Mr. Ed Hearne:

I might begin and then hand over to Ms O'Loughlin. Regarding the Chairman's final question about whether legislation would be appropriate or would help in this regard, it is clear, from what we are doing that and from the wider work that is ongoing within the Department, that we have a very ambitious reform in respect of performance budgeting generally. We have made some internal structural changes lately that bring equality budgeting, performance budgeting, green budgeting and all our initiatives on well-being budgeting into the same unit. This will really help to avoid us having buzz words or particular modules that get a lot of focus over a period but that are not fully embedded. Those changes will certainly will certainly help us. That is an ambitious programme of reform.

On legislation, when we look at other OECD colleague countries and other comparators, we have comparatively few provisions for public financial management in law compared to what is generally out there. We have legislation on how the Oireachtas appropriates budgets and how Voted expenditure and so forth is allocated but an awful lot of what we do, which is core practice in public financial management, is guided more by administrative arrangements and circulars. If we look at things that are core around the public financial procedures and the public spending code on how we make decisions for capital expenditure, much of what we have been doing around performance budgeting has not typically had its roots in legislation. For now, we are confident that the real thing is that we get the push from the bottom up, build out the community, have adequate expertise across the public sector and the Civil Service and set the requirements from the centre, for example, on the tagging project, which will be a really rich source of data on things like the improvement of the performance report and the equality modules within that. Between those two and embedding it along the lines of the administrative procedure we use for most other aspects of public financial management, that will drive the change. I will ask Ms O'Loughlin to come in regarding our work with the Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and the Department of Justice in the past.

Regarding the Chairman's first question about recommendation 42, that is ultimately a policy question. Our approach, as with all policy areas, is to make sure all our public financial frameworks, how we measure inputs, how we allocate resources, how we monitor performance and how we screen the impact of programmes are equally orientated towards equality and gender equality as they are to all the other fields of policy around our public capital programmes. That will continue to be our focus - to work with the relevant policy Departments and make sure we are backing them up with adequate provision across public financial management.