 I'm very glad to be back in the Institute and especially to be looking at cooperation with Japan in a very important area. A country, Japan, where I served for just two brief years in the embassy between 2000 and 2002 under Ambassador Poric Murphy with my colleague Franco Donohue, who's in the audience, who's still working on Irish and EU-Japan relations, and where some of the most dynamic leadership on Irish and European relations with Japan were, of course, provided as ever by Tom Hardyman, whom delighted to see here today. I'm very pleased that we can talk now about common challenges. We've looked at our own situation, we've looked at Japan's situation, but what we're going to look at now I think some of the most pressing common challenges that none of us can escape and none of us should try to escape. Japan has shown great leadership on global challenges and on development, where it is in volume terms the fifth largest provider of official development assistance globally. The European Union collectively provides just about 55 percent of total ODA, total official development assistance, and Ireland as current presidency of the European Union, but also as a central element of our foreign policy, regards development issues as central to foreign policy issues. And we have a tradition of providing assistance, but more importantly working in the area of development and learning all the time how the global challenges of development are more than just the provision of assistance. It's 40 years now since the Irish government established its aid program, and I think it's very important to note that it's not a coincidence that that coincides with our accession to the then EEC, the current European Union, because that is one of the, I suppose, obligations that you take on board when you join the European Union, which is to look at development at the provision of assistance to those in the world who are less well off than ourselves. So I think the European Union has, the heads of state and government have just completed their negotiations on the multi-annual financial framework, and while the Commission and NGOs and many others might have felt that the amount provided for development instruments was not as high as they would have hoped, we regard it as very important that it still represented an increase, no matter how slight, over the previous multi-annual financial framework, and that at a time when, as you know, budgets everywhere and EU budgets are under great pressure. Ireland and Japan are two very different countries, but we have taken on board a sense of the need to work on development issues, reflecting a sense of our responsibility, our moral responsibility, but also, crucially, I think, our interests, both nationally and globally. Japan's program is quite different from ours in some respects, but as we heard from you, Madison, earlier, Japan makes a major, major contribution in Africa through the TAICAD initiative, and we in our way in Africa are much smaller, but a prominent actor nonetheless. We cooperate with Japan in some still relatively small respects in Uganda and in Zambia, and I think there is great potential for Ireland and for Japan to cooperate more closely in Africa. So just very quickly to give you a sort of a broad oversight of what our development program looks like at the moment, the context where we are coming from as Presidency of the European Union and entering the debate on global development. We have a program that is completely untied. It is completely provided in the form of grants, no loans. We have now, at the moment, eight priority countries, our program countries, where we have commitment to long-term strategic assistance. Seven of those are in Africa, and one, very interestingly, is Vietnam in Asia, obviously. And there was, among the development community, for want of a better term, a little bit of unease and questioning about why we opened a program in Vietnam. But I think you only have to visit that country to see exactly why we opened, because what we're seeing there is a country which is moving through the different phases of development, moving into middle income status, or towards middle income status, and where you can see that we can see our own program moving from the provision of working with government for the provision of basic services through economic assistance, learning from our experiences. To be very honest, we had, in 2008, we were planning a program there, which in the slight hubris of the moment was to be known as the Celtic Tiger program, but that name disappeared pretty quickly. And it's where Vietnam had asked to learn from our experiences. Well, now they've been able to learn, and we've been able to share experiences for good and for ill in economic growth and in building up an economy. And, for instance, our Economic and Social Research Institute, our central bank, and other institutions work through the program in Japan. Also, our Enterprise Ireland trade promotion people work in Vietnam through the Irish aid program. So some of the barriers which were seen in the past in terms of development programs have been broken down, because we can see that development is not just about the provision of aid for basic services, it's about helping countries in their interest and in our interest to move through the phases of development, so that they can drive their own development. Once you've built up the social services, inevitably you're focusing much more on economic activity and on trade activities. So I think we will have a lot to learn in our African programs from our program in Vietnam. And I think it's fair to say that Vietnam is a country where you could look ahead and you could see the point at which our relationship with Vietnam would change away from the provision of aid towards much more exclusively a sort of a political