Eoin Hayes (Dublin Bay South, Social Democrats)
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194. To ask the Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade the details of all overseas aid projects and funding amounts allocated in 2024 and in 2025, or the latest data available, by country, in tabular form; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [61055/25]

Neale Richmond (Dublin Rathdown, Fine Gael)
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Ireland’s Official Development Assistance consists of funding from various sources, notably Irish Aid, Ireland’s development assistance programme, which is managed by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. It also includes contributions from other Government Departments, Ireland's share of the EU Development Cooperation Budget and eligible supports for refugees in their first year in Ireland.

In 2024, Ireland’s ODA totalled €2.35 billion, of which €771.3 was managed by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. For 2025, €810.3 million was allocated for the Irish Aid programme, and Budget 2026 has provided for a further increase of €30 million for next year.

The Government's Offcial Development Assistance Annual Report for 2024, which is available assets.ireland.ie/documents/Irish_Aid_Annual_Report_2024.pdfcontains further detail on Ireland’s ODA for 2024, highlighting the important work undertaken with our bilateral development assistance in our partner countries and other vulnerable locations worldwide. The report also includes annexes in tabular format. These provide detailed breakdowns of the distribution of aid, including the modalities and channels through which the funding was given, and the amounts allocated for different thematic priorities and to different partner organisations. They also provide provide levels of funding by country of destination, as reproduced below. The Annual Report for 2025 will be published next year, once details of all ODA have been verified and finalised.

Total bilateral assistance for the top 30 recipient countries of Ireland’s ODA in 2024 were as follows:

Ruth Coppinger (Dublin West, Solidarity)
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195. To ask the Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade the allocation of Ireland’s Official Development Assistance (ODA) in the past five years to programmes where gender equality is the principal objective; the proportion of this ODA which was directed specifically to women’s rights organisations during the same period; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [61092/25]

Neale Richmond (Dublin Rathdown, Fine Gael)
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Gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls is a key priority for Ireland’s foreign policy. A Better World, Ireland’s policy for international development, commits to the provision of direct funding to gender equality programmes as well as to ensuring the integration of the needs and interests of women and girls across all our interventions and partnerships.

Ireland has consistently been ranked by the OECD as among the OECD member countries with the highest share of Official Development Assistance with gender equality objectives. In addition, Ireland funds interventions directly dedicated to supporting women’s political and economic empowerment; prioritising girls’ access to quality education; addressing gender based violence; and improving women and girls’ access to sexual and reproductive health.

Programmes over the past five years in which gender equality is officially marked as the principal objective , as measured by the OECD Development Assistance Committee Gender Equality marker using the latest available validated OECD data from 2019 to 2023, amounted to €266 million. Of that, 17.3% on average has been directly allocated to women’s rights organisations each year.

There has been a sizeable overall increase in the level of our ODA provided for women's rights organisations over the last five years. This is in line with our commitments to increase engagement with and funding to women’s organisations and movements, and Ireland’s commitments in 2021 at the Generation Equality Forum to support feminist movements and leadership.

Ireland is committed to increasing our funding directly to women’s rights organisations to support their critical work in protecting and advancing the rights of women and girls in their local communities. In 2024, we launched two new funding partnerships to resource women-led organisations’ engagement on climate justice and to provide rapid response grants to women human rights defenders in crisis contexts.

Globally, crises continue to exact their highest toll on women and girls. Women and girls remain hardest hit by the effects of extreme poverty, climate change and conflict. Women and girls earn less, own fewer assets, and are under-represented in economic and political decision-making processes.

Ireland will continue to be to the fore in international efforts to drive gender equality and champion the rights of women and girls, in our statements and through increased investments in the implementation of our international development policy.