which have national and international responsibilities. The work of the Department of Foreign Affairs is broadly on the international side but the co-ordinating mechanisms, the working together and the cross-departmental work has improved hugely because of the sustainable development goals. It is much better than it was in the past and there is a much better understanding of that interdependence. It probably took the system a little longer to do it than it took, for instance, young people in schools and universities to understand the SDGs. The concept of interdependence that we used to talk about 20 or 30 years ago is much clearer to everybody now just what that means. One the biggest impetuses to building that understanding has been climate change, which affects absolutely everybody be they sitting in Dublin or sitting in Lilongwe, Malawi. The cross-government and cross-Department co-operation, co-ordination and engagement is miles better than it was ten years ago. I would put that down to the SDGs but obviously it will always need to improve.

An important point was made about working Article 11 post tsunami and working in emergencies. Sometimes it does not look like progress is being made. The disasters we are facing sometimes feel to be getting worse and happening with much greater frequency. The truth is that natural disasters are happening with much greater frequency and conflicts are happening with much greater frequency. We do not have the luxury of dealing separately with conflicts because they are both interlocking and overlapping.

The Deputy also made the point that it is very important in all of this to listen to the voice of people who are living with disability, rather than deciding ourselves as administrators or politicians what it is that they need. We attempt to do this. We have started working with the UN on exactly this point around emergencies. We are working with the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, OCHA, on how we can make progress on including disabled people much more effectively in the response to humanitarian emergencies. Just one or two years ago, we launched at the UN interagency standing committee guidelines on the inclusion of persons with disability in humanitarian action. There is a lot of work going on in that where Irish Aid and the Department of Foreign Affairs are working along with United Nations. There is, however, a lot more work to be done now. The central emergency response fund of the UN, to which Ireland is one of the main donors, is the UN system of responding immediately and rapidly to emergencies. Ireland supported an initiative to tackle underfunded areas that were not being funded under the central emergency reserve fund. One of those areas included disability. We were on the advisory board of this UN fund and we were able to make progress there. We are being reappointed at the end of this year to that fund, which is a very influential post in advising and working on how the UN responds to emergencies. We will have an opportunity there to raise the profile for our commitment to disability inclusion in humanitarian action. Having said that here today, when we join it I hope the committee will hold us to account and ask us about how we have managed that when we are back on that advisory group from the end of this year.

On the election monitoring, yes I am aware of that recommendation. Members probably will be aware that the next version of the election roster is under way at the moment. We advertised for expressions of interest and at the moment these are being assessed with a view to appointing the new roster at the end of this year. We have included disability inclusion. We have consulted on how to do that. I will be honest and say that I do not know whether we will reach the 15% target but we are making strong efforts to ensure that we do recognise the role that people living with disability can and should play in election monitoring. I will be happy to come back to members on that subject when we have the new roster completed in the coming months.