Mr. Ed Hearne:

To add to that, we talked about a number of different categories like green budgeting, equality budgeting, well-being and sustainable development goals, SDGs. The risk we need to manage is that these do not just become new silos and new things we focus on for a little bit of time and then move on. Ultimately, what we are trying to do is integrate them all into a better performance framework whereby we bring in a wider view of the performance of public policy programmes beyond just the traditional focus we have had in terms of money amounts and input numbers.

As we develop out this tagging project, I think it will be very useful and very flexible in the future for how we might want to look at other modules. It will also provide the basis for much better policy analysis. We have had some really good developments over the last decade or so with the advent of the Irish Government Economic and Evaluation Service. As we get better data for analysis through the tagging programme and other initiatives, that will really help us build the evidence base in the context of how we might be able to carry out more discrete analysis around, say, things the Senator mentioned like screening particular programmes or screening the overall expenditure of a Department with regard to a particular theme, whether that is equality or climate impact or whatever it might be. We would very much see these as building blocks of a more integrated process.