Ms Eilís Ní Chaithnía:

My answer on the Deputy's question about the steering group will be very short, in that we received confirmation just last week that the steering group would be established and that the NWCI would be invited to sit on it. My understanding is that the invitations are with senior level staff and are yet to come to us. Consequently, we do not have details about the terms of reference as yet.

We do not have that detail as yet but the NWC also works quite closely with the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission with regard to gender budgeting as well as lots of other issues. We will also be having discussions about what we would like to see the steering group achieve and how it should be run. Those conversations will be ongoing with the Department as well as between the other actors who will be invited to sit on the steering group.

In terms of the goals and objectives of the pilot project being underwhelming, I did make reference to the same issue myself. All I can do at this stage is reiterate the point that it was done in a very short space of time. There was a very limited amount of time given to Departments to identify their goals. While the child care goal is ambitious, many goals are narrow in their focus, particularly those from the Departments of Education and Skills and Health. However, all international expertise would suggest that keeping the focus narrow is useful. At this point, officials are just getting used to looking at budgetary measures from a different perspective. Measures are not just about cost-effectivenessper se, although they should be informed by cost-effectiveness, but also about equality. It is about the impact of budgetary measures on equality, which is a different perspective for many officials to take. They need time to get their heads around that, to understand what equality objectives and indicators are and what kind of data they will need. This will also require really strong, solid circulars from the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform and from the Parliamentary Budget Office, PBO. The latest document produced by the PBO is really useful in that regard. The National Strategy for Women and Girls 2017-2020 contains a specific commitment to building capacity among officials. Based on international experience, the best way to do that, in addition to circulars and so forth, is to establish a mentoring system. Officials will require ongoing support and there will be details that they will need to thrash out and the best way to do that is through mentoring. I would really like to see the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform and Ministers from each Department committing to a mentoring process.

In terms of how we compare to Scotland and Israel, one of the equality budgeting examples used quite a bit by Scotland is around apprenticeships, one of the aforementioned narrow-focus goals. The Scots have been very pleased with progress made. In 2007 only 14% of the 9,000 people on apprenticeship schemes were women. This was identified as a concern during the equality proofing of the budget and the resulting change in policies actually improved the overall take-up of apprenticeships. There were 26,000 placements last year, over 40% of which were taken up by women. Scotland is continuing that equality proofing to increase access to apprenticeships for people with disabilities.

It is important to state a number of points here. I have already mentioned that the Departments were directed towards the National Strategy for Women and Girls 2017-2020 to look for areas in which they would set their objectives and apprenticeships is one of the issues that is identified in that strategy. In that context, the Department followed the guidance that was given. Apprenticeships tend to be not just a gender issue because apprenticeship schemes are also often targeted at lower-income earners or those from lower-income communities. In that context, there may also be other equality outcomes that the Department has yet to identify that may come about. It seems that the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform is following the international advice that it has received to date.

On the PBO, we have not yet sought a meeting. However, reference was made in our opening statement to a document on our gender budget assessment exercise which was presented to high-level officials and budget officials in November 2017. The director of the PBO was in attendance and engaged in the discussion at that time. We received good feedback from those who attended. Other than that, we have had some initial conversations with PBO officials but we have not had a formal meeting yet.

A question was asked about what we would like to see in budget 2019. We would like to see some of the refining that was suggested by the PBO in terms of the technical elements of it happening, which would be very useful. We would also like to see an emphasis on equality outcomes for individuals. We will have to see how the indicators are reported on but one concern is that there may be too much focus on performance outcomes in terms of Department's hitting the targets that they have set in the Revised Estimates volume and not enough focus on whether that equates to equality outcomes for individuals. As yet, I cannot see how Departments are going to do that. We have not seen the ex anteanalysis to understand why they came up with particular objectives and indicators so it is not clear how we will find out whether there have been clear equality outcomes for the individuals they have identified. We would also like to see an equality budget statement by the Minister to sit alongside the Budget Statement itself at the end of this year. Interestingly, Sinn Féin published a gender budget statement last year alongside its own budget document which was useful. It pulled out the gender priorities from the budget document, which was a good start. We would like to see other parties doing the same thing because that would encourage the Government to do it too.