Seán Sherlock wants private sector to deliver on climate and aid

Caroline O’Doherty asks minister of state for trade Seán Sherlock how Ireland will live up to its pledges on overseas aid and climate change. Private firms could provide at least part of the answer, he says 

If the pledge by European development ministers earlier this year to increase their country’s overseas aid to 0.7% of national income annually by 2030 sounded familiar, that’s because it has a 45-year history. It was 1970 when the UN first stated it as an objective for economically advanced countries to reach by 1975. A handful did, a few more followed over the next decade and a small group have regularly exceeded it.

But for the rest of us, it remained a vague aspiration until 2000 ,when the millennium development goals were agreed and the 0.7% target was reset for 2015.