Professor Mary Murphy:

A lot of work has been done on gender-based budgeting. Some of the work shows that it is very hard to make it work in a practical way, where there is added value from the process and you can point to things that changed because of gender budgeting, whether policies or budget allocations. I have some experience of trying to do some gender budgeting and I think there is great learning to be gotten from it.

I think it gives a real appreciation of the nature of how we design policy and the sometimes implicit gendered distribution implications of a policy, that unless you do gender budgeting or gender proofing more broadly you simply can never understand. It is really important. There have been some advances in respect of the Parliamentary Budget Office and the infrastructure of the State in this regard but we are still in the ha'penny place on the level of investment that is needed in it. Let us consider the Irish Fiscal Advisory Council and its level of resourcing to do what is considered to be fiscal proofing. What kind of infrastructure does the State need to have to really do gender-equality budgeting in a meaningful way so that we can really draw out enough lessons for it to actually impact on the decisions we are making about policy and budget allocation? There is a lot in that space. We have some demonstrable shift in what we are doing but we have a long way to go.