Professor Angela O'Hagan:

As the chair of EBAG, I would certainly be very happy to see us work together and to share our learning and development between Ireland and Scotland. In preparing for today and re-reading what Ireland has been doing, I certainly learned a lot and I will be passing on a number of observations to my colleagues on the group, and civil servants and Ministers supporting that work.

As to the difference between equality and gender budgeting, there are some significant differences and some caveats in how we approach equality budgeting in particular. Gender budgeting takes a very specific focus on looking at the structural inequalities that give rise to or create inequalities in the experiences of women and men, economically, politically and socially, and how they manifest in women's and men's economic status. Unless public policy decision-making takes a gendered analysis, it will continue to produce and reproduce those inequalities in public policy decisions across social security, taxation, economic policy, labour market-weighted policies and other policies, including maternity, paternity and other gender-equality policies. It is essential that there is a gendered analysis there to understand those differences, the causes of those differences and to take steps to eliminate the inequalities through examining public resourcing decisions and the decisions around the distribution of public resources.

An equality budgeting approach takes a much broader perspective. Very often, as can be seen in some elements of the Irish work, it can focus on socioeconomic equality or inequality, and do poverty-related and income-related work. Unless that equality analysis contains a gendered analysis and an intersectional gendered analysis that reveals how the oppression of gender inequality, racialised inequality, class-based inequality, and disability all intersect to create and recreate different experiences of discrimination and inequality then we are not going to eliminate some of those structural issues.

All of that said, it means it is a complex process and it requires robust detail across different characteristics and the intersection of how those different characteristics work together to create different types of inequalities is important. Having that data is not straightforward. I can see there is a commitment to improving the data available in Ireland, just as there is a similar commitment in Scotland, but it means having the data and then building the capability to interpret the data and understand what it means and then using that information and understanding for policy formulation and policy responses to the status quo- the current situation. We must understand why it is that some experiences of discrimination and inequality - economically, socially, politically and culturally - happen to different individuals and groups of individuals. Some scholars talk about it as critically thinking otherwise. I think about it as working backwards from what is the current situation, how it has arisen, what policy choices, policy decisions and political decisions have given rise to this inequality and then working backwards from how the policy problem has been considered or what it is considered be.

It is about working backwards from that to get a better understanding of people's circumstances, in the first instance, how some policy decisions make those circumstances worse and how to avoid that.

I will quickly give an example. There was a very good analysis by the UK Women's Budget Group of the cumulative effect of changes in the tax system and the social security entitlements system by the UK Government over a number of years. It demonstrated clearly that the changes in tax policy and social security policy, that is, the reduction in social security payments and the increase in tax giveaways, most affected women, particularly affected lone-parent families, by far the majority of which are headed by women, and particularly affected lone parents with larger families, the majority of which are headed by women of colour. The intersection of the factors of race, class and gender reinforced and exacerbated those inequalities as they manifested in a serious reduction in income to those particular groups.

We need the data on who is currently where across society and we need use need to use those data, in the first instance, to make policy from a perspective that is about driving equality, securing the realisation of rights and eliminating inequalities. That needs to be the starting position for policy, rather than deciding on a policy and then looking to see how it will affect different people differently.