Heather Humphreys (Cavan-Monaghan, Fine Gael)
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Across Government we evaluate all these issues and examine the impact, and of course there will be a review of Covid, the impact it had on society and the issues on which we need to focus post Covid.

On the role of the Department regarding equality budgeting, we introduced equality budgeting on a pilot basis in 2017 as part of a commitment in the programme for Government in 2016 to developing the process of budget and policy-proofing as a means of advancing equality, reducing poverty and strengthening economic and social rights. The pilot was relatively successful in pushing for equality considerations. In 2019, the OECD was commissioned by the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform and the then Department of Justice and Equality to conduct a review of Ireland's approach to equality budgeting, both to accelerate the uptake and impact of the initiative and to take account of developments. The OECD recommendations will underpin overall future implementation and the establishment of an interdepartmental network of equality budgeting contact points.

By improving knowledge sharing across Departments, this network will help to resolve several challenges highlighted by the OECD. The network will also facilitate cross-Government training on the purpose and application of equality budgeting. The interdepartmental group will include a senior member of staff from each Department, with each member having a broad knowledge of the policy work undertaken by his or her Department and its relevance to advancing the goals of equality and inclusion. This network will help inform the future direction of equality budgeting policy in line with the provision of a distributional overview by income decile and household type. There is a lot of work ongoing in this area and we continue to have a strong focus on proofing all our budgets in respect of these targets.