Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour)

I join my colleague, Deputy Michael Higgins, and the Labour Party in offering condolences to the families and others who have been bereaved in Pakistan and in India, and to those who have endured dreadful suffering and loss in Central America. I concur with both Deputy Coveney and Deputy Michael Higgins in regard to preparation for and prediction of disasters and the development of a rapid reaction capacity at regional and national levels.

The only groups of people who can deal with the aftermath of a disaster such as that in Pakistan are the army, fire brigade, ambulance services, and people who are trained to take orders, not to compete with other agencies but to go in and do the job. Pakistan has a significant army and spends a fair percentage of its national budget on defence and military hardware. If a country is disaster prone or is in a disaster prone region, and requires a large defence budget, it should be possible to develop a protocol whereby a percentage of its defence expenditure is devoted to a capacity to react and cope with disasters.

I concur with Deputy Coveney's point about the PR image of disasters. Much of the media engage in a type of disaster pornography, for want of a better word. It wants pictures of people at their most desperate and destitute. While the intention behind images such as those from Darfur and Niger, and the few from Pakistan, may help to raise funding and alert people's compassion, we must guard against transferring them to the whole of the country. This gives the impression that people from whole continents or regions have no capacity and feeds into a theory, which is a legacy of colonialism, that no local government is good, all local politicians are corrupt and someone on a white horse must charge in from the west to rescue them.

The reality at local level is very different. These countries have armies which have capacity to lift supplies and carry out emergency repairs that is not available to any development or disaster relief agency. The focus at UN and regional level should be on building and identifying that capacity and the commitment to it.

I have examined some of the reports regarding the aftermath of the tsunami. I welcome the Government's allocation but feel that when writing large cheques to UN organisations, we need much more accountability for how the money is spent. The Government has rightly been on the ropes in the House this week on the issue of consultants. The UN and its family of agencies probably have more per square foot than even Fianna Fáil and the Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment, Deputy Martin, have ever considered having.

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