 Thank you, Chair, distinguished panelists, distinguished guests. I'm so delighted to be here, and I want to thank very much the Institute for International and European Affairs for inviting me to speak here. I must first introduce myself by telling you about that I am proud of my Irish roots, but like you, I was educated by the very best Irish educators, that I went through the hands of Irish women from the age of five until the last day I left university. I was always taught by Irish nuns, so names like Paddy Maguire, Teresa O'Connor, Mary O'Reilly, these are the names of the people who taught me, so I'm proud to be here and delighted to be speaking with you. I joined Oxfam 18 months ago. I have been looking since then for an opportunity to come to Dublin and was particularly honored to be invited at this prestigious institute to speak on the topic of inequality. I grew up in Uganda, I'm Ugandan in a little town. When I was growing up, my parents were teachers. We didn't have much, but my parents were teachers, so we were the better of people in the village. I had a pair of shoes, one, every year my mother got me one pair of shoes. I walked to school, I had this pair of shoes, but my best friends didn't have shoes, they walked barefoot. I didn't understand why, I still don't. I used to hide my shoes in my school bag just to be like everybody else, but I couldn't understand why I was better off than the rest of the people in my village. That question continues to bother me, and for many at Oxfam, we come together because of our strong sense of social justice, of wanting everyone to have a good living. Oxfam International is a confederation of 17 member organizations. We have a center which is owned by all the members, and that is the center which I have the honor to lead as executive director. Oxfam Ireland was a founding member of that international confederation, and it plays a key leadership role in shaping the future plans of our organization, and in delivering our vision. I'm particularly delighted to be here with Jim Clark and my colleague who is the head of Oxfam, Ireland, and who leads in our confederation on the post-2015 development agenda that you have just been talking about, and on other issues that we work on with the OECD, and in other areas. I'm also delighted to be with the chair of Oxfam, Ireland, Etta Campbell, who's here with us. So together we are part of a global movement for change. We work to empower people to create a future that is secure, just and free of poverty. We live in a complex world. I'll give you an example from Africa. On April 6th this year, Nigeria suddenly became Africa's largest economy. Using new data, Nigeria recalculated its GDP, and overnight it shot up by 90 percent, leapfrogging the previous leader, South Africa. You can't understand this. There's some competition there in our continent. So Nigeria became the richest country in Africa. The average Nigerians' annual income almost doubled at the stroke of a pen. Nigeria's movie industry alone became worth more than $7 billion a year. Its oil industry 10 times that. Yet despite these magical recalculations, and despite the real and rapid economic growth in recent years, what didn't change was the fact that most of the 170 million people in Nigeria still live on less than $1 a day. And the number of people in poverty has actually been increasing. Unemployment in that country is huge. The lack of development is generating violence and social instability in the north. I'll show you here about Boko Haram and in the Delta region. So globally, we should recognize that poverty, the geography of poverty, is changing. Most poor people no longer live in poor countries. They live in countries like Nigeria that are now middle income, like China, like India. These are countries that have achieved or are achieving high rates of economic growth, have competent and functioning governments and budgeting middle classes. Yet poverty persists. To complicate this picture further, geopolitical and economic power is shifting too. And shifting very fast. The United States and Europe do not now hold all the cards. Did you follow the Pope's message, the European Parliament? Countries are constantly recalculating their interests and their means to defend them politically, economically, socially, and even militarily. Climate change is changing the picture too. It's hitting the poorest, first and worst. In the more than 90 countries where we work, Oxfam, we are witnessing homes leveled, businesses destroyed, livelihoods ruined by climate-related disasters. The carbon footprint of the world's one billion poorest people, the one billion poorest people, is just 3% of the global total, 3%. Yet people living in developing countries are 20 times more likely to be affected by climate change compared to those in the industrialized world. These new realities present us in the development community with new challenges. Just as patterns of poverty are shifting, so too must our responses. The old model of North to South giving is no longer fit for purpose. It's not enough. I'll talk to you today about responses to poverty, which we as an international community need to rally behind. And I'll focus on two points. One is closing the gap between richest and poorest, tackling inequality, and two, supporting citizens to hold their governments to account. Inequality. Let me first talk about the relationship between poverty and inequality, because often we are asked if we are just not simply very jealous people at Oxfam, why are we going on about inequality and the rich and the poor? Why don't we concentrate on fighting poverty? So we have always to explain the link between poverty and inequality. Earlier this year, we made headlines. You have heard our statistic that's just been mentioned when we reported that 85 people, the richest 85 owned as much wealth as the bottom half, 3.5 billion people. Staggering, staggering. Since then actually Forbes has recalculated and said that it's not 85, it's come down is 64. So soon they won't be fitting in a double-decker bus, like I said in Davos, soon they'll fit in a little car. The collective wealth of this tiny few has increased by $668 million per day between 2013 and 2014. That's almost half a million dollars every minute, earning, each of them earning half a million dollars every minute. When I say this, I sound like I'm jealous of them, but I can't understand what they do. I'd like to try it too. From Ghana to Germany, Italy to Indonesia, the gap between rich and poor is widening. Clearly, economic inequality is out of control. We're not talking about the usual amounts of inequality that happen because people are not the same, don't work the same, are not motivated the same way. We're talking about extreme inequality. For a long time, reluctance to act on inequality was driven by the myth that there was a trade-off between growth and reducing inequality. It was thought the medicine would kill the patient, that redistribution would hamper growth. But in the last year, the question of inequality has shot up on the global agenda. The need to tackle growing and extreme economic inequality is being viewed as an imperative, not just for moral reasons that outrageous people of Voxfam, not just for social stability, but because it's bad economics. President Obama has made narrowing the income gap a priority for his administration. The World Economic Forum has identified economic inequality as a major risk to human progress. The World Bank has a new focus on what it calls shared prosperity. And