 I want to start actually firstly by thanking the Irish government, my good friend and colleague Brendan who runs the development cooperation effort here and also you sir at the Institute for giving me an opportunity to have this discussion with you. It's always great to come to Dublin, but particularly for me in my professional capacity now because over the 27 years I've been working in aid and development. One of the partners with which we've had the strongest relationship always especially at the country level has been Ireland and I think this is a really important moment as we shape together the future set of goals and the way we achieve goals on international development for both Ireland with your presidency coming forward on the EU and for the UK with the set of things we're involved with in shaping the future. So we've had a really fantastic day of talks today between the two governments on how we're going to work together in that period ahead. Ireland has consistently been for the last several years one of the most generous providers of development assistance and Irish aid has acquired an impressive reputation globally. My very good friend I'm going to ask Simon my colleague to to pass it up to me up to me my very good friend Ronan Murphy who used to do Brendan's job did a fantastic job in in telling the story of Irish aid. You'll see that my copy is extremely well-thumbed. We have learned a lot from the way you've developed your program. I'm not on commission for this but but if I were I would be advocating to you even more strongly if you haven't read this story. It's a story that should make every Irish citizen proud of the contribution you have played to global development and improving the state of the world and certainly in the UK where we've also tried to improve in recent years we think we've learned a lot from you. I think I know the government is in the process at the moment of finalizing a new white paper on aid and development. I can tell you that we in the UK will be studying very carefully the judgments and the decisions you reach and I think it's very timely for you to be going through that policy making process. But I also know that this issue of aid and development has been a matter of some controversy here over the recent period partly because of the economic challenge partly because of some of the cases you've had to deal with in the very recent past. Basically what I would like to do this afternoon is set out what I think the core case for support for international development is during a time of downturn and I would also like briefly to touch on how we deal with problems when they arise and solve the challenges we meet. We hear and I know you had a recent national conversation on aid. We hear that although there is still very high levels of public support for aid and development I saw one poll from here indicating that 80% of your citizens continue to support the priority you give to this. We also hear lots of criticisms and critiques and basically I would like to try and address the main critiques we hear in the UK respond to them and ask whether that line of attack and that set of responses resonates a tool with you here. The first line of attack on support for international development is that efforts to promote development are always doomed to failure. Actually that's an attack we used to hear a lot in the 70s and 80s but we don't hear nearly so often now. Because actually of course the last few decades have seen extraordinary progress on development goals of a sort that was it was impossible to contemplate three or four decades ago. In the mid 1990s as a lowly official in what was then the overseas development administration I was occasionally tasked by my then permanent secretary with writing briefing papers for him to take off to the OECD in Paris to discuss with his counterparts the state of global development and the future goals. And these great men because they were always unfortunately men in those days would go into this rather dark dungeon like basement in an unattractive 1960s concrete office block in Paris and have their discussions and those discussions ultimately led to the agreement of the international development targets which in turn were largely adopted in the United Nations as the millennium development goals. Now at the time the development of this set of targets was regarded as a rather racy proposition the idea that it would be possible to have global poverty to send every child to school to reduce by three quarters the number of women dying in childbirth to reduce by two thirds the number of children dying before their fifth birthday all by 2015. The idea of doing that in 1990 was regarded frankly as pie in the sky. And of course what we now know is that many of the targets have been achieved the halving global poverty target was achieved five years early. The target to do with providing access for more people to water and sanitation was achieved five years early. We have made enormous progress in health and education with plumeting infant mortality and much better access to education and these things have happened quite broadly across the world. This isn't just a story of China and East Asia since 2008 for the first time since records started to be kept. The proportion of people in Africa living below the extreme poverty line has been falling and it's a minority of people now in Africa who are in the most extreme poverty. So there has been a loss of progress. Of course not every target has been met and the naysayers like to pounce on the targets that were set and weren't met. But the analogy I like for this is the analogy of the fictitious high jumper who says that against the current world record of two meters 45 centimeters he is going to jump four meters. And in the end what he jumps is three meters 50. So is that an appalling failure because he didn't meet his target or is it a feat of exceptional brilliance. The second critique that we hear in the UK is that even if development has occurred aid had nothing to do with it. And again you know that was a critique that was quite widely heard and is still heard to some degree certainly in the UK. And you know the truth is reasonable people can disagree on the