Michael D Higgins (Galway West, Labour)

I welcome the Minister's reply and the financial support for the Annan mission — as well as the additional support that has been committed in humanitarian aid. I shall be supportive of any further requests that are received.

I want to touch on that part of my question that asked about the violence that has broken out following the election. It relates to the answer to the previous question, to some extent. I have served as an election observer in Latin America and in Cambodia. The European Union appoints long-term as well as short-term observers. The difficulties in the Kenyan case mean that the whole election observing mission must be reconceptualised to include, for example, the tally. The informal results that flowed from the election, in fact, were the trigger for the violence that happened in Kenya. Again, it was an injudicious media leak that led to the violence in Ethiopia. This time, perhaps, it was the responsibility of the European Union Mission. It is worth considering the restructuring of the observation process. The long-term approach meant that some 80% of the abuses are in the registration process. The short-term is quite limited in its utility, looking only at polling day, when in fact it is the context and the media outfall that is important.

As I have said, I welcome the Government's response to the humanitarian side. Is the Minister not concerned, however, that the impact of so-called displacement is effectively little short of ethnic cleansing, to some extent, as regards the population movements? Finally, in relation to what is happening in different parts of Africa, the largest proportion of that continent's population ever displaced is currently moving across borders in different conflicts, creating problems that cannot be handled by relationships among sovereign states and raising an entirely new set of issues as regards the human rights of the displaced peoples.

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