Mary Lou McDonald (Dublin Central, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

The Private Members' Bill that will continue to be debated this evening is concerned with amendments to the Equal Status Acts and the matter of equality budgeting. The Government is opposing the legislation. It cites the Bill’s imperfections, which could be remedied on Committee Stage, but the truth is that despite commitments and rhetoric on equality and human rights obligations, there is a fundamental resistance from Government - perhaps even from the permanent government - to hardwiring those considerations into the technical, procedural elements that are necessary to bring forward a budgetary proposition.

The disagreement we had on Committee Stage was not so much about the Minister’s use of the term “technical”, because I accept that this is technical legislation. He might recall that the difference of opinion was based on the Minister saying that equality and human rights considerations were, by definition, subjective. I challenged him on that. I do not believe they are. In any event, I am disappointed that the Minister will not accept the amendments. They would not in any way scupper or compromise the type of system which I support for multi-annual budgeting, proper planning and discipline. All of those matters are very welcome. The Bill is a step forward but it is a huge disappointment that the Minister will not take another logical step and fulfil the commitment to equality and human rights and write it into the technical process by which decisions on spending are made.

Although this is a technical Bill, we must be conscious at every turn that technical processes such as this have real, lived consequences and outcomes for citizens. The reason we set budgets and make decisions on expenditure is bound up with our view of what society needs, what the service needs are or where different categories of citizen and groups within society are and what they need. That is the very process in which we are involved. For that reason, by right the Minister should not alone accept the amendments but I would have thought it would have been something he would have considered at the start of the process when the legislation was being drafted. I am disappointed he has not changed his position. Soft language and in some cases lip-service on equality considerations will not cut it in the long term. At some stage the Government or a subsequent government will have to take the plunge and write into law budgetary processes, expenditure ceilings, decisions, frameworks and equality considerations to make them real.

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