Ms Eilís Ní Chaithnía:

The Deputy asks a fair question and I thank him for taking us through it again. The National Women's Council of Ireland is a policy and advocacy organisation and the Department is a part of government. Our relationship with the Department is very much as one would expect it to be. The National Women's Council has produced a significant body of work in the past 12 months aimed at influencing the Department and we are happy to be critical where necessary. It is not necessarily the case that we do not want to be critical of the Department. Rather, we accept that officials are in the very early stages of the process, which is key.

Significant efforts were made in the area of poverty proofing about ten years ago and policy proofing was pursued for a certain period before being dropped. When we speak to officials about poverty proofing we find that political and ministerial commitment to the issue was sometimes lacking. Moreover, it created additional work for officials who are busy. This is one of the reasons I am reluctant to be critical at this stage. It is important to us that the Department signed up to the process in the first instance. I would like other Departments to engage with the process fairly quickly. We engage regularly with the Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection and I am disappointed it has not engaged in this process.

I spoke to one of the budgetary officials who informed me that it was not directly invited to engage in the process, which I was disappointed to hear. That would not necessarily have precluded it from engaging. It already carries out switch analyses, for example. The type of work it does is really appropriate for gender budgeting. It should be involved in this pilot. By next year, it should be engaging actively on this. I am having those conversations with the officials.

We view this is a pilot scheme that definitely needs to be built on. That is part of the reason we are being so encouraging about it. If there was an equality budgeting statement, with broad and very ambitious commitments made within it by the Department and the relevant Minister, and if the Department came back next year with several high-level goals which link back to the overall goal identified in the equality statement, that would allow us to say that a range of issues are being addressed in order to achieve that equality outcome. This would provide greater clarity. There has to be a better sense within Departments of what is meant by different types of indicators. The Parliamentary Budget Office is included in that as well. It is important to know whether there are output or outcome indicators in the Revised Estimates Volume. That issue is quite fuzzy at the moment. We need to have much greater clarity in respect of it.

I would like to see some sort of qualitative assessment take place. I understand that the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform is seeking such an assessment. I am also concerned with performance budgeting. There has been a real move into quantitative analysis across the board because it is more concrete and easier to assess. However, any equality budgeting needs to have that qualitative assessment which very clearly links each of the high-level goals back into that equality budget statement goal that has been set. That would provide us with a greater chunk of information, a better idea of where the Government is going and how the Departments are fulfilling those commitments.