Maureen O'Sullivan (Dublin Central, Independent)
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128. To ask the Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade the priorities for Ireland as it attends the Financing for Development Conference in Addis Ababa in Ethiopia; and if Ireland will support the call for international tax matters to be under a United Nations intergovernmental body. [28342/15]

Charles Flanagan (Laois-Offaly, Fine Gael)
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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, this week in Addis Ababa, on a new framework for global development at the UN 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 Conference will seek to unlock the range of financing sources required to implement the new universal Goals. These include domestic resource mobilisation, private sector contributions, as well as Official Development Assistance (ODA), which remains critical for the poorest countries. The Government remains firmly committed to reaching the 0.7% target for ODA and to making further progress towards it as our economic recovery consolidates. Ireland is a world leader in the proportion of our aid which goes to the Least Developed Countries and we also strongly support the UN target of providing 0.15 – 0.2% of GNI for the Least Developed Countries, which we already exceed.

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 this regard upgrading the UN Committee of Experts on International Cooperation in Tax Matters to intergovernmental status could result in competing processes rather than fostering more cooperation.

In an effort to ensure the involvement of the developing world in these processes, the Minister for Finance has previously called at the OECD 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.