Mr. Jamie Drummond:

There might be opportunities to do this in 2018. As a campaigner, one usually looks to see if there are upcoming moments in the calendar where there are action-forcing moments to get a message across. There might be moments in 2018 that might be used for that. There will certainly be further crises and challenges when the media tend to cover these issues. One challenge is that the media only cover things when there is a crisis. It would be good to find a proactive way to communicate good news. It is a shame that the good news of the Jubilee 2000 campaign and the millennium development goals was not fully heard. The statistics for lives saved are extraordinary. They are amazing and they might not have happened but they happened because we got together as an international community and created the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization, the Global Partnership for Education, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria and made the World Bank more effective. Those things are to be treasured. They could be lost, but they can also be built on. They delivered on saving millions of lives and improved millions more for people who would otherwise be in worse condition for the rest of their lives.

The problem is that social media are in our face all the time and tell us more and more dramatic, shorter, attention-grabbing messages. There is also the fact of a demographic explosion in Africa. People of Irish origin will be familiar with where there is a period when a large number of children are born, there is lower infant mortality but family planning is unchanged and there is very large population growth. That has been occurring for an extended time on the continent of Africa. There are many people in Africa who are competing over relatively scarce natural resources in some parts of the continent. We need to double down on investments in that region, and Irish Aid has led in investing in that region. It is important for the country to continue with this.

I have often thought that we ought to have some sort of envelope similar to that for babies which was referred to by the Deputy. There is probably a more 21st century way of delivering that message that does not rely on the pews in the churches as much but which does work through secondary schools. Perhaps there is a development education programme in this that Ireland can look at that would engage younger people in a more systematic way. In the UK we have something called Red Nose Day which takes place every other year which has been incredibly effective. It is a partnership between the BBC and Comic Relief in which we all participate and support. Richard Curtis did an amazing thing in creating it. Inspired by Bob Geldof's work with Live Aid, he created Sport Relief and Comic Relief. It has been incredibly effective for nearly 30 years in educating every younger person on the importance of these issues, just as the envelope which Deputy Barrett mentioned would have done. Something like that would be a very good idea, not merely to justify the aid programme but to get people to think differently about the other because, as Africa's population doubles, no matter what the circumstances, many of them will come to Europe either as economic migrants or refugees. It would be a good thing if they were to come to a place that has an open mind and with economies that are doing well. We will be senile. Demographically we will be senescent and we will need their youthful energy to do stuff. That is merely what the economic statistics tell us and the demographic data demand. Demography is destiny. Europe and Africa will have a very close 21st century. The question is what kind of closeness will it be. These kinds of investments, through the aid programme but also into people's minds and ideas about who we are, gives less succour to the xenophobes and populists who will do very well in the political climate in the next couple of decades if we do not get this right. I think we should all be quite worried if we do not make these investments, not only in aid but also in other policies such as transparency. People need to see that the system is fair and that it is delivering in countries and regionally.