Simon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I understand that request. I will tell the Deputy of my experience. After we made the commitment, I was the Minister who repeated it because it had notionally been a Government objective for many years. I recall when the then Minister of State at the Department of Foreign Affairs, Liz O'Donnell, also made that commitment and fought at budget time to make sure there was progress towards it and so on. We would not have had €174 million extra in the budget just passed were it not for our commitment to 0.7% by 2030. I would not have had the political credibility to be able to do that. That has been the basis of what we have been trying to do over the past number of years. Even when we had Brexit budgets and Covid budgets that were significantly impacted by external factors, we still managed to quite significantly increase our ODA budget each year over the past number of years because of that commitment, which has been strongly welcomed by Dóchas. When we made this commitment, I was talking about between €120 million and €140 million extra each year between now and 2030 to get to where we need to be. This year it was higher than that and last year it was less. It will not be a linear line but, certainly, the objective needs to remain.

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