Gary Gannon (Dublin Central, Social Democrats)
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4. To ask the Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade if he will reaffirm the commitment to reaching a spend of 0.7% of GNI on official development assistance by 2030; the status of a roadmap to achieve this; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [56772/21]

Gary Gannon (Dublin Central, Social Democrats)
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I ask the Minister to reaffirm our commitment to reaching 0.7% of GNI on our official development assistance by 2030. Is there a road map to achieve this? I ask he make a statement on the matter.

Simon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael)
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I thank the Deputy. I am very glad to have an opportunity to clarify this because this question has not been asked for a while. I affirm the Government's commitment to meeting the target of 0.7% of GNI to be allocated to overseas development aid, ODA, by 2030.

In budget 2022, €1.044 billion was allocated to ODA. This is the highest-ever amount allocated by any Government. I expect that this figure will correspond to 0.32% of GNI for 2022 given the strong economic recovery we are experiencing. The need to continue to increase Ireland's allocation to ODA in GNI percentage terms must be balanced against the need to responsibly manage the large cash increases required. The increase in ODA allocated from 2021 to 2022, for example, was €176 million extra, or 20.3% of overall ODA. This is a large increase in real terms in one year.

My Department is currently reviewing and building systems that will enable our development programme to grow further, including as a proportion of GNI, in a sustainable and responsible way. This includes working in co-ordination with the many other Departments and bodies spending official development assistance. My Department also continues to work with the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform, and other Departments through the interdepartmental committee on international development, on how a growing ODA allocation can be managed most effectively across government. This, along with other work to further build systems and staff capacity, will inform when and whether it would be possible and appropriate to provide a roadmap to 0.7% for 2030.

We are committed to this but we tried to put a roadmap in place a number of years ago and it looked completely out of date within a year because of the pressures the economy came under. We are trying to build capacity to ensure we can spend a lot of extra money every year before we agree to an actual financial roadmap to 2030.

Gary Gannon (Dublin Central, Social Democrats)
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I thank the Minister for his answer. There is a great deal of merit in what we are already doing with ODA. Next year's figure of 0.32% of our GNI is very welcome. We know how well that money is going to spent and how far it will go. However, I return to the end of his reply where he referred to the appropriateness of providing a roadmap. It is 51 years since wealthy countries committed 0.7% of GNI to ODA and in the years since that commitment we have, I think, fallen €24 trillion behind that in global terms. Thus, in the absence of a roadmap, some of these commitments are just statements. I do not doubt for a second the commitment but we need a roadmap. That roadmap could say that if the global economy is on this level, here is how we will get there and if things subside a little more, then here is how we will get there in that eventuality. However, we need to lay out a pathway to these commitments. We leave ourselves a little at risk of talking about tokenistic commitments in the absence of a clear route to get there. That is what Dóchas and many other NGOs have been asking for.

Simon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael)
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That is not an unreasonable ask. What we are doing is not tokenistic. An additional €174 million, which is a 20% increase in ODA in one year, is a pretty significant allocation. The nature of that allocation has changed somewhat. Other Departments are taking up a higher percentage, for example, than they would have in the past. The Minister for Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth, Deputy O'Gorman, anticipates spending close to €120 million more on asylum and refugee costs in Ireland. That is part of our overall ODA contribution because the costs for asylum seekers and refugees in their first 12 months in the country is considered ODA funding. As such, we are working across Departments. We have also agreed in the programme for Government to double climate finance by 2025 up to approximately €225 million. That is also an increasing percentage of the overall ODA.

Gary Gannon (Dublin Central, Social Democrats)
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I fully accept that but while our contributions are increasing so too is the need, and drastically. The three "Cs" of Covid-19, climate change and conflict all make the need for and urgency of significant increases in ODA by us and other wealthy nations all the more vitally important. It is welcome we have reaffirmed our commitment and have done consistently. However, we need to demonstrate how we will get there.

The not unreasonable call from organisations such as Dóchas, which they have been making for decades now, to provide pathways and lay them out clearly is one we should be open to. It does not take much to say how we will meet these commitments under certain eventualities. It is important to have a target of 0.7% by 2030, but so is laying out how we will get there.

Simon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael)
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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.