Paschal Mooney (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I also welcome Ms Wahlström to the House. To put my question in context, I served on the Council of Europe until 2008 and my last report as rapporteur was on Europe's response to humanitarian disasters, on which I worked with Mr. Sergio Piazzi, now based in Malta and with whom I believe Ms Wahlström also worked. I am interested in an update on the situation from Ms Wahlström, given that the aforementioned report is now five years old. The report found that the problem facing Europe then, with regard to its role in developing an international co-ordination framework for humanitarian assistance, was political. It found that there was no political agreement between European states as to how humanitarian assistance and civil protection, respectively, should be effectively organised. The report states:

The separate and distinct mandates for funding aid (DG-ECHO) and intervention (DG-Environment) at European Union level are symptomatic of this lack of synchrony. As such, the current ambiguity surrounding the role of the Community Mechanism for Civil Protection is a further endorsement of this lack of political unity. If a united co-ordination platform is to be achieved, European states first need to decide which of their interested national ministries (whether foreign affairs, home affairs, justice or other) should play the central role in co-ordinating humanitarian aid ... European-OCHA relations have therefore reached a critical stage of their development. On the one hand, it is imperative that both parties ensure that the human values of humanitarian intervention ... remain the fundamental goal underlying any reform processes.

The report went on to say that "the key to success of European/UN shared humanitarian assistance responsibility relates to OCHA's ability to sensitise European states to the fact that its strengths do not lie in building separate systems with distinct and autonomously activated capacities, but rather by creating a united and participative system that allows all actors involved to bring their capacities to it in a co-ordinated and complementary manner." I invite Ms Wahlström to comment on these findings.