 Good morning, distinguished guests. In welcoming Commissioner Crane Bull to Dublin, it gives us a good chance to convey again the deep appreciation of the Irish people for the work of UNRWA. We try to express this appreciation through our financial support, but also through our political support in the region and in the UN system. UNRWA are still dealing with the provision of essential services to five million registered Palestinian refugees in Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, the West Bank and Gaza. That's a seven-fold increase on when the agency was first founded. So it gives an idea of the scale of the work that they do. And they've managed to do that with incredible impartiality down through the years, and I think it's important that we pay homage to those UNRWA staff who've lost their lives in the course of their work and who've been injured, and pay homage to the agency for the impartiality and the professionalism of which it's done its job. The Commissioner has a busy day today. He's meeting the Minister for Foreign Affairs. He's going to meet the Minister of State, Kiran Kannon, later in the day. I told him earlier that he has to tread carefully. They've all had a very fraught political week. And indeed, later on in the day, he's going to go to Aras Anuthran to meet the President. We're really pleased that he's given us the time and his busy schedule to come and speak to us about the work of UNRWA. So, Commissioner, over to you. Thanks very much. In the meantime, Mike is going to sit down and listen, and I'm going to be chairing in case there's any rouse or anything. So you can go to the podium, but I just want to remind people to turn off the phones if they could, please, or certainly put them on silent because they do distract. And the speeches on the record and the questions and answers will be off the record or non-contributable. That's the normal rules here. For any of you who haven't come to a meeting here in the Institute, you're all very welcome. So, Pierre, over to you. Thank you so much, Nora Michael. Thank you for the invitation. Thanks for the opportunity and delighted to be in Ireland. It's a long due visit to simply also come and say thank you for the support, thank you for the trust. It means a great deal to feel the strong links that exist between Ireland and UNRWA, and, of course, also a lot of appreciation and recognition for the important role that Ireland played last year in a very important process in New York that led to the New York Declaration on Refugees and Migrants, something that was very significant at the last General Assembly and has carried, of course, a lot of work into this year and into next year. So we very much look forward to continuing to work actively with Ireland on all these issues. Thanks again for the opportunity. It's really a moment just to share a few thoughts with you on both the situation in the Middle East, on the situation of Palestine refugees themselves, a few observations on UNRWA's work and the challenges that we face. And I think I wanted to start with one of the key observations about the situation currently in the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip. When I think about the situation there, one of the biggest worries right now is the total absence of a horizon for Palestine refugees, for Palestinians in general, but for Palestine refugees in particular, and even if I want to be more specific, particularly for young Palestinians and young Palestine refugees. If you think of it in the following terms, every young Palestinian below the age of 24 was born after the Oslo peace agreement. And these are young people who are told by their own leadership, but certainly very actively by the international community, that if they embraced moderation, if they believed in political processes, if they supported diplomacy, there would be a solution at the end of the road. And of course, 24 years on, they've seen that there has been no solution, that their horizon is defined and their daily lives defined in every aspect possible by the existence and the realities of occupation, of blockade, conflict and violence, by a lack of opportunity in personal terms, because the horizon is not only closed in political terms because there is no identifiable political process underway that they can relate to, it's also closed in personal terms in the sense of lack of opportunity, lack of prospects to develop oneself beyond a certain number of years of education received. Now, why is it that we are in a situation like this, with this closed political horizon? I will come back to some of the consequences and the realities that people experience on the ground in these different areas in a few minutes. But I did want to point to the fact that I'm struck, and this is also related to the many years that I've worked in conflict zones before working with UNRWA, with the International Committee of the Red Cross. There's a real feeling that over the last two decades or so, if we want to just simplify it now to the extreme, at least since the 9-11 attacks and events, that the international community has approached conflicts, in particular in the Middle East, but not exclusively, from two particular angles. It has pursued two particular strategies and has applied two particular methods to addressing conflict environments, one being military strategies. In other words, intervene militarily in these contexts. We've seen it in Afghanistan. We clearly saw it in Iraq and Libya, and now also in Syria, of course. And the point about this is that these