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Committee on Budgetary Oversight debate -
Tuesday, 27 Feb 2018

Business of Select Committee

I have received apologies from Deputy Donnelly. A pilot approach to gender budgeting has been adopted in the Revised Estimates for public services 2018, published in December. At last week's session we engaged with officials from the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform to discuss the general budget indicators that form part of that pilot. Today the committee will meet with representatives from the National Women's Council of Ireland, NWCI, to consider the equality budgeting initiative in greater detail.

Before we invite them into the meeting we are going into-----

Before we go into private session, I acknowledge the documents I sent this morning from the Fórsa trade union have been circulated. The documents refer to the tax exemption campaign it has undertaken in terms of their union subscriptions. I thank the Chair for circulating the documents and ask if at some point in our discussions of budget 2019 we might have some time to discuss those particular issues.

I was delighted to circulate the documents. It is a worthwhile topic the Deputy has raised. We will get a chance to look at that in more detail I hope.

I raised a parliamentary question with the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform, Deputy Donohoe, and he shot it down pretty completely. He cited the review done in 2016. I am happy to share his reply with the Chair and the committee. However, it was a pretty straight shooting down of the proposals.

It can form part of our discussion. However, we are the Committee on Budgetary Oversight and we can-----

We can make recommendations.

-----have a right to look at it and make recommendations. I think that will come up. If there is nothing else we will go into private session.

The select committee went into private session at 4.06 p.m. and resumed in public session at 4.16 p.m.
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