precise linkages between aid and economic growth and poverty reduction. Because it is the case that there are many determinants of whether an economy grows and whether poverty is reduced and aid in any environment is only a small part of the resource flow. As it happens I am trained as an economist and the best economists I know are reasonably satisfied that there is a positive causal relationship between aid and economic growth and poverty reduction. But it's hard to specify precisely and reasonable people can disagree about the precise determinants. But just think for a minute about a simpler test about the link between aid and the goals that aid is supposed to achieve. A decade ago the global level of development assistance was about $60 billion a year. Now it's about $130 billion a year. Over that period there has been exceptional progress on the sorts of things that aid is trying to do. So one of the reasons infant mortality has plummeted is that there is much better access to immunisation and all the other set of interventions that stop children dying before their fifth birthday. No one can deny the dramatic role aid has played in providing antiretrovirals to people whose lives have otherwise been cut dramatically short by HIV and AIDS. No one really can deny the role that AIDS has played in financing an opportunity to go to school for tens of millions of extra children across most of Africa. In fact of course even the skeptics have stopped trying to deny the contribution aid makes to those goals. What they try to do instead I think is identify a few of the failures of aid and leap to the conclusion that because some things have failed everything is similarly afflicted. And the truth is that the development community has opened itself up to that line of argument because we haven't in the past invested nearly enough in monitoring an evaluation or focused enough on the results we do achieve with the resources we have. We've started to get better at that in recent years generating more evidence on impact and the successes and in doing that we've achieved a kind of triple whammy. We have provided better evidence of our successes. That means we improve the quality of what we do so we learn lessons and we identify our failures better so we're slightly less likely to repeat them time after time and that investment in evidence and impact and results I think has been an important contributor to growing public support for aid and development as well. One of our leading newspapers in the UK set this out in an editorial last month. This is a quote. Global AIDS has wiped out smallpox. It's controlled HIV and AIDS in six million people. It's put 46 million more children into school in the past two decades and it will vaccinate one child every two seconds for the next five years. And when you tell people there is evidence to justify all that that's one of the most powerful things you can do to sustain public support. The third line of attack we then hear in the UK is that even if developments happened and AIDS contributed to it our problems now in Europe are so great that we can no longer be as generous as we used to be or as we promised we would be. Now this critique is a little bit above my pay grade so let me tell you what David Cameron's response to this critique is. The first thing he says is we made a promise. We have a moral responsibility to keep it. In the UK we're cutting public expenditure in almost every area very dramatically in most areas of domestic policy. But we do attach importance to the commitment we made to reach the 0.7 target which we will do next year and we've decided that we're not going to balance our books on the backs of the poorest people in the world. The second thing David Cameron says is that it's in the UK's national interest to promote progress elsewhere. Prosperity in the developing world will create new markets for us. Stability and the reduction of conflict which development brings with it reduces the threats to us. Climate change is only going to be tackled with the engagement of the developing world. It's in our interest to help them grow and develop in a cleaner greener way than we did. Similar considerations apply to concerns over asylum and migration, the threat of pandemics, the international war against drugs and to things like illicit financial flows. The UK, I guess like Ireland, is an open economy and an open society. We can't build a wall to protect ourselves from threats elsewhere so our only option is to help other countries tackle problems which if they're not tackled will affect us too. The fourth critique we hear is that aid organisations too often waste or misuse money and of course there's a big current case which you've been dealing with and which has the potential to draw us in as well in Uganda. I would like to say that I do admire very much the way the Irish government both here in Dublin and in Kampala where my colleagues work very closely with their Irish colleagues have been tackling this problem. I think you actually have led the dialogue with the government of Uganda on behalf of all of the donors and I know you've had a promise from the government of Uganda that you will be repaid and I'm 100% confident actually that Irish taxpayers will end up not losing a penny through this exercise. And I think that's really important where there is a fraud that the funds are recovered. That's a really fundamental part of the UK approach to dealing with fraud and corruption problems. I guess when you have a problem like this there is bound to be a temptation to ask well would it be better just to avoid working through governments where there's risky systems and just to work through intermediaries like NGOs or others instead. I am not sure that that is the best response. Ultimately every country has to try to develop its own systems and institutions and one of the best uses of aid resources is to help with the development of those institutions especially actually the institutions whose job it is to hold the wider system to account. So one of the things that we think is important in a country like Uganda is to provide support to the auditor general and maybe it's worth remembering that it was largely through the work of the auditor