Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 1 May 2024

Joint Oireachtas Committee on European Union Affairs

UN Sustainable Development Goals: Discussion

10:00 am

Mr. David Donoghue:

Just the entire United Nations. One reason may be that for the SDGs there was no specific cheque or financial commitment for US commitment to them. For whatever reason Trump did not use his previous four years to diss the SDGs. Equally, so far the more right-wing regimes are not distancing themselves. That could of course change over the next few years. The strange thing is that the international mood is one of SDGs being the only one we can all agree on and however imperfect and slow the progress is, we must keep going along that path. Part of me is a sceptic, like the Deputy, and thinks this will be overtaken by a global move to the right and away from multilateralism but the other part of me says to hold on to the positives that, oddly enough, we still have at the UN. It is a strange paradox that this incredibly ambitious agenda is still seen as the only one.