Mr. Michael Gaffey:

Yes. The 0.7% target was agreed in the UN back in the early 1970s. Obviously, as the Deputy can imagine, the initial idea in the late 1960s was to reach 1%, but through compromise and negotiation it became 0.7%. It is an imperfect target but it is a target. When some people have argued to drop the target internationally, we have made the point that if the target is dropped, there is nothing to work towards, and that can be a very difficult situation. It is, as the Deputy says, imperfect. GNI can go up. Back when the target was set, it was an era of optimism as regards economic growth whereby the assumption was that we were in an era of continuous economic growth. We had a particular experience with Ireland's programme. When I say we are this year at the highest ever level for Vote 27, the previous highest year was 2008. That is exactly the experience the Deputy is talking about. In 2009-10 the programme was cut by 23% in one year alone, but because in that year GNP or GNI fell by something catastrophic like 11%, it is not that our percentage went up and our funding went down, but our funding went down very significantly. For a few years, however, our percentage seemed to hold quite steady. We were up at 0.55% or 0.56% at the same time as grappling with cutting almost a quarter of our budgets. That is an extreme situation, but it is a commitment that successive governments have made. It is repeated in A Better World and in the programme for Government. There is a cross-party commitment to it, I think, and everyone recognises that we have to do more to try to achieve it.