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Committee

I am interested that the OHCHR has come to this country to evaluate us. It is important to see how we are doing. We always think we are doing well in this country in terms of human rights and poverty. My colleague, Deputy O’Hanlon, pointed out that we benchmark ourselves in terms of poverty according to the relative income in the country. From what the officials of the OHCHR have seen to date - I accept they have more to see - how do we relate to countries in the same income bracket in terms of relative poverty and access to services?

Our overseas development programme is very much targeted. The Swiss used to have 49 or 50 countries to which they donated money. They started rowing back from that on the basis that such a shotgun approach was not very effective. They were giving a bit to everyone but not being very effective in any one place. They began to adopt the Irish model of taking nine or ten countries and targeting specific areas such as education or health. One cannot tackle agriculture, industry and everything else at the same time. Is that what other countries should do in terms of tackling poverty? Should they all become an expert in one particular field and then target aid towards certain countries? The countries we target are in the bottom 20 countries in terms of the UN index on poverty and deprivation. Is that the OHCHR’s sense of how countries should proceed?