Neale Richmond (Dublin Rathdown, Fine Gael)

I am grateful to all members for their questions. I will group some of them, but I would like to start, if I may, by responding to Deputy Crowe's specific points because they are apt and follow on succinctly from the points made by Deputy Michael Murphy. It is clear. First and foremost, the work of Irish Aid is subject to a series of external and internal independent audits and we make sure every cent is spent accurately in all the countries in which we work and by the partners we work with, particularly at a multilateral level.

It was asked what is in it for Ireland. I have already discussed how this is an investment and how we address the issues that affect the Deputy's constituents in Killinarden, Tallaght or Jobstown or mine in Stepaside, Dundrum or Rathfarnham or wherever it may be. Equally, it goes to the role Ireland can play on the global stage. We have been known historically as a country that believes in overseas development assistance, long before Irish Aid was set up in 1974, going back to the work of our missionary nuns and priests. Many African leaders cite the Irish priests and nuns who educated or nursed them as children. It is deep seated. Then there is subsequent work of Irish aid agencies. I will not list them. It would be unfair. There are large and small ones and they are absolutely embedded in the public conscience and we are known for that. It gives us an ability when we go to speak, at the European Union, United Nations or any other level, to speak with credibility based on what has gone before.

It is important that Oireachtas Members bear witness to this. I am aware that the Joint Committee on Foreign Affairs and Trade has already identified two Irish Aid countries in west Africa to visit next year. If there was an opportunity for members of the Committee on European Union Affairs to do likewise, perhaps through the Global Gateway project or something tied to the multi-annual financial framework, it would be useful. Deputy Crowe mentioned Tanzania. I was lucky to travel there in March and saw first hand what is working. Our work there is having an effect. Farmers were mentioned. Milk-yield has tripled in rural Tanzania because we are able to train agricultural scientists at the Teagasc facility in Fermoy. They go back to Tanzania and work with nomadic farmers to make sure their yield is tripled and people have the opportunity not only to produce milk for their own consumption, but also to sell to market, giving them the opportunity to allow their children to stay longer in school and provide that kind of material as well a holistic development. It is important that we do not just read about it in reports or talk about it in a windowless committee room.

Since I was appointed in late January, I have visited seven of the 13 Irish Aid countries. That will be eight next week when I visit Colombia. I will visit three more in quarter 1 of next year. I am doing this on purpose to make sure that people do not forget why we do this, that it is not just something we think about at Christmas time or Lenten time and give a few bob to. Deputy Crowe is right, in that this is Irish taxpayers' money. We are investing €840.3 million out of our budget next year in development assistance because it is not just the right thing to do, but the smart thing to do. The more we have that discussion, the better. I would like to think, and am fairly sure, that every person and party in this room is in favour of our ODA programme. That marries with Irish public sentiment. An opinion poll by Dóchas prior to the general election showed that 76% of Irish people supported this work. None of us can claim to have 76% support in the polls. We would love it but those days are long gone for any party.

I will go back to the issues raised by Deputy Butterly as well as Senators O'Loughlin and Lynch in relation to progress on SDG 5 on gender equality. I have a couple of things to say in this regard to this. We have made gender equality and the work of women and girls central to our development programme. It is something that we practice as well as preach about. Deputy Butterly, it is in the programme for Government in relation to supporting women and girls in Afghanistan. The change of regime there has exposed them to very real threats. There is not just a lack of women in the judiciary, but a lack of access to healthcare for women and girls. In regard to our work, predominantly in east Africa, we are very firm in making sure we maintain that level of access to sexual reproductive health and rights. I will be quite frank, and while it is not very politically correct say it, but we cannot let the health of women and girls in the developing world be the victim of someone else's culture war. That is what we are seeing. We are seeing gender being lumped in with the anti-DEI agenda. The thinking is that if people remove funding from that, then there are no consequences and they are sticking it to the woke brigade. What happens is more girls aged 12, 13 or 14 become pregnant, higher rates of infection of HIV-AIDS, more maternal mortality and levels of malnutrition in breastfeeding mothers going up again. It goes to the overall point about the SDGs and why they are important. Great progress has been made. It is not enough progress, as I have said multiple times, but if we look at the rates of infection of HIV-AIDS, malaria and polio, if we look at the average lifespan, if we look at quality of life over the 25 years, we have seen those areas absolutely transform. In the past few months, they have started to regress. That is a very real worry. It is not just because of the massive reduction of funding to USAID. It is because of a reduction in funding by EU member states in particular as well as by other European countries. It feeds into all of the work that is ongoing.

From an Irish point of view, it is fine. The OECD notes that we are probably one of the highest donor countries when it comes to prioritising gender. However, we have to keep that on the agenda, particularly at an EU level. I will speak to that in a moment, as it rolls into Senator Lynch's question on the global Europe budget. It goes to Senator O'Loughlin's point, related to Deputy Crowe's point, about how we make sure we continue this. It is right that we should have these discussions in the Oireachtas. However, a couple of the really important efforts by Irish Aid are the Our World Awards, which reach out to national schools. More than 400 national schools last year throughout the country took part. A number of members from all parties and none have written to national schools in their own constituencies asking them to take part. It is a wonderful programme for national school children to see the work of the SDGs and how it matters to them. We launched it - in my constituency, no surprise - in the Our Lady of the Wayside school, which Senator Andrews would know very well, it is just up the Sandyford Road. It struck me that we had 28 children in the class and we were talking about the work and what was happening in Gaza, and three children said they were actually Palestinian. We were talking about the work in east Africa. Four children said their grandmothers originally came to Great Britain from Sudan. They were not just looking at it from a distance. This is within our communities. This is within our friendship groups, our neighbourhoods and the constituencies we represent. It is crucial that things like the Our World Awards and global citizenship education work with community groups, men's sheds and local community groups and that they are also part of it.

