Mr. David Donoghue:

I will go back to the interesting points raised by Mr. Andrews. I think he is right. In the remaining years we have to take a number of dramatic actions - "we" being the world - which will fast forward in some areas. We need, in particular, to have so-called accelerator actions, which are measures taken by a number of countries that are particularly well placed and well resourced. These are projects or initiatives that would hit several of the SDGs together. There are a lot of ideas around. There is potentially also enough finance if it can be properly allocated by the international financial institutions and so on. There are demonstrative actions that could be taken to show we are able to make faster progress than the 12% achieved. That has to happen over the next few years. Some of that will come out of the Summit of the Future in September. To be fair, some of it did come out of the SDG summit last September, which Mr. Andrews attended. That mobilised a fair number of financial pledges by countries and organisations. Some of that is being worked through at the moment, and it means we have a lot of goodwill we have to translate into concrete initiatives that will address several goals simultaneously.

I turn to the question of what is going to happen more generally by 2030. This agenda officially finishes in 2030. Something tells me we will end up flipping over and in effect renewing the current goals for a subsequent period. That will not be talked about officially until about 2027. For now, oddly enough, the emphasis is on hunkering down and doing everything we can to achieve the 2030 agenda. However, at some point realism will set in and people will decide we need negotiations on a new set of goals. In my view, however, they are likely to be the same as the present set. There might be a couple added. There is a school of thought that says there could be an attempt by the more right-wing governments to pull back on the SDGs and reopen what we agreed in 2015. This may seem too optimistic to some members, but I feel it is more likely we will retain the same goals. I do not think there will be a reopening of them, but they will be given a new validity for, say, another 15 years. From about 2027 on, we will begin to look ahead to a new agenda so the sense of everything coming to an end in 2030 will probably dissipate at that stage. You may ask what the point is of having a 15-year period for implementation of these goals if you then ignore it. The truth is that human beings like to have some goals or ways of concentrating energies and resources. On one hand we want to keep the focus on the current set. On the other hand, we realistically are not going to make the kind of massive progress needed, but we need some demonstrative initiatives to show what can be done. By that I mean a coalition of like-minded countries that would deliberately set out co-operative plans spanning six or seven goals simultaneously with the aid of the UNDP and the UN system more generally. That is what should happen and what probably will happen. Ireland has a role in that. I was glad Ireland was again given the co-facilitator position for the SDG summit last September and it did a great job. I would like to think, in our EU role, we will be in a position to steer things in the right direction from 2026 on.