Ms Camille Loftus:

It will, but I imagine that it is too late in the process for the office to have a significant impact this time around. Looking at what has worked elsewhere, however, it is important that institutions like parliamentary budgetary offices take on responsibility for ensuring that equality and gender proofing is put in place in a comprehensive fashion. This should form part of such an institution's overall costing and impact assessment exercises with regard to any policy measure. It is important that this new Oireachtas budget office have the capacity to analyse on both the basis of gender and on other grounds of inequality in order that we can capture the intersectional dynamics.

It is surprising that we are still struggling with data this far on in the evolution of gender budgeting. There are many areas in which data remain an issue. Speaking as something of a nerd, I am very impressed with the data bank that the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform has produced. There is a volume of data available on that database now that was never there before. It is not, however, presented on a gender-disaggregated basis, which is something we should now be doing as a matter of routine. The data are all there but they are just not being produced. This committee's job in providing oversight for the budgetary process and in making an assessment as to whether it has been effectively proofed in respect of gender and equality will be much easier with access to data and much harder without. This is an important priority.

For quite some time now, we have had at our disposal modelling programmes such as SWITCH that can tell us where the costs and benefits of a particular measure are distributed. We also now have modelling capacities to look forward to project the kind of impact that a measure might have on growth in the future.

We can look at the dynamic impacts of a policy rather than just the static, first round effects. I cited the McKinsey work because that is what they are doing. They can say that if we did certain things we would add a certain amount to growth. They are beginning to have this capacity within the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform and the committee could certainly have a role in ensuring this type of analysis is done in order that we will know exactly what kind of impact we could expect to see.

It is critically important to engage with people who will be affected by the measures. It is very challenging for a parliamentary committee to manage this but gender and equality budgeting works when there is a facility for people who will be directly affected by the measures to make some feedback into the process. We will specify this in more detail in our model when the work is completed. It is important as there is a realm of expertise that is not generally available within the bureaucratic system but which would be of great impact to the committee in assessing the impact of gender inequality budgeting.