Neale Richmond (Dublin Rathdown, Fine Gael)

That is welcome. I am grateful to this House that it has held the Government to account to ensure that the commitment in the programme for Government to continuously support the furthest behind first is maintained. The Deputy is right. We are in a situation where USAID, has been completely abolished and where the United Kingdom has gone from pledging 0.5% to ODA to 0.3%. The Dutch have cut; the Swedes have cut - all the reliable partners. For context, Ireland and Spain are the only EU member states that are increasing their ODA spend. To be quite frank, I wish we were increasing it by a lot more. I acknowledge that. I am grateful that we are not cutting it and we are increasing it. When I sit around European tables, it is saddening to hear that on one hand, there is a country saying that it is for budgetary reasons - they can make that argument all they want - but there are other countries that from an ideological point of view are just giving up on development. Ireland is not. We will hit 0.4% this year based on the amount. We will continue to move towards 0.7%. It is a huge challenge. Unlike other countries, we separate out first year Ukrainian assistance and country assistance to a different metric. If we included that we would be a lot further along, but we do not unlike other countries. We think it is important to be clear about what we are spending.

On the ask to increase from the collection of NGOs, they asked to increase by €300 million in one go. While it was merited on a calculation base, we have to be a little bit realistic about the budgetary environment we are in as well.