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

I thank the Deputies for their questions. Initially, it was a personal initiative but I stepped back from it to avoid unnecessary controversy. As I explained last week, decisions relating to the budget and staffing have been left in the purview of the Secretary General of the Department. The unit will not be doing any party political work. I have given that assurance on a number of occasions. It will inform the public of the work the Government is doing. In the aftermath of the budget, for example, it ran information campaigns and some meetings around the country to tell people about the budget and what it meant for their lives and their regions. While these things might have been done in the past by line Departments, the budget is about much more than a single Department. It is an attempt to break out of that silo, the idea that the budget is just a creature of the Department of Finance and the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform. It also involves €15 billion for health and the changes that arise from that and €10 billion for education and the improvements that arise from that. It is about pulling things together and taking a more strategic view of how we communicate the work of the Government to the public so that it is not just about departmental silos but about how the work of Government affects people, their regions and different groups in society in a more thematic approach. I believe that is a better approach.

One of the first things the unit did was the back to school campaign. What the Government does to support families during the back to school period does not come from a single Department. It ranges from school meals and the back to school clothing and footwear allowance from the Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection to the school books programme run by the Department of Education and Skills and to what the Department of Children and Youth Affairs does for preschool. Many of these things happen across Departments and this is an attempt to break out of that silo and, in that case, speak to young families about what the Government does for them, but not from the old-fashioned perspective of what an individual Department does with an individual scheme.

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