Bernard Durkan (Kildare North, Fine Gael)
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253. To ask the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform the degree to which his Department continues to monitor the performance in both the public and private sectors with a view to ensuring a reasonable degree of equality throughout the economy in terms of opportunities; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [56143/21]

Michael McGrath (Cork South Central, Fianna Fail)
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Beginning with a pilot programme introduced for the 2018 budgetary cycle, Equality Budgeting is a way of approaching and understanding the budget as a process that embodies long-standing societal choices about how resources are used, rather than simply a neutral process of resource allocation. In practice, this means that equality budgeting attempts to provide greater information on how proposed or ongoing budgetary decisions impact on particular groups in society, thereby integrating equality concerns into the budgetary process.

Equality objectives and indicators are published every year in the REV and the Public Service Performance Report. The initial focus of Equality Budgeting was on gender, following which the initiative was extended to other dimensions of equality. An Expert Advisory Group was established to guide development of Equality Budgeting policy, and has met regularly since September 2018. In 2019, the OECD published a report on Equality Budgeting in Ireland, providing 12 recommendations on how to drive this initiative forward. Implementation of the report's recommendations is now at an advanced stage.

In line with the OECD recommendation to develop an equalities data strategy, the CSO completed a data audit in cooperation with my Department, to ascertain the availability of public service data that is disaggregated by equality dimension. A report on this audit was published in October 2020.

In order to support the continuing development of performance budgeting in Ireland, the Department of Public Expenditure & Reform has been successful in its application to the EU’s Structural Reform Support Programme (SRSP). The project that the EU is funding under this Programme is providing Ireland with the opportunity to work with technical experts from the EU and OECD as well as other international experts in order to take stock of how effectively performance budgeting has been working and to consider future directions for ongoing reform drawing on international best practice (e.g., enhance accountability and transparency, upgrade existing budgeting and financial management systems and processes). This project also takes cognisance of the other reform initiatives (e.g., equality budgeting, green budgeting, and well-being budgeting).

Earlier this year, Government agreed to the establishment of an inter-departmental group for Equality Budgeting to facilitate the embedding of the initiative across all Government departments. This group has met twice this year and will meet again this week, and plays a key role in guiding the continued progress of Equality Budgeting.