Ruairí Ó Murchú (Louth, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Go raibh maith agaibh go léir. On some level, the witnesses present an absolutely frightening view of the world.

That is where we are at the minute. On the proposed cuts and the cuts from an EU point of view, what are the exact outworkings of them? Obviously we are talking about everything from lifesaving right through to alleviating poverty and the issues around the lack of freedoms that exist across the board. Something that was pointed out to me previously relates to what the witnesses said about the model not working in the sense that it is in no way sustainable and that the sector is reliant on six or seven countries with the United States of America being one of them as they put a huge amount of money into overseas. This does not alleviate some of the issues they create themselves, be it with Gaza or right across the world.

Nobody operates without some element of self-interest, whether it is the European Union or whatever. While I accept there is a change in geopolitics, Ursula von der Leyen and others have spoken about the need for an EU-wide military industrial complex. If the focus is there, it might not necessarily be there in relation to overseas aid. For many years, there has been a significant amount of overseas aid going to a large number of countries but, as Ms Wigens said, a huge amount of debt comes out, which is a greater amount. Even if we take the conflict areas out of that and just talk about the places that have not benefited from an economic point of view, we are referring to places that have huge populations and huge population growth and economies that cannot necessarily facilitate that. I am told that at time a lot of overseas aid increases, let us say, the educated middle class. What happens then when a huge number of people feel they need to move and they move? That is part of the migration issue.

Alongside the involvement of the European Union, the western powers, the Russians and the Chinese and that conflict of self-interest, there is also an element of self-interest around migration. Is it a case of doing whatever we can to settle Africa and make it more prosperous and make the rest of the world more prosperous? I know that sounds very fanciful but if we do not deal with that, then we have the issues we are currently dealing with.

The questions are around the impact of the cuts and how bad these are going to be and the fact that all the overseas aid in the world will not work if we maintain the status quogiven the amount of debt being taken out, which dwarfs it. Beyond that, what can we do to make a marked improvement while accepting that the European Union and some of the western powers are not the only players here and that there is an element of nouveau imperialism right across Africa?