Mr. Hans Zomer:

My colleagues will deal with the questions concerning scrutiny and trade. Senator Walsh's questions were probably most particularly directed at me in terms of the oversight of NGOs and the co-ordination of aid. We always maintain that the co-ordination of aid needs to happen on site, that is, in the recipient countries. In most countries, there is an effective government and it is our role as NGOs to co-ordinate through government structures, either at national or local level. However, in some situations, the task of co-ordination overwhelms governments, usually in a crisis.

In those cases, there are co-ordination mechanisms through UN agencies and there is also self-regulation of the aid agencies. In the humanitarian sector we do this on a thematic basis. We call these things clusters, so organisations working on water or shelter projects would get together, usually under UN leadership. Many of the structures are in place; people just do not see them.

There was a question about the overheads of NGOs and the salary levels and whether there were norms and standards. There are standards, but it is up to each organisation to set its own level of remuneration for its chief executives. We say they must be transparent about that. If anyone is unhappy about the levels of salary, there can be an open discussion. Dóchas members have all signed up to a code of conduct on corporate governance which sets explicit standards on transparency and accountability that we demand of our members. We offer an invitation to anyone in Ireland - particularly the committee, as law makers - to test us to see if the information we are providing is adequate for the committee to judge whether too much is being spent on salaries or other overheads. I would argue that overheads are not a helpful measure of the impact of an organisation. The best measure of the quality of a development NGO is to ask the people we are serving if they are happy with our work. That is difficult for practical reasons, so we look for proxy indicators. The overhead levels, however, are unreliable. What one organisation refers to as an overhead, another organisation might call a programme cost. There is probably a case to be made that the organisations with higher overheads are more effective because it means they are investing in research and quality control in the evaluation the committee is looking for. Most of us would feel restrained because people would say these are overheads, we call them quality control costs. I will send the committee the material we have on the demands on an NGO and I suggest that overheads and administration costs are not a good starting point.

Corruption often arises as a concern when discussing development aid. The vast majority of corruption in the world does not happen in an aid context, but in the interface between government and private sector. Research shows the net benefit of development is that it reduces corruption. That is not to say there is no instance of malpractice in the sector - this is a high-risk business - but Irish development NGOs have the structures in place to reduce the potential as much as we can. The bottom line is that overseas aid helps to build those checks and balances in the countries we are working with to reduce and fight corruption.