Mr. Barry Andrews:

I thank the Chairman and other members of the joint committee. First of all, I wish to introduce Mr. Jonathan Edgar, our chief operations officer in Goal, and Ms Maria McLoughlin who is our advocacy officer in Goal.

Goal has been trying to refocus attention on the necessity of looking at this issue at source. There is obviously an awful lot of debate about the logistical challenges of relocating a number of people in this country in the next two years and elsewhere throughout the European Union. I think Ms Sophie Magennis from the UNHCR is better placed to give her observations on that. Goal's focus is primarily on Syria and also on the border areas around Syria. We are asking leaders to continue to focus on this as the source of the problems we are seeing in Europe. Without addressing that issue at source, those problems will get worse.

I first addressed this committee in April 2013.

At that stage, 70,000 people had died in the war in Syria. I informed the committee that I was afraid that I would come before it again some day and that the figure might have risen above 100,000. What I did not anticipate was that the figure would reach 250,000. I did not anticipate that I would be back here in 2015. I did not anticipate that it would create incredible changes in the region, nor that it would come to visit the shores of the European Union, and certainly not to the extent that has actually proven to be the case.

This matter was raised by members as a Topical Issue in the Dáil in March 2012. There has been very little discussion of it the Dáil. Let me give some of the quotations that were used, one Deputy said this was a crisis of gargantuan proportions. At that time, just 10,000 people had died in the war in Syria. If the number of deaths were of gargantuan proportions in March 2012, what is it now? What have we done? That is my challenge to the joint committee and to anybody who will listen to the testimony that GOAL can give. The Minister of the day said that the worst-case scenario would be if Syria were to slip into open civil war, which would be profoundly destabilising for the entire region. It is not as if people did not know that this was going to happen and that there the likelihood was high that these events would come to pass.

What was very abstract back then is now very real. We know why that is so because we have seen various photographs in newspapers in recent times. GOAL started an advocacy campaign in the middle of August. The basic idea is that we do not want to look back at the conflict in 20 years' time and say "I wish I had known then what I know now". We tried to confront people with the reality of the war in Syria. Inevitably, we have a diminished sense of the reality of war because of where we are. However, we also self-censor all the time. We do not allow our screens to be filled with the realities of war and, therefore, we have a diminished sense of that reality.

The UN Security Council was presented, some four or five months ago, with a video of doctors trying to resuscitate three small children, none of whom survived the resuscitation effort. The UN Security Council was moved to tears by this video but was not moved to action and has done almost nothing about this crisis. Nobody has seen this video. We have tried to raise this advocacy issue as often as possible. What it brings us back to is the ineffectiveness of the United Nations, which I say with all due respect to my colleague. The UN, at its very best, is superb in terms of the work it does in educating children, particularly girls, the work it does with refugees and the work it is doing regarding climate change, with the COP21 meeting coming up in December. It is excellent in those circumstances. What it has been terrible at, for example, is evidenced by the way the World Health Organisation, WHO, dealt with the Ebola epidemic. It can be very bad in terms of bureaucracy but its core fundamental purpose is peace. It was founded in 1945 with the express purpose as stated in the opening lines of its charter, "We the peoples of the United Nations determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war ...". That is the central plank of the United Nations.

The Security Council was founded for that purpose but, as I have said before, the Security Council is a 1945 answer to a question nobody is asking anymore. There are five permanent members of the UN Security Council. Why so? They won the Second World War. They have a veto over all matters of the Security Council. It would be bad enough if the Security Council just passed resolutions that were ineffective. I have mentioned in my paper that the head of the Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs, OCHA, of the UN has acknowledged that Security Council resolutions have gone unheeded. What is worse is that the belligerents in the crisis in Syria are actually emboldened by the failure to implement UN Security Council resolutions. There is a direct correlation between the level of violence and the catalogue of failed UN resolutions. We have seen well-documented evidence of the use of chemical weapons.

We have seen well-documented evidence of crimes against humanity, rape as a weapon of war, disappearances and arbitrary arrests, but nothing happens. What we must do, and I have seen this emerge now in commentary among EU leaders, is really look at the UN Charter, the UN Security Council and the basic institutions. It is almost a Bretton Woods system, set up for the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, IMF, or something of a similar nature that is required to redraw a completely new paradigm for conflict resolution globally.

It might seem pointless for a small parliament to apply its mind to things such as this but, in fact, Ireland has a tremendous tradition. We have a very significant role in the EU and the EU has incredible influence with some of the major powers that are influencing this war in Syria. In the case of Saudi Arabia, for example, consider the trade relations between that country and the EU. In the case of Iran, we have seen a great improvement in relations between it and the West. Consider that influence and, of course, Russia. While sanctions have been applied to Russia because of what happened in Ukraine, that has not extended to the veto which Russia is constantly using to stop the most basic resolutions that would protect populations in Syria.

In conclusion, back in March 2012, Deputy Ann Phelan, who is now a Minister of State, quoted as follows: "The world is a dangerous place, not because of the evil that men do, but because of those that stand idly by and do nothing." Members of the committee will ask what they can do, but there has not been any Private Members' business applied to this issue in the House. There have been no all-party motions. It is debated in this committee, but nowhere else. There are no meetings held here in this building where external people are brought in and it is not given the priority that it deserves. It is the humanitarian catastrophe of our time. It was gargantuan in March 2012, and now, in September 2015, it is something that requires and deserves all of our attention.