general that the current problems were exposed in Uganda and to try to build up their ability to do that kind of job in future and to try to support the reformers in the system who want the corruption problem to be dealt with. In other words how can we use problems of the sort that have been in Uganda to turn a crisis into an opportunity to accelerate the tackling of corruption and the improvement of the use of public resources. There are other examples given of the way in which aid can sometimes be wasted or misused. We have had a lot of concern in the UK recently over the effectiveness with which multilateral organisations the EU the UN the World Bank and the like use resources we provide through them. Actually I must say I share a lot of the frustration that many people have about multilateral expenditure but I would also say that the quality of that expenditure is improving. I think well well we are making big steps forward in improving our approach to securing value for money through multilateral organisations. I was going to say I think that but in fact that form of words I've just used big steps forward in improving value for money was one that the auditor general in the UK used about the UK's own approach to securing VFM in multilateral institutions. I had the important opportunity to exchange views with the UK's public accounts committee on this discussion on a Wednesday afternoon three or four weeks ago and they too their job like here no doubt is to find the problems with public expenditure but they too recognise that value for money through the multilateral system is improving. We've also in the UK had criticism recently about the way we use consultants and the idea that you know it's questionable whether private sector consultants should be brought into the development business and providing their services under the aid programme. Maybe they're too expensive or inefficient. I think there are elements of that critique I have some sympathy for but it is important to unpack it. Technical capability is one of the core deficits of most developing countries so of course they want to access professional services from places where there is more capability. And the truth is that there's a lot more purchasing of professional services that's not funded by aid programmes purchasing by developing countries from developed countries and the idea that European businesses should be excluded from competing in that global market seems to me to be a slightly silly idea. That said I think when we're purchasing consultant services for developing country governments from our budget we have to do two things really well. Firstly we have to make sure we're getting services that are valuable and I think often we do you know in Afghanistan we have finance work by consultants which has enabled that country to increase its revenue base from essentially nothing a decade ago to a billion dollars a year now. If Afghanistan wasn't raising that money in taxes they would be even more dependent on us than they already are so it's in our interest to provide those sorts of services. I was in to give another example Nigeria last month and there the head of the presidential commission on the power sector said to me that the value he had identified from DFID supported consultants trying to improve the power trade. Transmitted through the grid and its transmission and distribution was providing benefits to Nigerian consumers of more than a billion dollars a year. So I think there's lots of examples where technical assistance provided by consultants is high value. What we need to do though is make sure we buy those services at the cheapest possible price. And one of the things we've been saying to our own consulting companies is you need to do a better job than you've done in the past at getting the price right. And we're going to build the competitive market so we can drive the prices down and we're going to have more transparency of fee rates and contract costs so everybody can see what's being bought for what some of money. Let me let me draw this to a close. I've tried really just to say a few things. The first thing is development works. The second thing is that aid contributes to development. The third thing is that our interests are promoted by securing progress elsewhere. Aid management has improved even if there are steps we can still take to improve it further. To paraphrase the British newspaper I referred to earlier even in the most generous countries it's still the case that aid is less than one cent in the euro of national income. And actually most people in all our countries understand that. That editorial I quoted earlier went on to say there's public support for aid. A 2010 poll found that 55% of Britons think we should keep our promises to boost aid with just 27% saying we should cut in. And ordinary people vote with their wallets as well. We have annual events in the UK like comic relief and sport relief where the citizens of the country decide to vote with their own wallets on whether they want to contribute to these endeavours. And notwithstanding the economic crisis we've been through the best ever year for fundraising for comic relief was 2011. I attach a lot of importance as I said earlier to the collaboration we have with Ireland in shaping the future policy processes. We had a great event which the T-Shot came to 10 Downing Street on the 11th of August. The last day of the Olympics on food and hunger and resilience issues. David Cameron was really positive about that event. He got a lot of publicity. Perhaps it was the T-Shot and the Prime Minister who got the publicity. Perhaps it was also Mo Farrah who may have held to it. But it was a popular event. I know the Irish government are going through the presidency to have a similar event here in the spring of next year. And then we as part of our GA presidency will also be pushing forward this food nutrition set of issues. I think that's a great example of the way our two countries can collaborate. One of the great poets once said thinking about when is the right time to tackle problems. And this is what I feel about the development challenge we have. The poet said if not now when and if not us who. Thank you very much indeed.