Senator Andrews rightly raised the ongoing genocide in Gaza and the fact that we were looking at a man-made famine. The head of the UN's humanitarian response, Mr. Tom Fletcher, was in Ireland about two weeks ago. I met him in New York when he had just come back from Gaza. I have heard Senator Andrews in the Seanad raise the issue of the Israeli blockade of humanitarian aid that went on for nearly 90 days and clearly cost thousands of lives. That blockade has been lifted. The agreement is seeing about 400 trucks of aid going in every day. Within that are very real Irish contributions to the work of agencies like the World Health Organization, WHO, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, UNRWA, and the World Food Programme, WFP. After the ceasefire was announced, we increased our funding by €6 million. We have been holding stocks in warehouses in Jordan and also in Dubai where we have a centralised stock. The Under-Secretary-General was quite clear, in that he has no issue with supplies. The supplies are ready to go. The issue is access. This is a man-made famine. I asked him how long it took to reverse a famine. He said Gaza, unlike the famine in Sudan, could actually be reversed far quicker than any other famine because all the tools to release Gaza from famine were there. The medicines and supplies are there, the medics and humanitarian workers are there, the trusted work of agencies like UNRWA are there. It can be turned around in less than eight months if it is given free-flowing access by the Israeli Government. Members do not need me to tell them that that is not happening to the level that we need to reverse a man-made famine. The more we see engagement and interference that stops or impacts on the efforts of international organisations, the longer it will take to reverse that famine and, quite frankly, the more women and children who are already at risk will die or be otherwise impacted.

It then goes to the point about looking to consolidate our actions, perhaps in the context of COP, which begins next Monday, when I will travel to it. It is not necessarily about consolidation. We have rightly set out lofty goals and have improved those goals, but it is now about how we look at the roadmap to achieving those goals. It is being described as the Baku to Belém roadmap, and when it comes to my end of the work with issues such as mitigation and adaptation, Ireland is meeting its needs. We have met all of our financial commitments and we are prepared to meet them again, but we need to make sure that, first, we get other donor countries to play their part and, second, funds are being spent in a manner that is effective. I believe they are. One of the points made to me at an event recently from someone from the developing world was that the more large donor countries continued to pollute and the more they did not reduce their emissions, the more money developing countries were going to need to mitigate the impact of that. It highlights the question of why we set these targets. It is not just because the planet is burning, but also because it will save us money in the medium-to-long term. We will spend less of our taxpayers' money on loss and damage and on mitigation and adaptation if we and other countries, particularly in the global north, actually meet our responsibilities. Ireland is doing better than most, but to go back to Deputy Gogarty's point, we can do better.

Before I finish on the point in relation to global Europe, Senator O'Loughlin and Deputy Butterly made points about the humanitarian disaster in Sudan. I have mentioned our focus on maintaining access to maternal health and protection in that conflict area. As I have said before, women and girls are more at risk in conflict situations. They are demonstrably more at risk from sexual violence and lack of access to healthcare. We have seen worryingly increasing rates of female genital mutilation, FGM, in those regions as well. That is why we are increasing our level of support in terms of humanitarian aid. However, due to what is happening in Sudan and Gaza, this is the deadliest year in history to be a humanitarian worker. More than 300 humanitarian workers have been killed. These are people - colleagues of UN staff agencies, in the WHO and UNRWA - who have been killed. This is why it is so important that we talk about access, not just into Gaza, but particularly in Sudan. The difficulty in the latter is much more acute. Due to its vast size, the people who need medical care are much harder to reach.

To conclude on Senator Lynch's point - I have addressed some of it - in relation to how we prepare for the Presidency of the Council of the EU, which we will take over in July, and the continuing discussions on the multiannual financial framework, MFF, we saw the initial papers released by the Commission in July and follow-up papers in September.

It is to be welcomed that we are told that over 90% of the budget will go to official development assistance, but we have made the point quite clearly that with the reductions made by USAID, a number of member states and other European partners, the responsibility on the EU to maintain its development budget has never been more important. We have a number of like-minded countries that we work closely with, such as the Spanish. We work very closely with them regarding what is going on in Palestine, obviously. Equally, we work with the traditional countries, such as Denmark, within the European Union. There has been a worrying political shift in previous reliable political partners, however, such as Belgium, Finland, Sweden and the Netherlands. I have no problem saying that. Hopefully, the change in government in the Netherlands might rectify that. I know we are paying close attention to those election results. The Germans have been particularly strong when it comes to gender equality. Previously, the Swedes were really strong in that regard, but less so now that we have a Sweden Democrat involved in the development ministry who makes it very difficult to be political. In the wider European region, the Norwegian Government remains a rock-solid partner. It would be remiss of me not to say that we lament the decision of the United Kingdom to cut its ODA from 0.5% to 0.3%.

It is a false dichotomy when we see the British Government and other European governments cutting their development budgets in order to invest more in their security and defence. It is very easy for Ireland to say that, however. Even though we are on course to double our defence and security spending, we are still increasing our development spending. The two are absolutely interlinked. If you talk about the issues that present the greatest threat to domestic security, you go back to the global instability that is particularly felt in the developing world as well as the humanitarian situation in Ukraine and those regions that have been invaded by Russia. It is false to say there is a binary choice between development and security and defence. That is why Ireland will be working particularly hard in our Presidency to make sure that development is given a central and vocal role. As Deputy Butterly said, we are very loud at the European table about it. We very much hope to bring in not just Members of the Oireachtas but members of the civic society as well as the private sector to play their role in our Presidency in this regard.