military strategies really have shown very little evidence of bringing stability to the context in which they have taken place. It really isn't very strong material that one can use to point to any positive impact that these interventions may have had in the context where they took place. And yet, this is the method that is still being used very frequently, and the temptation seems to be, at times, almost irresistible to continue to pursue that path. The other strategy that has been applied is one that I should be advocating for, and I do with passion, which is the humanitarian response. So, of course, the international community has supported humanitarian action in many environments, and I think that's very necessary in times of crisis, but of course it's also very clear that humanitarian action has never led to addressing the root causes of any of the situations in which humanitarian action takes place. The whole idea of humanitarian action being to address consequences of conflict but not to address the fundamentals in political terms. And so what we have is we have the international community focusing on two strategies that don't contribute to the longer-term solution. And so we cannot be surprised that we are dealing, in a very large sense, with conflicts that tend to be characterized not only by their fragmentation, but also by their very long duration. Think of most of the conflicts that come to your mind. Actually, the paradox being that the Syrian conflict is one of the youngest conflicts. It's one of the shortest that you can think of when you list most of the big armed conflicts in the world still today. Think of Afghanistan, Somalia, Congo, not to mention Israel-Palestine. Until recently, one would have added Colombia. And all these contexts, you know, they are being managed somehow and we have seen, and you can go to endless workshops where people will focus on conflict management. Focus on conflict management and you get 70 years of UNRWA. Focus on conflict resolution and you might actually open the path for something different for people. And this is, I think, in some of the paradigms that are being used by the international community, a rethink is absolutely necessary. I'm encouraged personally to see the Secretary-General focus so much on conflict prevention and on focusing on renewed emphasis and sort of a surge in mediation and conflict resolution. That is, I think, very much necessary. Because the thing is if, now just come to think of it in these terms, in the Middle East of today, you have young people growing up who think that if you embrace moderation, diplomacy, and politics, you don't have a solution. And in today's very unstable Middle East, that's a very poor message to give young people. That politics actually does not work. Diplomacy does not lead to progress in your situation. That is a very bad message to convey to young people growing up today in the Middle East. So there needs to be a re-engagement. We need to recreate a much more identifiable, robust set of approaches in conflict resolution and recreating horizons. Right now, there's nothing more important in the Middle East and there's nothing more important in the dynamics between Israel and Palestine. And of course, when we'll always run into a lot of skeptical attitudes, I meet those and encounter them all the time. People saying, you know, on the one hand, reconfirming their sort of pledging renewed allegiance to the two-state solution, but then not necessarily doing actively something about it. So I can be in favor of the two-state solution, but unless I actually do something to push this forward, there won't necessarily be specific results associated with it. So this first theme, for me, very important is the lack of a political horizon being a very big liability for everyone in this region. And it's particularly important to think about it, because it then has many very specific consequences for people. Because one thing is to look at the political paradigms and others, how does that play out for people? Because there's another topic and theme that you hear about a lot when you think about the situation of Palestinians and Israelis. It is the status quo. You heard it after the Gaza conflict. Let us not allow the situation to return to the preexisting status quo. Status quo is something where you think things are essentially stable and the parameters are known. But for the people in the region, nothing is stable, because you have lived now for 50 years under occupation. There is conflict between Israel and Palestinians. Your lives are being defined by all these parameters. So nothing is stable in human terms. Think of Gaza, for example. What you currently have is, since the war in 2014, you have a cumulative impact on the community that is creating what our health colleagues call a continuously expanding and worsening psychosocial epidemic. And what it means is that you have people who have, because they have no prospect in life, because there is no future on the horizon, because young people grow up and have gone through three wars in their young lives. And today, of the 270,000 students that UNRWA has in Gaza alone, over 90% have never left the Gaza Strip in their lives. That's the reality that they deal with. And so suicide rates are on the increase. 