Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

The ESRI's work is very good and is driven by the institute. Therefore, sometimes the work is useful to legislators but sometimes it is not or sometimes we would like extra pieces. For the new committee that will be in place, there will inevitably be a set of prescribed analysis that it will need. Let me give an example. Yesterday, this committee met the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission. The delegation suggested that equality proofing, be it gender, poverty or human rights proofing, should be done by Departments for various reasons. I suggested to the commission that somebody should play the role the Irish Fiscal Advisory Council, IFAC, plays with the Department of Finance and DPER. In other words, validate the analysis. The IHREC is one group that could potentially build up the capacity to do so. The ESRI is the other obvious group that has the technical capacity to take the analysis from the Departments, put it through the hopper, come back to the standing committee and say, for example, "70% of a matter is great but we question 20% and 10% is flat out wrong." Obviously the ESRI carries out the main distributional analysis that we all use. That role could be easily extended.

Professor Barrett has described the ESRI's ad hoc relationship with the budgetary process. He has said that the ESRI does good work and that the nature of the ESRI's remit means the analysis will, hopefully, be useful to the committee and the Oireachtas. My sense is that the committee will need more formalised arrangements with some analytical body as well as with the Departments.

Does Professor Barrett think that the ESRI is well placed to enter into a service level agreement with the standing committee to say, "Yes, we are going to provide you in January with this, in March with this and in September with the following." Does he believe that the ESRI has a useful role to play in this process? Does he believe that the ESRI can play a useful role in equality, poverty and human rights proofing? Did Garret FitzGerald set up the ESRI to provide a second view apart from the Departments? I heard it was Garret FitzGerald at an interview. Be that true or not, does the professor believe that the ESRI is well positioned to play a quality assurance role for the standing committee when it comes to equality proofing what comes out of the Departments?