Seán Crowe (Dublin South West, Sinn Fein)
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I welcome the delegates and take the opportunity to thank them and the many members of their organisations for the work they do around the world. I do not think we do this often enough. Officials of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade appeared before the committee to talk about its ambassadors, but the goodwill ambassadors for Ireland are clearly the members of these organisations. The transformative nature of their work is fantastic.

I refer to the document sent to us on 5 June. It states poverty reduction cannot be achieved by aid alone and that as "development" is a broad and all-encompassing term, the Government needs to consider how it will impact on the development objectives. Rather than members asking the delegates questions, they challenged us in many of their questions.

In fairness, the questions being put to us have not really been discussed, to my knowledge. Perhaps they have been discussed at Government level or perhaps I missed a committee meeting at which they were discussed. We have not dealt with the question of how we are going to scrutinise and co-ordinate this work. In that context, this committee has been challenged by the questions posed today. I genuinely do not know how we will deal with this. It is one of the big weaknesses of our system that interdepartmental co-ordination or co-operation is very difficult, if not impossible. I do not know how we will co-ordinate the work of the various Departments that are relevant here. There is an enormous amount of work to be done in this regard and that work needs a champion, whether it be a Minister or an official. Someone needs to pull the whole thing together. That is probably a discussion for another day. Perhaps the Department of the Taoiseach could be the lead department, although I do not know if the Taoiseach himself would have enough time. Certainly, someone needs to take it on.

We know that reducing poverty and lifting people above the $1.25 per day income level is extremely important. We must focus on the question of income poverty and, in the context of the post-2015 framework, we must focus on those who live on $2 per day, $4 a per day and so forth. How important is the question of income inequality in the context of the post-2015 framework? What targets should be set and how will progress be measured? I do not know the answers in this regard. Where will we be at the end of this process? I ask the witnesses to give their opinion on Ireland's policy document, One World, One Future. What, if anything, has been left out of that document? What has been ignored or overlooked in the context of the post-2015 development framework?

On the issue of income inequality, recent events in Bangladesh hit the headlines here and changes have been made to the terms and conditions of some employees in the garment sector there as a result. Those dreadful events had a big impact and served as a wake-up call for the West in terms of how our purchasing decisions can have an impact on the quality of life for those in developing countries.

In the context of climate change, I am interested in the witnesses' views on the carbon credit system, whereby richer countries buy carbon credits and dump their waste in Third World countries. We buy carbon credits from developing or Third World countries while continuing to pump out fumes and so forth but the planet is still suffering. The world is still getting warmer and this does not make sense to me. I have seen film footage of nothing but miles and miles of palm trees being grown to feed our ferocious appetite for fuel.

What do the witnesses believe the Irish Government can do to make Irish Aid more accountable and transparent? I ask that question against the backdrop of what happened in Uganda recently. How do we make EU aid programmes more accountable and transparent? Scrutiny by these Houses may be of some benefit but are there other options we should consider?