Ms Louise Finan:

I am happy to answer that. The OECD Development Assistance Committee, DAC, agreed some years back that the cost of the first 12 months of resettling refugees in a country may be counted as official development assistance.

That is what has happened here. It is common practice across donor states and not especially unusual. However, when we see a large spend on refugees in that first 12 months, it skews the figures. In a way, it means that we must have a breakdown. To be fair, the Department of Foreign Affairs has given that. If we look at the Irish Aid annual report for 2022, the amount spent overseas has been outlined as well how much has been spent domestically. We have confidence the money that has been spent domestically has not been taken from the overseas budget, it has just been counted towards it. That is really important. We certainly would not want to see any diversification of spending from the ODA budget. As members have heard, there are so many global crises we are trying to respond to that we need to see the funding going overseas increase. Once that in-country spend for the 12 months is being counted, it can inflate the percentage. That is why we are looking at much higher GNI rates from, say, 2022 onwards than we would normally have. From a civil society point of view, we would like to see a continuing push towards 0.7% being spent overseas and that funding very much targeting the least developed countries and those countries most affected by climate conflict and food insecurity. The Government can also count that money domestically as ODA, but we really want that 0.7% cap to be met and spent overseas.