Sinéad Gibney (Dublin Rathdown, Social Democrats)
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778. To ask the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform if the well-being framework will be utilised in formulating key target areas of budget 2026; if consideration is given to how the Sustainable Development Goals could map onto the well-being framework; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [43989/25]

Jack Chambers (Dublin West, Fianna Fail)
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In 2021, the Government agreed a Well-being Framework for Ireland. This Framework consists of eleven dimensions which constitute the different aspects of well-being and contributes to the development of a holistic view of how Irish society is faring and informs government policy making and the budgetary process. The Well-being Framework is supported by a Well-being Information Hub maintained by the Central Statistics Office (CSO).

The Government publishes an annual report, “Understanding Life in Ireland”, which analyses the latest data available on the Well-being Information Hub. The most recent report was published in June 2025 and is intended to support a broad discussion of the impacts of policy decisions.

Within the whole-of-year budgetary process, the Well-being Framework features at the National Economic Dialogue where stakeholders have an opportunity to consider issues around well-being including longer-term economic, social and environmental factors. It also features in the Summer Economic Statement and in the Department of Finance’s “Beyond GDP – Quality of Life Assessment”, an annual report that complements the Economic and Fiscal Outlook by analysing the broader impacts of budgetary policy on economic, social and environmental well-being.

The well-being initiative is part of the overall performance framework, in particular performance budgeting, and is associated with the ongoing development of other outcome-focussed initiatives in the areas of equality and green budgeting. Information on the impact of public policy is available in both the “Revised Estimates for Public Services” and the “Public Service Performance Report”.

In December 2022, my Department published a working paper that sets out an approach to integrating the Well-being Framework into Ireland’s whole-of-year budgetary cycle. Following on from this, my Department designed and implemented a well-being tagging initiative which utilises the Well-being Framework to provide whole-of-government descriptions of resource allocation decisions. Following each of the two most recent budgets, my Department has published working papers that utilise the dimensions of the Well-being Framework, firstly, to describe how the selected measures presented in annual Expenditure Reports are enhancing well-being, and, secondly, to provide a whole-of-government description of the total allocation of resources as presented in the Revised Estimates Volume for Public Services. These papers are intended to increase transparency around the use of public resources and inform the broader discourse around budgetary decisions. These and other related papers are available under the “Well-being” section of the publications page of the Irish Government Economic and Evaluation Service (IGEES) website.

In June 2022, the report “Understanding Life in Ireland: The Well-being Framework” was published and presented a mapping of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to Ireland’s Well-being Framework. The report noted that though conceptually different there is a significant degree of overlap between these complementary initiatives.