Ms Caroline O'Loughlin:

The Senator asked about equality budgeting. I assure her that the momentum in this regard has not weakened at all. It may appear that way because a lot of the work at the moment is behind the scenes, so to speak. When we launched the pilot, we really tried to articulate what it was about and sell it to the Departments. What we are doing now is trying to embed that within the overall performance budgeting framework and build up Departments' capacity. There is a focus on training to ensure Departments are using equality budgeting to refine their policymaking process in order that policies are targeted at the specific cohorts they should be and to ensure public expenditure is reaching the maximum target it can. We have shifted over the past number of years towards impact budgeting to make sure policy is hitting the people for whom it is intended.

There has been some important progress in the past two to three years. As of now, all Departments are participating in equality budgeting. This means they are, at a minimum, reporting on equality metrics in the performance report and the Revised Estimates Volume, REV. However, as we have always said, equality budgeting is not about clocking up equality metrics. We do not say, okay, we have 50 equality metrics and we are done. We always wanted to make sure it was not going to turn into a tick-the-box exercise. We wanted to embed it into the performance budgeting framework and ensure it sharpened up how policymaking is done within Departments. As we have increased the number of equality budgeting metrics, we can see the impact of equality budgeting policy being embedded in the performance metrics as they are reported in the REV and the performance report.

We have also done a number of other things recently. After the OECD did its scan of equality budgeting on Ireland, it gave us 12 recommendations for how to improve and embed the implementation of equality budgeting. A key part of that has been the improvement of the availability of disaggregated data, the lack of which was one of the barriers to how we could identify the metrics to measure these things. We have done a huge amount of work in this area. It began with an equality budgeting data audit. The Central Statistics Office, CSO, appointed a statistician to us for six months and she conducted a data audit of equality budgeting information in Ireland. That information is now housed on the CSO website. It is a central point to which everybody can go to see what disaggregated data are available. That information will inform identification of equality budgeting metrics. The data audit showed us what we had, including the fact there was duplication in some efforts, where the gaps were and what we were not picking up.

We are conducting a data audit strategy to identify how we can plug those gaps and identify what measures can be taken within general data protection regulation, GDPR, rules, etc. and how we can capture that data. That is a huge body of work that is being done at the moment.

I mentioned capacity building in Departments. We engage greatly with Departments as a whole and sections within the Departments to raise their awareness of equality budgeting and see how they can embed that in their general policymaking frameworks. The structural reform support programme that is under way at the moment to tag expenditure, will be a huge momentum for this work as well. The ability to be able to tag all expenditure against the nine grounds of equality will also be of great help as the work continues over the next 12 months.

We have also established an interdepartmental group. The Government made a decision in March 2021 to the effect that it wanted to accelerate the implementation of equality budgeting. On the back of that, an interdepartmental group was created. That group was represented by every Department and, as I said, the purpose of the group is to build capacity within Departments and make sure everybody in the Department is aware of equality budgeting and, vice versa, to share information with us on what work is going on around all the different Departments to help accelerate this work.

A huge amount of work is going on at the moment. On equality budgeting, certainly, we have been very careful to make sure that momentum has not been lost and has been maintained. We are also working on something with our colleagues in the Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth. Our colleagues in that Department are doing work on gender mainstreaming. Obviously, we work very closely with them because gender is an element of equality budgeting but all of the work there is also very transferable to other areas of equality. We are looking at things in our own Department like introducing a module under OneLearning for equality budgeting. Again, as I said, this is all really to raise capacity building within the Departments.