Michael Kitt (Galway East, Fianna Fail)

I appreciate the Deputy's support on this. That is the very point I have been making at the meetings, first of all in Madeira and more recently in Brussels. We are pressing very hard, particularly in Africa, which the Deputy would accept has fallen behind. There has been more progress in China and other Asian countries.

We can also consider with some satisfaction that some 6 million schoolchildren are now attending schools in Uganda, for example, where only 2 million were attending those schools 13 years ago. We have made very good progress with regard to home-care packages in countries such as Mozambique, which I visited recently. A high proportion of the funding there goes to tackling HIV-AIDS.

We are very keen on the development issues, which I stressed at all our meetings should be the direction we, as a country, would like to go. We will work on that, particularly with the funding through the United Nations, NGOs and missionaries and the bilateral programmes with the seven programme countries, particularly in Africa.

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