Charles Flanagan (Laois-Offaly, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

This year, we are working for global agreement in three major international conferences on sustainable development. The conferences are interlinked. They are on financing for development, in Addis Ababa in July, on a new framework for global development at the United Nations in New York in September and on a new climate change agreement in Paris in December. The aim is to deliver a new and transformative sustainable development agenda, with sustainable development goals up to 2030.

The Addis Ababa conference, which will be attended by the Minister of State, Deputy Sherlock, will seek to unlock the range of financing sources required to implement the new universal goals. These include domestic resource mobilisation, private sector contributions and official development assistance, ODA, which remains critical for the poorest countries. The Government remains fully committed to reaching the 0.7% target and to making further progress towards it as our economy continues to recover. Ireland is a world leader in the proportion of our aid which goes to least developed countries and we strongly support the UN target of providing between 0.15% and 0.2% of GNI for the least developed countries. Currently, we exceed that target.

Issues of taxation will be central to the financing of sustainable development. We believe the most effective way to deal with global tax issues is through the OECD. In an effort to ensure the involvement of the developing world in these processes, the Minister for Finance, at the OECD, has previously called for all countries to undertake spill-over analyses of the impact of their taxation regimes on the developing world, similar to the analysis already commissioned by the Department of Finance in respect of Ireland.

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