Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Deputy for his comments. He is quite right in that there is no realistic prospect of meeting the 4% target in 2016. That target was set long before the financial crisis, but we do not yet know how much progress we have made in getting to that point. That is why I would also like to see up-to-date numbers.

Deputy Thomas Pringle asked about the impact of measures. The Department engages in social impact monitoring and we can publish the information. We are ready to publish, if it has not already been published, information on the social impact assessment of the changes made in the budget and how they will affect poverty rates, for example. Anything we do must be done using the baseline data provided for us by the CSO which tells us how many people and children there are in the State, etc. We make social impact assessments of any policy or proposed policy change. We have all of that data, as well as the ESRI SWITCH analysis model to assist us, but it must all be based on some baseline data, the data collected by the CSO, the State's statistical agency. The Department does not conduct the census and does not collect that data. Employment data are collected by the CSO. We make the social impact analysis of policy changes. It seems that Deputies John Brady and Denise Mitchell are tabling the wrong amendment. They are looking for an annual report, not a report which would be timely. There is nothing in the amendment about the figures needing to be up-to-date, it would just require the production of an annual report. It would not require the report to include up-to-date numbers or the figures for the previous year. If there was to be a statutory obligation applied to anyone, it should be applied to the CSO, not the Department.

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