Mr. Dualta Roughneen:

I echo much of what Mr. Gaffey has said. There are a couple of areas I would challenge but I will first go back to a couple of the questions that were asked.

Why are only 15% of the targets are being met globally? Conflict is one of the reasons. Before I came in to the meeting, I was talking about when I started working in west Africa 15 years ago, the region was calm, peaceful and quiet. The only conflict people were talking about was the civil war in Côte d'Ivoire. Since then, there have been civil wars in Nigeria and Cameroon. There are conflicts in Burkina Faso, which is destroying the country, in Niger and in Mali. Only a few weeks ago there was a coup in Niger. We have seen that whole region disintegrate over time. It is almost impossible to make progress towards things like the SDGs when this happens. Similarly, in other regions of sub-Saharan Africa, in the east and southern regions, instability in those countries pushes everything back.

There is often the assumption that overseas aid can solve all these problems or bring everything forward to achieve the SDGs. Overseas aid is still only a small portion of the funding countries spend themselves on their own development. Looking at Ireland, we see some of the challenges and we are not achieving all of the SDGs. The problem is that when there is such a small resource base in many of the countries we work in in international co-operation, investing in different areas is always a challenge. The tax base is very small, there are many different demands on it and the needs are very large. The contribution from Ireland and other developed countries is hugely important.

If it is asked who the laggards are to an extent, I would not say who are the laggards. I would point to some of the countries that have achieved the figure of 0.7% for a number of years in their commitment to overseas aid. Some had achieved it and have dropped back. FCDO UK Aid Direct has pulled back on the 0.7% commitment. Ireland still has a long way to go to achieve the figure of 0.7%. These are financial contributions to assist overseas aid and achieve the sustainable development goals.

Regarding women with disabilities and talking about inequality, ending inequality is one way of looking at it, but ultimately, to end inequality we have to be able to bring people up as well, so we need to have targeted strategies. If we are looking at the issue of women with disabilities, we need a targeted strategy around disability in the first place, and this can be further honed when we look at the issues of why women with disabilities are not in the workplace or why there are fewer of them in the workplace. Some of this is also for societal and cultural reasons and the type of employment available in those countries. Much of the employment is day-to-day employment and subsistence living. For many people long-term careers are not even an option. People work to live. The work is very physical as well, and that can have an effect on whether people with disabilities are able to access that work.

There are a huge number of challenges which have been exacerbated, to an extent, not by Covid but by the policies that were put in place during the Covid pandemic. For example, for a person in Niger who needs to be out working and who needs a busy marketplace to work, if there are restrictions on movement where a population cannot go to that person's stall he or she has set up, that person cannot earn a living and that means he or she cannot eat that day. All of those things have a knock-on effect, and much more so than we could ever really appreciate in Ireland. We have such a high standard of living in general here in Ireland, and then there is the challenge of being a person with a disability in Burkina Faso, for example, when you are surrounded by conflict and war and there is nowhere to go.

That leads us to the challenge of institutionalisation. There is an issue around institutionalisation and disability, but then how do you de-institutionalise it? It takes a long time and is very difficult.

If you want to close institutions where people with disabilities are homed, where do they go? What do they do? The families do not have the resources to support them. There are not systems in place to provide them with the necessary rehabilitation. The school systems are often very weak as well. We can work to ensure children with disabilities can access schools but those schools need to be able to support them. It is not as easy as saying we can bring children with disabilities into schools and all will be fine. It can have very difficult knock-on effects when that is done without the proper training for teachers in place and the proper supports around the curriculum. How can a blind person access textbooks that do not have Braille, for example? The government budget cannot give the schools the necessary budget to buy those so parents who are already struggling to make ends meet need to get Braille schoolbooks for their children that cost two, three or four times as much as regular schoolbooks. We are having a lot of those challenges.

The Deputy mentioned the European Disability Forum. It is an organisation we work with. One of the priorities for ourselves is working with organisations of people with disabilities. We sometimes think that as NGOs or international NGOs we have the solutions to the problems but it is people with disabilities and the organisations they have set up and run that do. They often have much better ideas of what the solutions are but the problem is that they are very under-resourced. Even here in Ireland, they are significantly under-resourced but it is the same if you go and work overseas. We talk to organisations for people with disabilities and they say people are not willing to resource them. Why not? It is often because of the compliance requirements that come with overseas aid. It is understandable. Irish Aid is responsible to the Comptroller and Auditor General in Ireland and the European Union is responsible to the European Anti-Fraud Office, OLAF, for internal audit. Those bodies want to make sure the money is spent properly. Small community groups of people with disabilities do not have the systems and processes that are expected to be in place to manage funds for international co-operation. That has a huge knock-on effect on how we can bring people with disabilities into looking after their own development.

The last point I wanted to make is on the UNCRPD. The optional protocol is not an obstacle to addressing Article 32. While the SDGs are somewhat voluntary and governments are committing to them, the UNCRPD is something Ireland has ratified. That means it has ratified Article 32, which means we need to approach international co-operation and inclusion of people with disabilities in line with convention and that puts huge responsibility on Ireland. I commend what Mr. Gaffey said about starting to look at Irish Aid's work through a disability lens and trying to understand what Irish Aid is doing and how the money is being spent.

I was very surprised because I have not seen the outcome for the disability marker Mr. Gaffey mentioned and 24% of funding being disability inclusive. I would love to be able to delve into that more and see what that actually means. We know the OECD DAC markers are blunt instruments. It is really about getting inside them to see, for example, if someone says money is being spent and it is disability inclusive, what that means. A whole range of work needs to be done to ensure communities are more inclusive but also still making sure we are able to deliver those programmes that respond to the needs that people with disabilities have right now. It is a case of getting a balance between the medicalised approach to disability and also the changing society and attitudes towards people with disabilities.