Bernard Durkan (Kildare North, Fine Gael)
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139. 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. [20130/24]

Paschal Donohoe (Dublin Central, Fine Gael)
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My Department continues to lead on Equality Budgeting.

Equality Budgeting examines public expenditure designed to address inequalities, with the aim of increasing the level of transparency and accountability about how resources are being used to advance equality, reduce poverty and strengthening economic and social outcomes across all sectors of society. It is anchored in the existing performance budgeting framework.

Equality budgeting was introduced in Ireland 2018 and has progressed considerably since, from gender budgeting elements to broaden its scope to other dimensions of equality including poverty, socioeconomic inequality, disability and minority groups.

It is a core pillar of the performance framework, designed to embed consideration of distributional effects into the decision-making process and facilitate ongoing monitoring of the impact of Government policy on tackling inequalities across society.

Equality metrics are reported alongside financial allocations in the Revised Estimates Volume and the Public Service Performance Report (PSPR) on an annual basis.

It is the responsibility of each Vote/ Vote Group to identify equality metrics, their commitments for the year ahead and report on these.

Such equality metrics are designed to capture the activity that a given allocation of public expenditure directly funds (outputs) and the change in the equality-related outcome that public funding is ultimately intended to improve (impact).

As part of REV 2024, each Vote/ Vote Group identified equality metrics that will be used to measure progress over the course of this year. Each Department reports data on the achievement of equality goals in the annual Public Service Performance Report (PSPR), to enhance transparency and accountability on the delivery of results. The 2023 PSPR is currently being finalised and will be published by end Q2 2024.