Colm Brophy (Dublin South West, Fine Gael)
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The Senator raised a couple of very interesting points that I believe are very important. In addition to the direct immediate response on the humanitarian and development side is our role in working with our UN partners. One of the key things we did over our term on the UN Security Council was to look at the whole area of climate and security and to make it a real priority during our involvement with the Security Council. What we are seeing in the crisis in the Horn of Africa is effectively the first global manifestation of the impact of climate insecurity. A way of life has been wiped out. Communities that have lived with pastoral farming for centuries will never be able to return to it. In that context, we have to look not only at putting in place emergency relief but at how, as an international community, we are going to address that.

We have to address it through a number of structures. The UN structure will be very important in that regard because this issue leads to migration and, long before this migration ends up on the shores of Europe, it becomes inherently destabilising within Africa itself. As large-scale migration starts to occur and people move within the continent of Africa, the structures that are in place are destabilised and this migration becomes a very difficult problem for African countries to deal with. There is a role for the international community to play with regard to support. There are things we can do. One of the important things, which comes out of the concept of loss and damage I mentioned earlier, is that, through development aid, we can put in place processes that enable communities to survive and remain in situ. It can be as simple as doing the right geographical surveys to allow access to deep water tapping, which can bring up sufficient water to sustain the growing of crops. We will not have pastoral farming but we could have agriculture in a different way. Food security, which is something Ireland led on for many years before that term was widely used, is going to be one of the crucial things. These are the types of areas we have been involved in at UN level.

At Security Council level, we also did a lot of work on peace and security and how to deal with the whole issue of providing a peace and security framework that enables countries and communities to have an existence unaffected by conflict. The conflict situation is highly damaging. In South Sudan, there are two refugee camps sitting side by side. One houses 100,000 people who were displaced by the conflict. They have ended up in a camp and cannot leave because they are too scared to do so. Next to these, a new camp has grown up in recent years as a result of flooding. Two situations are coming together and turning into a crisis because the numbers are growing exponentially and certainly exceeding what the Government of what is effectively the newest country in the world can deal with. What we do at UN level is important, as is the type of work we do on the ground.

On another point the Senator and others have made, which is really important, as I said in my initial opening remarks, our NGOs are playing an incredible role in delivering on the ground. In proportion to their size and scale, they are doing an amazing job. As a country and as a Government, we are incredibly proud of the work they have done. They have done it in other situations before but, on their work in the Horn of Africa in particular, it says it all that, when the BBC went to film in Somalia to highlight the situation, it went to Trócaire because its people on the ground are able to provide information straight away. They are doing an incredible job and that is why we continue to support them. We will talk about how to enhance our support in the year ahead, working in conjunction with big international agencies that are there and which have great logistics capacity. By the way, many of our Irish NGOs tap into the UN stuff so it is a circular thing. They do not operate in different spheres from one another but work together collectively.