cooperation and a mutually beneficial economic and trading relationship. That's to divert slightly, but I think it's just important to make those points. Nonetheless, over 80% of our assistance and our aid program goes to Africa, to sub-Saharan Africa. We provide about two-thirds in bilateral aid, one-third multilateral. We channel about 30% of it through non-governmental organizations. We work particularly closely with them, probably because of the experience over the years of Irish volunteers and missionaries in working in Africa and the very strong non-governmental sector that we have here. And our focus is very strongly on the fight against extreme poverty and on hunger. And we have made a very strong priority in recent years on focusing on the global hunger crisis, not just in terms of food price crisis, such as there was in 2008, but the chronic systemic crisis that exists, which leaves some 900 million people without an uptweet in our high technology, in our high technology world. A world which actually has the resources to feed the people. And the technology, there are very simple solutions available to end the hunger crisis, and yet we have to ask why they are not being adopted. We look at, in particular, in our program, smallholder farmers, building up smallholder farmers, which is one of the, in Africa, 80% of smallholder farmers are women. And it's one of the most effective ways of building broad income growth in Africa is to look at smallholder farmers, to look at new varieties of seeds and agricultural practices. And we had some very interesting discussions with Bill Gates on this just a few weeks ago when he visited Ireland. And also on the issue of nutrition, which hadn't been looked at much before in terms of development, it was seen as a non-development issue. And the scaling up nutrition movement in which Ireland has taken a leadership role and Japan has taken a leadership role, is actually looking at the impact you can make on societies and individuals by focusing on the first two years of a child's life. The first two years, if you intervene in the right way, in terms of providing nutritious food, you can make changes which then feed into education and society and economic growth. If you miss those two years, there's no way you can get them back. And you're dealing with a situation of child stunting and a complete missing out on the potential that those children have for their countries and for their societies and for their economies. Ireland's official development assistance now stands at about 0.5% of our GNP. Back in the 1970s, through a whole series of cumbersome negotiations, the international community arrived at the objective of spending 0.7% of GNP on development assistance. It's not the best measure of the contribution you make, especially in a changing world, but it's the measure we have and it's the measure against which we hold ourselves and others to account. And Ireland, as I say, having reached in 2008, 0.59% of GNP is now providing around 0.5%. Now, our experience in 2008 was a very good example of how it's not the best measure because we were racing in volume terms to increase, to chase after our very high GNP growth rates. When the government cut the program in 2009, 10 by about 30%, because our GNP fell so precipitously in those years, we still did not fall below 0.5% in our... So I don't think it wasn't... The 0.7% measure wasn't designed for economies that are booming and collapsing. It's designed for a much more, a much calmer way of running your economy. Nonetheless, we are, on the latest measure, the joint eighth highest provider of development assistance in per capita terms. So in areas where our reputation may have taken a dip over recent years, development hasn't been one of them. And that's why we regard it as essential. It's an argument we always make every year when ministers are fighting in budgets. The reputation of the country, we believe, is another reason why we should maintain a strong development policy. Therefore, we have been very pleased, actually, that this six months of our presidency is the particular six months that it is because this is a period where the world is looking to the framework for international development post-2015. We've been working under the Millennium Development Goals since 2000, which set very clear, tangible targets for the reduction of poverty. But the world is changing, and the MDGs come to their target date as 2015. And our presidency takes place at the start of the period of substantive discussion of the post-2015 international development framework. So in development, we have three broad areas for our priorities for our presidency. One is to get a strong EU-united position for the UN event, which will take place in September in the UN General Assembly week, 25th of September, probably, on what to do to reach, to maximize progress on the MDGs and to start looking at post-2015. Our second priority is to make greater progress on linking actions and funding on humanitarian relief, response to emergencies, and long-term development, so that we don't make the mistakes that have happened so often before, where you go into a crisis, feed the starving and leave only to find that there is a chronic structural crisis and famine returns, say, five or six years later. And thirdly, we want to, and we believe this is very important, not just for the effect on people's lives, but also to make the best use of funding that is available to break down the barriers that still exist in thematic approaches. You often find in development that your education people don't talk to your health people, who certainly don't talk to your climate people, and who don't talk to your water and sanitation people. And we are looking, in particular, at the links between hunger and nutrition and the effects of climate change. And