Conor Lenihan (Dublin South West, Fianna Fail)

It is within the rules of the development assistance committee to include some costs for the resettlement of refugees as part of official development assistance. We do not fully set these costs against our official development assistance as other donors do and have never decided to do so.

Multilateral debt relief qualifies for official development assistance but it drops out the following year according to the amounts and when they are given. This year, thanks to the generosity of the Minister for Finance, we achieved 0.5% for the first time, one year ahead of the schedule we had pencilled in. We achieved this because of a one-off €59 million payment by the Minister to the multilateral debt relief package begun in Gleneagles. That will drop out next year but we will reach the 0.5% target in 2007.

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