Eric Byrne (Dublin South Central, Labour)
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Does the cost of the Irish Chief of Staff in Somalia come out of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade budget or that of the Department of Defence? Does funding for the OSCE and the Council of Europe, which have other bodies called the parliamentary assembly, come from a separate budget? Do they play a complementary or divisive role? For example, the OSCE has a parliamentary body that does election monitoring and can manage to find that its observations run counter to those of the official OSCE body, for example, the United States of America. Does the Tánaiste think that the public image of the OSCE and ODIHR, which are based in three different countries, lead to the type of cohesiveness that is required? Is there overlap between the activities of, for example, the Council of Europe and those of the OSCE? I know this is a rambling question but I would argue very strongly that there is need for reform in the structures and possibly the funding and the role of both those bodies.