we are organizing a major international conference in April, along with the Mary Robinson Foundation and the World Food Program, on those three themes and how the experience in the daily lives of communities in poor countries can feed into the post-2015 debate. Now, we held an informal meeting of development ministers in Dublin just two weeks ago, in Dublin Castle, and we brought to it in order to open the post-2015 debate. We brought in outside speakers, we brought in Mary Robinson, we brought in the deputy head of USAID, we brought in Aminah Muhammad, who is the special representative of the Secretary General on post-2015. In order to have that first substantive debate among EU ministers, we brought in three commissioners, Development, Humanitarian Affairs and Crucially Environment, and I'll come to the significance of that very shortly. And we looked for the first time really within the EU at substance rather than process. Everyone knows the European Union loves process, but you have to every now and then move a little beyond it to talk about substance. One of the criticisms of the MDGs is that they were handed down from on high and that there wasn't enough consultation. So we are now in a year of global consultations internationally, which is a great period to be in, but of course next year will be much more difficult as we have to make choices and look at how we focus our objectives and our goals. But it is true that the context, the global context is hugely different today from what it was in 2000. It is different nationally and it's different globally. But first of all just to set out very briefly what has been achieved by the generation of action and resources under the Millennium Development Goals. All too often development assistance is seen as a bit of a luxury or something you do in good times, the charity notion. We would argue that this isn't charity, it's interest, but it's also effective. People say all too often that development assistance is not effective. And yet since 2000 the percentage of people living on less than $1.25 a day has fallen from 43% to 22%. The target of having that percentage was reached in 2010. And yet still with population growth 1.3 billion people still live in extreme poverty, 900 million people face hunger. On the success side again between 1990 and 2010, 2 billion people gained access to safe drinking water. Primary school enrollment over the past 10 years has risen enormously and is now at 89% with moves towards gender parity. Although still far too many people are out of school and still you have to look at the issue of quality and you have to look at pushing that through to secondary and third level. The chances of children dying from disease has fallen considerably, HIV infections are falling in large part due to the retroviral drugs and huge investment across the board internationally. Global ODA over those 10 years rose by 70% to some 96 billion with the EU providing in 2011, 53 billion of that. But also crucially it's not just because of ODA and that's the really important point. Trade, global trade has increased hugely in the years from 2000 to 2009. Global exports rose 40% but exports from developing countries rose 80%. So you can see that the future actually does lie once you've once you plug the gaps and provide the basic services, trade is going to be trade and economic growth are the engine for development if we can get if we can get to that point. So there are new opportunities, new contexts, the MDGs have had successes, they missed certain areas, they didn't necessarily then perhaps looked more at quantity rather than quality. The issue of gender equality perhaps wasn't addressed as clearly and specifically as it might have been. Michelle Bachelet, the former president of Chile who's now the head of UN Women was in Ireland last week and she made the point that we all agreed it was politically correct not to have specific goals on gender equality but to mainstream them across everything except that that last political visibility and frankly it didn't advance gender equality to the extent that it should have. And we believe that the goals perhaps didn't look sufficiently at the drivers of hunger and especially on the on the issues of nutrition. And also in the changing context we have to take a different approach I mean the emerging there are new actors in development the private sector is more involved the emerging economies are more involved the the geography of poverty is shifting the majority of poor people as we heard at the conference last week that was held in Dublin will soon be living in cities and the majority of poor people will be living in in middle-income countries while at the same time sub-Saharan Africa in particular is an area that is lagging behind on all these measures. There is one particular measure that has been almost really difficult to shift and that's the issue of maternal mortality the the numbers of women dying in childbirth remains far too high and hasn't been reduced to the same extent of some of those other measures that that we have. So the questions of population growth and climate change do it's clear that they are posing the threat of undermining the progress that has been made. I mean one statistic that I saw is that not just in terms of long-term development but just in terms of the the just in terms of the resources that have to be devoted to natural disasters since 1992 some 750 billion has had to be devoted to coping with natural disasters and there have been 1.3 million deaths from natural disasters and these uh Japan is very well aware of this experience from its own experience and I know that Japan has played a major role in focusing attention on how to cope with with natural disasters. Likewise the processes that we've set up to deal with with with these challenges these global