Pauline Tully (Cavan-Monaghan, Sinn Fein)
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216. To ask the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform the progress that has been made on expanding the equality budgeting initiative to examine outcomes and expenditures as they relate to disabled people. [36191/24]

Paschal Donohoe (Dublin Central, Fine Gael)
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Equality budgeting has been a core component of performance budgeting policy since 2018. It focuses on ten themes - Gender; Marital Status; Family Status; Age; Disability; Sexual Orientation; Race; Religion; Membership of the Traveller and Roma Communities; and Socio-economic Status.

The two key annual outputs of the equality budgeting calendar are the Revised Estimates Volume for the Public Services (the REV), and the Public Service Performance Report (PSPR). The REV contains information on the equality outputs and outcomes that each Department sets out to achieve in the year ahead. The PSPR provides information on how each Department fared in the achievement of these REV targets for the preceding year.

For REV 2024, which was published last December, Departments were asked to clearly link the appropriate expenditure subhead alongside each metric indicator so as to more clearly focus on the link between Departmental and Vote expenditure and their individual activities. 18% of the equality budgeting metrics in REV 2024 are specific to people with disabilities.

To support the ongoing development of Equality Budgeting across all Government Departments, my Department, along with the Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth, co-chairs the Inter-Departmental Network on Equality Budgeting, on which all Departments are represented. At the most recent Inter-Departmental Network Group on Equality Budgeting meeting, all Departments were encouraged to consider and develop more equality budgeting metrics to properly reflect their work in alleviating inequality across all ten equality themes.