Mr. Dominic Crowley:

Apologies for my voice. I thank the Deputy for his very good and interesting questions. I will talk about Concern for a minute. I sent an email to all staff last night explaining that we were closing three country programmes. It is the last thing we ever want to have to do. We have already let go the best part of 400 of our staff working for us overseas. We have just gone through a process in Dublin of 17% redundancies. The ability of the organisation to continue to function at a global level is being constrained. I urge caution that we do not just talk about the USAID cuts. It is a pattern we are seeing across Europe. Ireland is one of very few exceptions, which is trying to adhere to its commitment of 0.7% of GNI. It is not there yet and it is spending a lot on in-donor costs, but it is moving in that direction and there is a strong commitment by Irish Aid and the Government towards it.

At a more granular level, we just had people come back from Bangladesh who were working in the Cox's Bazaar programme that deals with migrants from Myanmar. People are now turning up at clinics who are increasingly malnourished. They are receiving a food ration, but it is totally inadequate and it is being shared, so the level of malnutrition - of people reaching a very precarious level - is increasing. A report in The Atlantic magazine two days ago talked about €800,000 worth of food aid being destroyed at the cost of another €130,000 because it had gone out of date as it could not be distributed. That is part of a much wider volume of aid that is stored in warehouses - five warehouses across the world - that cannot be distributed at the moment. Most of the funding for UN humanitarian air service, UNHAS, flights in countries where road travel is too dangerous has been cut. We lost a staff member in Sudan two weeks ago coming back from delivering nutrition supplies and medical supplies to a clinic. The vehicle was ambushed and the driver was killed. Wherever you look and whatever you look at, the impact of cuts and increasing insecurity can be seen across the whole sector.