this month, I've just come back from the G20 summit in Brisbane, Australia. Contrary to all expectations, the leaders there made a commitment to inclusive growth and to tackling inequality. We were surprised. The IMF too has changed its tune. Of late, the IMF managing director, Christine Lagarde, and I meet on panels and agree about inequality. And she's often quoting the Voxfam quote on the 85 People statistic. So, in fact, even God agrees, His Holiness the Pope has announced that inequality is the root of social evil. So these are total consensus. Many developing countries have achieved high rates of growth in the last decade. But the more unequal a country is, the less the benefits of growth tend to flow to the bottom of the pyramid. In theory, the wealthiest are supposed to reinvest their income into productive enterprises and to drive growth. But in practice, the wealthiest seek investment opportunities out of their countries, they hide their assets, and they use tax haven bank accounts. This does not come back to build growth and incomes for everybody. Voxfam estimates that at least 18.5 trillion dollars, almost 15 trillion euros, is hidden away in tax havens by wealthy individuals, not companies, individuals, depriving governments of 156 billion in tax revenue. The missing money is twice the amount required for every person to live above 1.25 dollars a day, the poverty threshold. At Voxfam, we are focusing more now on the worsening gap between the rich at the top and the billion at the bottom. We're doing this because we know that we cannot achieve our mission to end poverty and injustice without taking on inequality. Our new research has found that millions more people could be lifted out of poverty if income inequality were reduced. Take India, for example. If the country were to stop inequality rising, hold it where it is now and so really high, they could lift 90 more people, 90, 90 more people out of poverty by 2019 in five years time. 90 more Indians could be lifted out of poverty if they just stabilized the inequality gap. If African countries continue on their current trajectories, growth trajectories, with no change in the income inequality levels, then the continent will not end extreme poverty until 2075, 61 years away. So forget about the World Bank's target of ending extreme poverty by 2030. That won't happen if the continent continues growing, achieving growth that is widening the inequality gap. So in a world of finite resources, we cannot lift the poorest out of poverty unless the pie grows, unless the pie is better shared. Poverty and inequality are linked, they need to be tackled together. But this is not just about who has more money in their pockets. This is also about social justice. The good news is inequality is not inevitable. It's a result of political choices and solutions exist. My colleague Jim Clarken will speak to some of Oxfam's proposed ways forward on tackling inequality. A question I will ask now is, who decides how much inequality is too much inequality? Who decides? For us at Oxfam, the answer is simple. It's ordinary people. The extreme concentration of wealth that we see in the world today tears apart the social fabric. Ordinary people have taken to the streets to say the gap between rich and poor is too big. We've seen this across the globe. Ordinary citizens saying enough from America to China, people have been rising. This brings me to my second point on governance and accountability. The majority of the hundreds of thousands who have taken to the streets since 2008 from Chile to Iceland have been frustrated by the divide between the richest and the rest, a lack of services and the fact that governments listen to elites and not to their people. The increasing concentration of wealth in the hands of very few has deepened both ecological and economic crisis, which in turn has led to an escalation of violence in every corner of our planet. Inequality is a lens through which we can see the misuse of power and its implications for global security and development. You might not have followed this story in a country called Burkina Faso in Africa, a very poor country. The president who'd been a president for 27 years was seeking to change the constitution so that he could stay for more years in power. He had already made a deal with parliamentarians who also were hoping to change the constitution, to stay also longer in parliament. Young people came and burnt down the parliament before the parliamentarians could make change the constitution, burnt down the parliament. That's what we mean that people are rising because they find that the political process has also been hijacked by those who are by political elites. So inequality is all about who does and doesn't get access to political power, who gets the good jobs, who gets justice, who is secure, who gets food and land, health and education, and to life opportunities. The lowest tax rates, the opportunities to influence, the best education, the best healthcare are claimed by the rich and by their children. This is a cascade of privilege that continues down generations. So when wealth is concentrated in an extreme way, there's a real threat to democracy. When wealth shapes government policymaking, the rules bend to favor the rich. So as a development community, how do we support the efforts of citizens to reclaim their democracies, to hold their governments to account, to have a voice, to put in place health and education systems that will level the playing field for all people? Very briefly, I will say that aid is useful and aid can help a country, should help a country to graduate from aid. Assistance that supports citizens and civil society to raise their voice and which helps governments to mobilize the resources they need to provide the social services their citizens need, whether by supporting governments to collect taxes from corporations who operate in their countries or to negotiate fair deals with oil and gas companies, this is what's needed from foreign assistance. So the way forward, many of the poorest countries have made progress in the struggle against poverty, yes, progress that I've seen with my own eyes. I told you how I walked to school with my friends and lived in a house with no running water, no power. And here I am, I see a country that's changing, my country Uganda. Oaks Farm has spent 70 years working to fight poverty and injustice in more than 90 countries. From Kerry to Kigali, from Derry to Dar es Salaam, I'm proud to say that Oaks Farm's collective efforts, working with partners, is making a real difference to thousands of people every day. We have succeeded in making change as our long-term development work empowers poor people to improve their lives. Meanwhile, we also save people through responding to emergencies, but this progress, as I've said, is threatened by rising inequality. That is why, along with our development work, our response to emergencies, we have been campaigning now to tackle global inequality. The agenda to end poverty must be matched by an agenda to end extreme and growing inequality. Both are historic challenges and neither will be overcome in isolation. For our people, climbing a few steps up the economic ladder can be the difference between sickness and death and health, life and death. But having an unobstructed path to the top, a chance to hope and dream is the difference between surviving and living. Please join us, Oaks Farm, in fighting for a fairer, more just world in a struggle to end extreme inequality. Thank you very much.