Brendan Howlin (Wexford, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I apologise for being late. I had to be in my constituency last night for an important event and the traffic getting up from Wexford was not the easiest in the morning, so I apologise for missing the presentation.

I warmly welcome this interaction. The organisations represented here are very important. When we talk about cultural organisations, we praise them for being the visible heart of Ireland. In many ways, the organisations represented here are the social heart of Ireland, and they are very important to us.

If any question I put has already been covered, the guests should just say so. I want to follow up on the point on development because I have had an interest in development issues for a very long time. There has been a fundamental shift. I have had a number of meetings in Brussels with representatives of INTPA at senior level and have made a presentation to the Committee on Development of the European Parliament on supports for Africa. This committee has met many similar committees across member states. There is a fundamental geopolitical shift. Maybe the result of the most recent European Parliament election has not been as shocking as feared, but the trend is undoubtedly real in the national governments and we have to come to grips with that. It is not a matter of saying, "These are the resources." There are fundamental pressures to alter the focus of European social development. I am referring to nationalism in all its manifestations, including protected trade or the putting up of trade barriers, which will have an impact on the developed world. This may well be compounded if Donald Trump is re-elected, but it is manifest everywhere.

The point I am making is that there is a political shift that has to be acknowledged. When dealing with matters, we can have an Irish perspective but that is not going to have enormous leverage in the context of what has happened in Europe. The growth of authoritarianism is not just a European phenomenon as it is also a world phenomenon. What is happening in Africa, which has seen a series of coups across the Sahara in the past three or four years, coupled with growing antipathy to Europe, particularly antipathy to France across the former French-dominated areas, and the growing embrace of Russia and its proxies, has two consequences. One, it is alienating Europeans for investing in the countries in question and, two, it is not representative of a march towards democracy but of a march towards its opposite. I would welcome the guests' general view on this.

I have a couple of questions. Consider the way in which we always used to tie aid to democratic progress, or, if "tie aid" is not the right phrase, make aid conditional on democratic progress – for example, progress on LGBT rights. Very worrying new legal instruments are being adopted in several countries that Ireland partnered with in the past, such as Uganda, where it is now a criminal offence not only to be gay but also not to out somebody who is gay. This is just shocking. How do we deal with that sort of authoritarian view across countries we are partnered with?

My second question is on the debt relief issue. We have talked about this for a very long time but have not been very successful, although there have been individual instances of success. How do we construct much better dialogue to allow countries to manoeuvre? Considering what is happening right now in Kenya, where there were very serious riots yesterday and whose parliament was occupied because of tax increases to meet demands from the IMF, how do we, as a country, deal with such phenomena?

My third question relates to the future. This was touched upon by Senator Chambers. There is going to be an enormous financial cost, amounting to hundreds of billions of euro, to rebuild Gaza and Ukraine in the coming decades. That will be an enormous strain that will be hard to resist. Since world focus is limited on particular areas at any given time, how will we ensure we do not take our focus off other issues as we deal with the matter? I do not know whether the delegates have thought these things through at all.