John Crown (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister of State and wish him well in his various undertakings at present.
I have had representations made to me by concerned citizens who are interested in our development aid programme and who asked that I highlight the issue of the attitude of the statutory Irish developed authorities towards efforts at population control.
Access to birth control is critical to managing the earth's populations. During the 20th century alone, the global population exploded from 1.65 billion to 6 billion people. Over the course of my young lifetime the world population has doubled. There is a huge burden on global food supply. Today 842 million people do not have enough to eat and one in four Sub-Saharan Africans are hungry. As a consequence of the increasing population we have also been quickly depleting the earth of its resources, poisoning its water supply, so critical for life, and disrupting other aspects of the environment. Thankfully, in many parts of the world, this is a situation which is beginning to be ameliorated. However, the situation in Africa - a very troubled continent, where many of our fellow humans live in terrible conditions, to which we have pointed a great degree of our own national aid - is very troubling. Africa's population is likely to double in the next 30 years. Historically, access to birth control has been a deeply divisive political issue in western countries but over the course of my lifetime the ability to access and use contraception is something that women in the western world and Irish women have come to take for granted.
Sadly, family planning is much less readily available in Africa than in any other region on the earth, including other regions which are facing development challenges. Some estimates indicate that a quarter of married women in Africa want contraceptives but cannot get them. In the first 14 years of the current millennium, access to birth control was restricted because of political tensions between the Bush Administration in the US and the UN population programmes, as a result of internal political and cultural issues in the US. As the then Minister of State with responsibility for trade and development noted in 2011, providing women with access to reproductive health care is not just an end in itself, it can have a transformative effect on women's vulnerability to poverty, hunger, economic and social discrimination. The choice to have smaller families allows for greater investment in each child's health care, nutrition and education, improved productivity and better long-term prospects for women, their families and societies.
I understand that between 2006 and 2011, only €30 million was donated to the UN population fund by the Republic. When the then Minister of State, Deputy Jan O'Sullivan, addressed this issue in 2011 the world's population was just under 7 billion people. In the three years since that address, the population has increased by 0.25 billion. How much has the Republic given to the UN population fund since 2011? Does Ireland engage in any programmes which provide increasedaccessto birth control other than the UN population fund? Is the availability of birth control an issue that Irish Aid addresses when it develops programmes with its partner countries?