Conor Lenihan (Dublin South West, Fianna Fail)

It is not worse than the Deputy thought. Ireland is among a small number of those 15 countries which are either on that figure or well on the way to achieving it. Our overseas development aid programme has tripled in size since we got into Government in 1997. Ireland is the ninth largest donor in the world, with 50% of that expenditure going to the poorest countries on Earth. That is a great achievement for which Ireland has been positively evaluated internationally. There were two non-governmental assessments of our overseas development aid programme in the last week or two. One such assessment ranked us second in the world, while the other ranked us first in terms of practice and roll-out of the programme.

I want to answer some of the questions the Deputy raised cornering the decentralisation of the development co-operation directorate to Limerick, because they contained some numerical inaccuracies.

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