Mr. Kevin Dowling:

I thank the Minister of State. The Department has just approved a budget for Vietnam for the coming year. The focus really will not change and will not be changed by this framework agreement on partnership and co-operation, PCA. The Chairman will have seen some of the projects himself. We focus on minorities, the poor and the marginalised and that is in-country, so to speak. However, a second leg of our development programme, which is expanding quite rapidly, is called the ideas programme. This is a programme in which we have quite a number of visits from Vietnamese people to Irish institutions and for example, we have formal arrangements with the Economic and Social Research Institute, ESRI, and the Central Bank in which they are learning best practice. They also are extremely interested in food safety and a variety of other areas we will develop in the coming year. We have two legs to our programme, so to speak, and in-country, we focus on areas where poverty is evident. Vietnam in fact has made a lot of progress in the reduction of poverty, which has more than halved in the past decade and some real results are being seen there. As the Minister of State noted, the commitment will remain. This is a framework agreement and it just gives other opportunities for dialogue with the Vietnamese.