Mr. Michael Gaffey:

I will, and I hope I can answer every aspect of it. This OECD policy marker is quite new and Ireland is one of the first to recognise the need to do more. That is why we have been adopting it and working on it. That is why I say we are still mapping and learning, but with a view to doing more. That is true. This morning we had a discussion in our senior management group on precisely this point about markers and how we train our people to ensure we know what we are doing in implementing our thematic priorities. We started the discussion this morning by talking about gender. We talked about prioritising the empowerment of women and girls and gender and how to do that across all programmes, projects and proposals. We have broadened that to discuss disability also. We make commitments and statements, as the Senator rightly said, but how do we ensure they actually appear as priorities in the implementation of our programme? We have developed a system whereby for every proposal for funding a programme or project, we have a complex system of appraising it. Part of that appraisal involves answering questions on disability inclusion. I will admit it is probably not as much as it could be but we are starting. We have questions on disability inclusion so that everybody designing a programme or a project has to be able to understand how it will relate to disability but also has to answer those questions or we cannot approve the programmes.