Ms Caroline O'Loughlin:

Equality budgeting is embedded in performance budgeting, which tries to increase transparency and accountability in how public funds are allocated and used and what impact they have. Equality budgeting adds a new lens. It does not examine just what impact public expenditure has, but also what impact it has on different cohorts in society. We hope it will build that examination into the policymaking process so that, when people in the line Departments are writing policy, they have this additional end focus, thereby sharpening up policy from start to finish. Since it is part of the budgetary process, it will inform future budget allocations based on evidence. We work closely with the CSO to ensure this is evidence-based analysis. There is a greater demand for this evidence now.

Equality budgeting and performance budgeting have always taken the approach of taking feedback from stakeholders. The citizen is at the heart of that, but there must also be transparency for and accountability to the Houses of the Oireachtas. We regularly appear before the Committee on Budgetary Oversight as well as other committees. Feedback from all of these groups is essential to our work. We need to know what information legislators need us to provide them with. We have taken feedback on board. I can think of specific issues. In the early days of equality budgeting, for example, we were very much focused on trends whereas the feedback from the Oireachtas committees was they wanted the focus to be on targets and achievements. We redesigned the entire layout of the performance report based on that feedback. We will continue to take feedback. Equality budgeting needs to best serve its purpose. We will make sure that whatever feedback we get is reflected.