Colm Brophy (Dublin South West, Fine Gael)
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The very straight and very simple answer is, yes, it is a failure. There is absolutely no question about it. In my speech I alluded to the fact that we have a 50% funding situation. That in itself speaks absolute volumes about where the international community is as a whole in what it is thinking is about this. There are those of us sitting in this room who are old enough to have memories of the television footage of the former president Mary Robinson's visit there, or of the Live Aid footage. I consistently make the point that when this footage turns up on our television screens, it is the definition of failure. It is not success; it is the definition of failure. It means we as an international community took too long and waited too long to respond. The Deputy's point is so well made about frequency with which people are dying. I know the young children I saw are, by this stage, dead. As horrendous as it is, we are at a point where we can still intervene in a way we need to.

On what we need to be doing, we need to be looking at how much extra we as a global community can intervene. I mean the wealthiest of nations and our EU partners, the G20s and the G7s of this world. They must look at this collectively. We must intervene in a way that enables groups like the World Food Programme to intervene. Ireland will be going on the executive board of the World Food Programme and we will be championing this from next year onwards. When Ireland takes its seat, we very much want to have a voice heard on this.

It is very important to recognise, and the Deputy referred to it, that while the grains export deal is in place, it is by no means sufficient. It in no way nor in any way compensates for the loss and fall-off of the grain that was available before the war in Ukraine. What is happening in Ukraine is absolutely horrendous, and everybody is right to have that level of support and to continue with that. However, the truly terrifying outcome we can see is that, the two biggest feeders to the World Food Programme, which then went on to feed the world, including the Horn of Africa, were Russia and Ukraine, and because of the partial grain problem that still exists, what is going into the World Food Programme now is not sufficient to enable it to deliver. There is a real problem there right across its ability to deliver.

It is so right of the Deputy to say that one hears about a suspension of aid. I was sitting beside a UN official looking at a camp. The official told me they had cut that camp off from their programme. I asked what would happen to the 100,000 people in that camp. The official told me they would just have to find another way of getting food. When I saw this happening literally a couple of metres away from where I was standing, it brought it home. They were still working at the camp on either side, but because of the overall shortage, they had made decisions about how they could deliver. I believe this has been caused entirely by the international community failing. While we are doing an incredible amount, and it is important to acknowledge that USAID is also doing very strong work on the ground in this particular area, as much as we believe we are doing, the international community collectively is actually failing on this. We must move and move quickly.