Dr. Mary Murphy:

The workshop focused primarily on gender-proofing, which the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform chose to focus on, believing that that is the most likely, practical way of advance proofing in the next budgets because there is more data available in that area than any other equality ground. There was a growing understanding of where the current budget processes, for example, spending reviews, would be proofed. It was not concerned with identifying extra dimensions of mechanisms that would be proofing but rather looking at the evolving budget practice and where proofing could be added in.

Some good common understanding about the usefulness of that approach and how that would work was developing. There was also a common understanding that there would be an equality statement in the budget on budget day and some discussion as to how that could be made meaningful. Again, this built up expectations that this would happen. One of the most useful parts of it was the realisation that individual line Departments needed to understand the elements in their established policy goals that were most relevant to equality and human rights, draw out from their established policy goals some key priority goals that were relevant to equality and human rights and put them forward for specific proofing exercises. That could mean existing expenditures that needed to be reviewed to maximise the impact of that expenditure for equality and human rights or it could mean new budget lines as they were evolving.

One example might be Rebuilding Ireland which is now open to review and which is likely to have existing budget lines and some new budget lines added, but has not been fully exposed to an equality and human rights proofing exercise. Lots of other ones included national strategies that were already in existence such as the youth strategy - Better Outcomes, Brighter Futures - or the new Traveller or Roma strategy or the new national women's strategy. All of those strategies have a bearing on individual line Departments and all of them are ways of advancing equality so it involved getting a better understanding of where these national strategies fitted into the business of line Departments and where they needed to proof to make sure they were maximising the budget potential to realise the outcomes in those strategies. Much was done in the training to help people have a common understanding of how this would advance and it was quite useful in that sense. People gave us feedback that they had a much better sense of what the language meant and that there was agreement across Departments that this was a sensible way to move forward. Mr. Bond might want to add something.