Ms Caroline O'Loughlin:

Deputy Clarke was asking about the tagging and the tracking, and the pilot Departments that were used. The three Departments we selected were selected because it was a pilot. We wanted to identify Departments where it was likely to be more problematic. This was a huge culture change. Departments would not have had to tag expenditure in this way before. Given the OECD team was to come over physically to the country and work with the Departments to do this, we tried to identify three Departments that would probably have most difficulty in doing this across all of the dimensions. We asked them to tag against green budgeting, nine grounds of equality budgeting and also for well-being budgeting, which is currently under development as well.

The reason that those Departments were picked was because they had a broad array of different dimensions. If we had picked a Department, such as the Department of Health, for tagging and tracking, in some ways it may have been more obvious. We wanted to pick the Departments that would be more difficult and would benefit from having the OECD expertise there with them to do the pilot. That was the reason those three Departments were selected.

The issue of tagging and tracking arose at a recent meeting of another Oireachtas committee when Senator Higgins asked similar questions. We told her about the long-term use of tagging and tracking and how it would not just be an exercise that would be done now, but would instead be built upon over the coming years and would inform long-term planning. It will facilitate the expansion of equality budgeting and performance budgeting greatly and contribute to the budgetary process as a whole.