Mr. William Beausang:

Our assessment, and possibly our instinct, was to walk before we run. We consulted widely with experts. Ms Swaine attended an OECD conference on gender budgeting and we took away lessons from other countries. The lessons are not particularly reassuring in terms of the effectiveness of gender budgeting. Many countries have engaged in gender and equality budgeting but whether that delivered the results for which people hoped is open to question. Although I cannot recall the exact figures from the OECD survey, there was difficulty in identifying where an engagement with equality and gender budgeting generated clear change rather than shedding more light on issues such as those referred to by Deputy Broughan.

I do not wish to be defensive about the pilot programme but it has been of benefit. The child care issue and the objective in that regard is very significant and relates very directly to more general economic policy because the maintenance and enhancement of our growth rate over time will be achieved by enhanced female labour force participation and child care is an important element of that. The objective regarding the level of female recipients of Science Foundation Ireland research grants is a very important signal for women in terms of access to STEM courses and their participation in that area.

Data and the availability of data are huge issues, as mentioned by Ms Swaine, because although the equality budgeting initiative is being referred to as a new initiative, distributional analysis has been conducted on the budget for many years using the simulating welfare and income tax changes, SWITCH, model, with which I am sure the Deputy is familiar. It generates a significant amount of very useful information on the distribution impact of budget changes but there are many gaps and shortfalls in that information. To try to build on and enhance the information available from SWITCH, the Department carried out social impact analysis whereby officials considered particular areas of public expenditure to try to form a baseline of information such that we have an understanding of the impacts of particular spending programmes on individuals and households. In some instances, we found that the impacts were not very aligned with the initial objectives of the spending. We are attempting to strengthen the general approach we take to these issues and the equality budgeting initiative is an important part of that. We are not yet at a point of development whereby we can start embracing very substantial and significant issues that might have gender equality implications because we do not have the tools or data to do so, nor the experience of how to progress from an understanding of what these gender and equality issues are to how to change policy to address them. At a certain level, what we are trying to do and the process we have described today is the easy part. The difficult part is the change driven from a better understanding of a particular spending area.