challenges are still too separate and for instance climate change discussions have taken place in one forum development discussions have taken place in another at a time of huge budgetary pressure we've agreed budgetary targets financing targets for development and in theory or in principle separate targets for climate change for overlapping activities actually and also with the knowledge that probably the developed countries are not going to meet those so we have a huge issue of of of bringing together our analysis of the challenges we face but also how we're going to generate generate resources to meet them even the arrangements that we put together for post 2015 are segmented the Rio conference on sustainable development last year decided to set up an open working group in the United Nations to try and craft sustainable development goals there's a high level panel co-chaired by David Cameron under the under the auspices of the UN Secretary-General looking at post 2015 and the millennium development goals and yet we are all agreed that these two processes are supposed to bring us to a state where we try to put together a single set of new goals not sustainable goals and development goals but one set of goals for the international community post 2015 ideally with universal application although it's easy to say that and there was great agreement on that at the informal development ministers meeting but then what exactly does that mean if every country is to be held account across a whole set of goals and also does that mean that the fight against extreme poverty gets relegated or does it mean that we don't generate the same action and resources as we did as we did before so I think as we see it at the moment we would hope that post 2015 we maintain and strengthen the international community's fight against extreme poverty we address the gaps that there are that there have been in the millennium development goals we perhaps set ourselves the goal which has been talked about of eliminating extreme poverty in the world in a generation which is achievable but we have to be realized that we can't do so without addressing issues of environmental sustainability and the limits of the planet where there and the resources of the planet where we live there's a fundamental link between global environmental sustainability and the eradication of poverty and and and the crafting of these objectives and the creation of international momentum behind addressing and fighting for these objectives is a huge challenge I think for the global community over the next two years and I just would conclude by saying that one thing I think is clear in setting goals and and is that to galvanize public and government support and that is absolutely crucial to galvanize public and government support to generate financial resources both from government from private sector and from innovative sources of financing the great phrase that is always used when we're not 100 sure where the the gap in financing is going to be is is going to come from and to ensure that we generate action and not just aspirations I think we can say at this stage that whatever goals we do agree will have to be very clear they'll have to be understandable to the public they'll have to be measurable statistically robust and politically feasible they'll have to deal with both quality and quantity and they will have to they will have to galvanize as I said the support not just of the development professionals not just of government but of the public so that's the challenge that we and the global community face it's it's it's it's often doesn't receive the attention that it deserves because the issues involved are perhaps so huge we often only come to these issues when there's a natural or man-made disaster but it is clear that given the resources of the planet given the way we're using them and given the persistence of poverty and the growth in our population that we actually cannot avoid these these these these issues and that they're vital foreign policy issues that need to be addressed now rather than when the disasters increase and in our in our presidency in the next few months we will be hoping to guide the European Union towards council conclusions for the September 2013 UN event we want to try and do so and this is this is an enormous challenge is to work with the European institutions to ensure that the environment and development foreign affairs ministers can adopt the same set of council conclusions if we can do that we will have achieved something that people thought was not possible now hopefully then you translate that great achievement into action that affects people's lives rather than just words on paper in Brussels and and then we would hope that also in June when the G8 meet in in Northern Ireland we're working with Prime Minister Cameron to ensure that there is somewhere in that process a sufficient focus on the issue of of hunger and poverty and and also then we will move to the UN process in in in September where the international community has to decide how to move from September 2013 to a major summit meeting perhaps in the first half of 2015 to adopt these goals and this new approach that I have been talking about and Ireland again there I'm glad to say has a role to play as our ambassador in the UN has been is the co-facilitator for that September 2013 event so we've a busy agenda I look forward to hearing from our Japanese colleague on on your approach but I know that there's a great commonality in our approaches to these global challenges and that perhaps out of this meeting today we will understand that commonality better and maybe even oh good and then and then also that maybe out of this we will we will be able to agree as some practical areas of further cooperation between Ireland and Japan so thank you very much for that