65% of young people will never find a job. So they go through education and come out well-trained, well-equipped for life, well-equipped to contribute, but they will never find a job in that context. And of course, in the West Bank, it is defined by settlement expansion, by lack of freedom of movement, and these different parameters. So it has very measurable and identifiable human consequences. So there is nothing static. It's a worsening human development. And that is something that, again, I cannot reconcile anything that I see in Gaza, for example, with the security or dignity of anyone in the region, whether Israelis, Palestinians, Egyptians, or others. So those matters have to be tackled. And of course, one of the challenges that we confront in the region is that currently levels of attention are strongly directed to Syria, to Yemen, to Iraq, to Libya, now, of course, also to other places in the world, Myanmar and Bangladesh. And for very good reasons, so it's not a complaint. It's just a factual observation that the levels of attention have shifted to other regions. And this is something that, of course, may be another impediment or something of a barrier in attaining a solution between Israelis and Palestinians. Now, Palestine refugees, of course, don't live only, and that was mentioned earlier in the West Bank or in Gaza. They also live in Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon. And to talk briefly about the situation, also, of Palestine refugees in the Syrian context, there were 560,000 Palestine refugees in Syria before the war. About 120,000 have fled the country, alongside many Syrians, obviously. And they find themselves now for about 30,000 of them in Lebanon, 16,000, 17,000 in Jordan, several thousand in Turkey and in Egypt. But then also, a number have or did join the flow of Syrians who came out in 2015 and made their way to Europe. So you had about 50,000, that's our assumption, Palestine refugees from Syria who ended up in Europe. When you go to Syria, as I do on a regular basis, the Palestinians, I think what you would find is, of course, that they have been exposed to the same levels of violence and tragedy as millions of Syrians. But there is one difference for Palestinians is that you will find that it's a renewed trauma. It's another generation of Palestinians that have endured now the trauma of displacement, loss of home, loss of livelihood, of friends, relatives, neighbors. And so for the younger generation, who had heard the stories of 1948, who had heard the stories of 1967, they now understand what it's all about and what wars do to communities, how they tear them apart, how they postpone the possibility of renewed dignity, self-reliance, and other parameters of that nature. So UNRWA, in the middle of all this, was tasked in 1949, and it was indeed, as we discussed earlier initially, of course, considered as a temporary solution after 700,000 Palestinians were driven from or fled their homes and then mandated Palestine and went into what are now Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, the West Bank, and Gaza, and they found themselves, of course, waiting for a solution. The idea was the very young United Nations established a specific agency, UNRWA, to assist them and to provide a measure of relief while waiting for a solution. That expanded then, of course, over time into something that has become an agency that delivers quasi-state-like services. So for example, we run an education system that in the United States would be the third largest after that of New York and Los Angeles, for example. So we have 500,000 students, boys and girls, in our schools, and these are 700 schools across the Middle East. So it's not only what you would come to think of in terms of an aid agency that drives into a village, distributes food, and then goes on. We are in a certain sense part of the institutional landscape of the Middle East. With 700 schools, we employ 22,000 education staff. These are school principals, teachers, education specialists, and they are all, very few exceptions, Palestine refugees themselves. So they serve their own community, they're engaged in it, and this has, of course, been a huge contribution to regional development. Over two million Palestinians have graduated from UNRWA schools since the 1950s, so you see them and find them around the world, of course, very much in the region as well. They have developed skills. And I think one of the key questions that I'm often confronted with is, is UNRWA part of the problem, in a way, because you have somehow created dependency among this community, and that is a risk for every humanitarian organization. There is a part of the work that risks creating dependency by distributing food year in, year out. But actually, when you invest in education, you're doing something else. And that was my biggest discovery coming from the International Committee of the Red Cross. When I joined UNRWA was the education part of the work, because when you invest in education, you don't look at the person, and particularly as the young boy, the young girl, from the perspective of a victim. You look at the person as an actor of his or her own destiny, with her own capacities and skills, and one of the students, a 16-year-old Palestine refugee girl from Jordan that accompanied me to the General Assembly in September at a half, expressed it in very beautiful terms. She says, we are victims of an historic injustice. We know it. We are refugees. We know it. But we don't want the world to see us only as that. We want the world to recognize us for our individual skills, our capacities, our motivation, our determination to contribute. And so in a sense, while these young people are not yet full citizens of a state of their own, nobody can deny them the fact of being citizens of the