I thank the Chairman. The Secretary General, Mr. Joe Hackett, has asked me to convey his apologies for not being able to attend today due to illness. I know he would want to have been here to answer the committee's questions in his role as the Department’s Accounting Officer.
I thank the Chairman for inviting us to the committee to discuss the 2020 appropriation accounts for the Department of Foreign Affairs - Votes 27 and 28. We have provided the committee a summary of the main areas of departmental expenditure and receipts in 2020.
The programme structure for Vote 28 corresponds with the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade strategy statement 2017-2020, which set out the Department’s work in five main areas: serving Irish citizens; actively engaging in the European Union; promoting Ireland’s values internationally; advancing Ireland’s prosperity; and strengthening Ireland’s influence.
Vote 27 is structured around a single expenditure programme, namely, Ireland’s work on development and humanitarian assistance, also known as Irish Aid.
The year under review, 2020, was a hugely challenging one for the public service. For our Department, it meant re-prioritising and repurposing a number of our programmes to address unprecedented domestic and international challenges posed by the Covid-19 pandemic, while ensuring that we did not let our focus slip from key priorities such as Northern Ireland, Brexit, our overseas development programme and winning Ireland’s seat on the UN Security Council.
Our largest citizen service, the passport service, was required to significantly adapt its service in compliance with Government public health guidance. The closure of the public offices during the different phases of the Government’s response to Covid-19, which was essential from a public health perspective, coupled with the fall in demand for passports due to the travel restrictions, required us to alter our service provision. This, combined with the pent-up demand for passports not renewed in 2020 and 2021, means we are still working through the effects of Covid-19 restrictions. I know this is an issue of particular concern to the committee and I look forward to answering members' questions hand outlining the steps the Department has taken to address these issues to ensure the efficiency the public expects from the passport service is delivered.
During this year, we have made intensive efforts to significantly improve passport application processing times. By international standards, Ireland continues to produce one of the most highly regarded products in the world. With over 90% of applications now submitted online through a very user-friendly system, turnaround times for renewals in particular are efficient and very competitive when compared internationally. So far this year, we have produced almost 700,000 passports, by far the largest number ever produced for a six-month period. However, I acknowledge that our customer service response to queries to our call centre has fallen short of the service we want to provide. This is not acceptable for our customers and I apologise. I assure the committee that we are focusing on addressing this challenge as a matter of priority, including through the temporary recruitment of call centre staff previously engaged by the HSE.
As part of the Department’s Covid-19 response, we also sought to support other Departments with their emergency response. In addition to the redeployment of staff within the Department to meet the challenges we faced, 163 staff members from the Passport Office were redeployed to the Department of Social Protection to assist with the processing of the pandemic unemployment payments, PUP, and to the HSE to assist with contact tracing.
While the demand for passports fell away during the Covid-19 pandemic, the demand for our emergency consular services increased to a level the Department had never previously experienced. To ensure an effective consular response to this global crisis, our consular directorate was restructured and substantially reinforced at an early stage. Demonstrating impressive solidarity across the Department, 150 additional colleagues, both at headquarters and overseas, received special consular training, with up to 80 officers temporarily redeployed to the reinforced Covid-19 consular response team at any one time. With this reinforced consular team, we provided assistance, support and advice to more than 9,000 Irish citizens who were stranded overseas. We directly chartered aircraft to facilitate three large-scale repatriations from Peru, India and Nigeria and worked with airlines to facilitate dedicated repatriation flights from Australia and the UK. We also worked closely with our European and other partners to ensure that Irish citizens could avail of repatriation flights arranged by other countries and, through our mission network, assisted Irish citizens to secure seats on commercial flights.
We also recognised at an early stage the potential negative impact of the pandemic on our diaspora communities. To mitigate this impact, a dedicated Covid-19 response fund for Irish communities abroad was established, funded through our emigrant support programme and focused on support for the elderly and newly vulnerable; mitigating the impact of social isolation; responding to individual cases of exceptional hardship; providing mental health supports and bereavement counselling; and moving more services online.
I will now give a brief overview of some of our other priorities in the Department during 2020. As the committee will be aware, in 2020 we entered the final phase of the process that ultimately saw Ireland take a seat on the UN Security Council. We are now in the second half of our two-year term on the Security Council. Since taking up our seat last year, we have been active across the full council agenda, bringing our principled and independent perspective to a range of key issues, in line with the core principles for our term, namely, building peace, strengthening conflict prevention and ensuring accountability. We have achieved some considerable successes despite the very challenging council dynamics and the changes in the working environment due to Covid-19.
From a development co-operation perspective, the year was defined by the Covid-19 pandemic, with the United Nations system at the heart of an integrated and urgent global response. The allocation of almost €550 million to Vote 27 enabled the Department, through the Irish Aid programme, to move quickly, with €150 million allocated over the course of the year in support of that global response. This included quadrupling Irish funding to the World Health Organization, WHO, to €16 million and investing in the COVAX facility to ensure vaccine access. This leveraged Irish Aid’s work over many years building public health system capacity in developing countries, which enabled targeted engagements with health ministries, including supply of personal protective equipment, PPE, infection control measures and establishing ICU capabilities.
Recognising that this was more than a health crisis, Irish Aid funding enabled people to cope with the wider impacts of the pandemic through enabling social protection systems, allowing children to continue their education and a focus on reducing gender-based violence. In addition, our focus on humanitarian assistance to those most vulnerable was maintained. Ireland’s approach to humanitarian action is an expression of our values, supported by our financial investment which in 2020 was just over €190 million.
Northern Ireland and managing the outcome of the UK’s exit from the European Union continued to be key priorities for the Department in 2020. In particular, the New Decade, New Approach agreement in January 2020 represented a significant shared achievement of the political parties in Northern Ireland with the Irish and British Governments. We also sustained engagement in Brussels, across the EU, in London, Washington and at home on addressing and mitigating the economic and political consequences of Brexit.
In 2020, the programme for Government moved trade promotion back to the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment. My Department continues to work collaboratively at headquarters and through the mission network to deliver on the Government’s trade and investment objectives and to promote Ireland as a great place in which to live, work, do business, invest and visit. The Global Ireland 2025 strategy offers a framework and ambition for this ongoing collaboration across government. In addition, our mission capacity overseas and our network of relationships were key to our consular and diaspora response in 2020. We have recently opened 14 new missions, without which it would have been much more difficult to provide the consular support required in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, in particular to repatriate citizens from locations such as Peru, Colombia, Chile and New Zealand.
I also want to acknowledge the dedication and motivation of the Department’s staff.
The Covid-19 crisis had and continues to have a profound impact on the Department's global operating environment, including on staffing, security and ICT functions. The crisis has underlined the importance of investment in workforce planning, building resilience, supporting well-being for staff in challenging situations a long way from home, supporting remote working and engagement via digital platforms, and investing in health and safety and security of staff who serve our citizens and promote our interests overseas.
I am joined this morning by the director general for development co-operation, Mr. Ruairí de Búrca; the director of the Passport Service, Ms Siobhán Byrne; and Ms Jane Connolly, who is the director of the finance division. We look forward to the discussion.
