Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I thank the National Women's Council for their contributions. I have a question about the relationship between the micro and macro in assessing budgets, making recommendations or scrutinising and proofing things. It is one thing to look at a particular measure and ask if it impacts negatively, positively or not at all on the level of gender equality or some other index, but a more comprehensive proofing might look at the macro consequence of making particular choices. If there is €350 million of fiscal space and the Government decides, following the intersectionality argument, to give a big chunk of it to tax breaks for women CEOs in multinational companies, as against spending it on employing people in the health service which would be more likely to impact on employment opportunities for women workers, would the National Women's Council see it is part of its equality-proofing role to assess the relative impact of one choice over the other in those terms?