Conor Lenihan (Dublin South West, Fianna Fail)

As an agency that disperses development co-operation funding, we take a much different approach. It is a broad definition which encompasses the human capacity of the countries in which we operate to manage themselves, in particular their public finances and the means of developing their expertise at managing those finances. We spend some €70 million each year on governance measures across our various programme countries. Much of this spend is concentrated on enhancing the capability and capacity of the countries to manage themselves, by empowering them to impose sophisticated systems for the audit, monitoring and evaluation of their own public spending.

In many of these countries, unfortunately, because the record-keeping is in a poor state, it is often extremely difficult to evaluate retrospectively how our money was spent and whether value for money was achieved. It is a significant issue and we have been attempting to tackle it for some time. Many years ago in Lesotho, for instance, we funded an accountancy training college because that country had no accountants in its public service at that time.

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