Mr. Maurice Sadlier:

The committee should feel free to cut me off if the connection does not work. I will not be insulted or annoyed. My story is similar to Ms Bennett's. I am in Karamoja, northern Uganda, which in terms of landscape is similar to northern Kenya. I had a meeting with the district officials. Some 35% of the population of the district is eating one meal per day to cope with the current hunger crisis. That is a large number of children and young adults who are going hungry. I asked the reason and the driving factor behind that. There is one answer from the district, the communities I have met, and other government representatives - climate change. It is a coping mechanism they have had to endure. Northern Karamoja has erratic rainfall. It is not a known rainy area. It has a single rainfall period each year between April and October. Communities are used to planting once per year and getting their food from that. However, due to climate change, we have seen increasingly changing weather patterns, with which people do not know how to cope. This year the rains arrived one month early, so people were struggling to plough the lands and get the seeds in the ground. After a few weeks of rain, it has suddenly stopped for the past six weeks. It was only with the arrival of the Irish ambassador, Kevin Colgan, that the rains reappeared. They thanked the Irish for the appearance of the rains in Karamoja. If community members had planted, their seeds had not taken, or were already destroyed, or they will just not have enough to produce enough to keep them going through the coming hunger season.

Uganda has a population of 45 million people. It is nine times the population of Ireland in a country that is three times the size. However, the per capita carbon emissions of an Irish person are 64 times that of a Ugandan. I am sitting in a town in northern Uganda, and there will be no power for the evening. It is about to go off in a while. The power is gone. There are very few vehicles. The carbon emissions of communities here are negligible, but these are the communities faced with the worst impacts of climate change. They really are struggling to cope and struggling to know what to do. The Government of Uganda is trying its best. I asked it about food distribution. There was food distribution here last week by the Government. It is not enough. It is enough to last a family of six for about a week. There is just a very small sticking plaster for quite a short time. When I asked communities what they need, they need a lot of access to irrigation, ability to cope with the situation, cash transfers and anything to get them through. Overall, they need more action on climate change by all of us, at all levels, and on increasing our funding to climate change.

I will leave it there.