Alice-Mary Higgins (Independent) | Oireachtas source

It is relevant to the wider debate. As I said, the Athena SWAN charter is important. One of the key things that I am concerned we may lose is that, previously, the Irish Research Council drove a lot of the take-up of the Athena SWAN charter by making compliance, or indeed engagement with the Athena SWAN process, a condition of research funding. That led to a massive step change in a lot of universities in that, suddenly, they started to actually take it seriously in terms of whether they were delivering on those standards of gender equity within their institutions.It is another example of where there should be scope within the conditions of funding for something such as the Athena Swan Charter to be made a condition. That was done previously by the Irish Research Council, which set a very good template. I am concerned that this body should be empowered to apply that same standard and require engagement with the Athena Swan Charter, as the Irish Research Council did previously.

On this specifically, with respect to the Minister of State, I know that the functions exist but the question is on the ability to deliver them. The test will be seeing how this unfolds. If a body is being required to act as administrator for multiple Government schemes, or schemes of individual Ministers, and the body will have ten or 20 staff members, that will necessarily consume energy in terms of hours in the day. I have no problem with that as long as it does not compromise the delivery of those core functions. The test will come but I hope we do not have a situation in the future where we are told the agency was not able to deliver on its core functions because the Minister for enterprise, the Minister for agriculture or some other Minister had given it a task and it was required under section 50 to step to it immediately, in effect.