Mr. Simon Murtagh:

I thank the Deputy for bringing up the human rights issue. It is something we have discussed in detail in Oxfam Ireland and across our international organisation. The next COP is going to be in the United Arab Emirates, UAE and similar objections may apply there. We have a protest movement called the climate caravan which we are supporting across Africa in 22 different countries and is going to end up at the conference. Without giving too much away, it will seek to raise publicity on all of these issues, beginning with climate justice. We have tried as much as possible as an organisation to hand over agency to the African activists on the ground. The committee heard Ms Wathuti's opening statement today - she represents everything we are trying to do as an organisation, which is to give leadership to African and global south voices to carry out their agency in all of these areas. It is a UN conference; we cannot control where it is held. A decision is made by all of our organisations about what level to engage. The fact that it is being brought up at political level here is the right thing.

When it comes to IMF debt and Pakistan, as the Deputy mentioned, he is correct that they now have to resume an IMF loan of $1 billion as a result of the floods. That is exactly what we are trying to get away from. There are a number of means of doing that. Given the context of the last couple of years, from the pandemic to the current crisis, we have called for the cancellation of debts in 2022 and 2023 so countries can get on with trying to recover in general.

There was also a question about special drawing rights, which are a form of currency issued by the IMF. One of the points of the rights is that they can pay off debt. It was a great campaign last year when we were at COP26 in Glasgow. I had a detailed discussion with the Minister, Deputy Ryan, about it. It has fallen off the agenda. It is a mystery that it has, because at first we were talking about issuing $3 trillion of those rights across the world - the development community as a whole was behind it. It has fallen off the agenda; it was reduced to $650 billion. Ireland received $4.5 billion of these special drawing rights. The idea was that we would try to allocate them to developing countries. It would be a good question to ask the Minister about what happened the reallocation of the special drawing rights and if they could be a means for debt cancellation and funding loss and damage in an immediate sense. I hope that answers the question to some extent about debt and the IMF.

The windfall tax is something Oxfam has led on and it continues to do so. There are significant revenues across the world to be made from the windfall profits being made by energy companies. Along with wealth taxes, it is a way of addressing our inequality crisis, which is a huge contributor to the climate emergency, as proven by the carbon emission figures for the richest 1% of society. It is also a means of addressing immediate crises like this in order to raise revenue.