world and wanting to be part of and engage in. And I think to underestimate the huge contribution that UNRWA has made, and particularly also Palestinians in UNRWA have made to the education, keeping opportunities alive and further developing the skills and capabilities of young people in this very unstable Middle East is a huge contribution to personal dignity, regional stability, and I think that's something that needs to be and thankfully is also deeply recognized and supported. Now, we, of course, also do a lot of other work in primary health care and microfinance and camp improvement and others. And of course, while we do that, we run to quite a number of challenges. One is certainly a challenge of access and security of staff. And it was kindly mentioned. Thank you for that because it's true that we lost 11 colleagues during the 50-day war in Gaza in 2014. We have lost now over 20 colleagues in Syria since the beginning of the war and have 25 who are missing. That is a very, very high price for any humanitarian organization. And when I went to Aleppo earlier this year, and really the main reason to go to Aleppo was to thank the 239 Palestinian colleagues who kept all of our installations open throughout the war, unbelievable. And the price that is being paid for that type of risk is also something that I think no one should take for granted, that colleagues are able and willing and ready to stand on those difficult front lines at this very challenging time in the history of the Middle East. So all of these things are very important to us. And I wanted to give you a sense of the work that is being done. The challenges, of course, expand beyond security. They also go into issues related to the very intense polarization in the region. Of course, when you deal with any topic that relates to Israel and Palestine, you are on a highly emotional front line. You are an environment that's deeply polarized where anything that you say or don't say, do or don't do is scrutinized, analyzed, criticized, sometimes complemented. Also, that's encouraging. But it is a very tough environment to work in. It's also a very rewarding one for a whole range of reasons we can come back to during the discussion as well. So nobody, in that sense, is complaining. We face immense funding challenges, partly because of the issues we deal with, partly because the world has so many other crises also to focus on. So I think it's a necessity for us also to constantly think about how do we speak about an issue that is now 70 years old? How do you continue to interest the world in the human dimensions of a crisis that began in 1948? It's really, it is a challenge. And I'm deeply convinced that one way of doing that is to focus on the human dimensions to have, for example, our students being able also to convey what it means for them, what are their expectations. And here, of course, one of the hopes for them is to be able to branch from being a student in UNRWA schools and to obtaining possibilities for further education, high school scholarships, professional training, and others. This is how they hope to be able to preserve the opportunities for their own future. And so to conclude, just to share with you one final thought and story, the community of Palestine refugees is an incredibly fragmented one because of the dynamics of conflict occupation in the region. And two years ago, I visited one of our schools in Calculia in the West Bank. And I asked students whether they were often in contact with fellow students in the Gaza Strip, for example, or in Jordan and Lebanon and Syria. And of course, the answer was never. And that was a very clear indication that with all the work that we had done in education, something was missing, that we were not creating links between these students to stay in contact, to share experiences, to think about joint initiatives in arts, science, literature, or whatever else. And we created an institution that was based on something that came out of our human rights curriculum, which are student parliaments. They had been built up in the different schools where students are elected to represent and advocate for the interests and the rights of their fellow students with the teachers and school principals. But we now created, and it met last week for the first time ever, a central student parliament for all students in New York. And 22 members were elected from Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, the West Bank, and Gaza, and have now come together to start to build, first of all, a sense of a collective set of initiatives that they may bring forward and influence also the way in which UNRWA thinks about education when we design schools, for example. Do we design them well? When we think about the role of youth in the communities, are we supportive enough, and what other initiatives they may take? Two of these students yesterday addressed the League of Arab States meeting in Cairo. And we think that it's very important that their voices be heard in different ways, because you can read, and UNRWA, like most other agencies, has a phenomenal capacity of producing long reports, which then, of course, people with very specialized interests would be interested in reading, but mostly to be able to connect and communicate with the human dimension of it, our students with the refugees themselves, and to hear what this means for them is the most important part of our work, and that's a part of our work we are incredibly proud of. And very nice to share that with you. Thank you so much for the opportunity.