Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I commend the Committee on Budgetary Oversight secretariat and the Parliamentary Budget Office for their great work on all of this and the report that was produced in May, in particular the work they have done in trying to advance the cause of equality budgeting and gender budgeting. I commend the Chairman and my fellow committee members for their work. I thank all of the people who contributed or who came in to the committee, such as the National Women's Council of Ireland, the Wheelchair Association of Ireland and the ESRI, and there are others I cannot remember, unfortunately.

This is a hugely important issue. I agree with Deputy Burton that some of it is quite technical, necessarily so when it comes down to trying to disaggregate information to see how budgets and budgetary allocations impact on women, on different genders, on different groups, such as people with disability, ethnic groups, Travellers, or on any sector of society, given there are obviously different social and economic groups in society. Why is it important to do that? Probably the best case for why we need to do it was set out in the book, The Spirit Level, written a number of years ago, where the authors gathered a lot of evidence to show that societies where there is greater equality do better at every single level imaginable. Societies where there are greater levels of equality have better community and social relations, better mental health, better physical health, longer life expectancy, less obesity, less violence, less imprisonment and better economic growth. Every indicator suggests that societies that are more equal do better. That is why it is important.

For many reasons, I find the budgets I have had to interact with over-----

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