Ms Karen Jorgensen:

I will address the organisational issues that Deputy Byrne raised. As a member of the committee a country is obliged to undergo peer reviews roughly every five years. It is also obliged to serve as an examiner of another country, roughly every two years. Every year I know which countries are due for a review. I schedule them in and consider which countries are due to be examiners and try to match up members that can serve as good and appropriate examiners of the country to be examined. That was not very eloquent but I hope the committee gets the point. In this case Austria and Portugal were on the list of countries to be examiners this year and we felt that they had programmes of a similar size to Ireland’s, that they were engaging in similar topics, had similar interests and could learn a lot from each other. That was my rationale for suggesting to the committee that Austria and Portugal examine Ireland, and that was accepted.

Another question was how we define best practice. Some committee members have the reference guide for peer or country reviews which sets out seven dimensions of performance against which we think we should measure the member. While it does not attach numerical or quantitative values that would allow a more specific ranking there is in fact an implicit ranking because we have indicators. We started to apply this a year ago. It gives us a better comparator between our members because we now review them against the same set of indicators.

In answer to the question about how we judge delivery of aid in countries, first, our point of departure in examining a country is the commitments that it has made. The basis for our review of Ireland is the 2006 White Paper, supplemented by the more recent One World, One Future because they are the policy instruments that set out what Ireland would like to see being achieved. It is very important that countries work in areas where they feel they have a comparative advantage, where they can add something specifically to the development of their partner countries, that they focus on countries where they have a presence, where they understand the context very well, where they have established good partnerships because all of those factors will be key to successful delivery of an aid programme.

I will leave my answer there and turn to the representatives of Portugal to answer the more specific questions related also to the EU.