Ms Ana Paula Lopes Fernandes:

I will try to respond to the question on coherence, which is a very important and fundamental question. We have been addressing this in the Development Assistance Committee from the perspective of the policy coherence for development. We agreed on building blocks in terms of having the institutions really help us to have, first, an all-of-government approach to certain issues and then to address some of the areas where we are not being really supportive of development. We have been advancing this, but it is an area where we are having some difficulties.

At the same time, in the OECD we have what we call the development strategy of the OECD. There we have areas where we thought it would be good to have a more all-of-government approach to certain development issues. One of the areas in which Ireland is very much engaged is tax and development annual flows. Other areas relate to environment, gender issues and corruption issues. What we are trying to perceive in that regard is how can different parts of the government think in a development way and where are the constraints to having a global development that can service all. What are we doing by our policies that do not enable the others to develop also? That is the approach we are trying to take.

We also have a chapter in our review that addresses that coherence approach. In Portugal, for example, in some years we had an approach to security and development issues, and that takes time. First, one must put everyone working together. Then there must be a very strong discussion about the different views. The most important issue, however, is that in the end one manages to have some impact in the way one is operating as a global actor, and that impact should enable others to perform better. That relates pretty much to trade tariffs and some agriculture issues which were mentioned. The OECD has just released the food security PCD document which might also be of interest. We see that Irish Aid is very attentive to this and the work it is doing with agriculture. We had some meetings with different line Ministers to discuss this all-over approach.

I am sorry for taking so long but I wish to add a point on trade jobs and fair trade. We are conscious of that. Increasingly, different donors are acknowledging the need to go a little beyond the traditional areas of work and increasing the collaboration with other actors, such as the private sector, to see how we can best help different countries to create jobs and have economic growth. That is all part of the challenges we will face. This all links with the post-2015 framework. In that sense administrative costs are part of some of the discussions we are having in terms of counting aid for the future statistics of development finance. The Development Assistance Committee is very much linked with the United Nations in this discussion about post-2015 and the finance for development discussion, which also includes these administrative costs and the way we are measuring them.