Mr. William Beausang:

We always like to think that we are collaborative and work together with Departments. The answer to the Deputy's question is that it is a shared responsibility. Given that the Department and the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform have ownership of the equality budgeting initiative, as is reflected by our presence today, we are in the driving seat and seek to work with Departments with the benefits of external expertise that I spoke of to deepen the process. The point Ms Swaine was making in the presentation was that we have a framework and a way of doing it which reflects best practice advice and experience in other jurisdictions.

We want to try to make it real and impactful in an Irish context. However, the first step is to have the framework because, as I earlier stated, when one is dealing with the spectrum of poverty proofing, equality and gender budgeting, gender mainstreaming and so on it can all get very dense and theoretical and we are trying to boil it down and make it simple, clear and straightforward to drive the type of changes that Deputy O'Brien mentioned.