Budgetary Oversight Committee to focus on equality and gender budgeting

Committee Chairman Colm Brophy said: “Equality budgeting involves scrutinising budget decisions for the impacts they may have on equality in society and on gender.

The Programme for Partnership Government contains a commitment to ‘develop the process of budget and policy proofing as a means of advancing equality, reducing poverty and strengthening economic and social rights’.  It also contains a commitment to ‘ensure the institutional arrangements are in place to support equality and gender proofing within key government departments’.  

As a first step, a pilot approach to gender budgeting has been adopted in the Revised Estimates for Public Services 2018 (link to: http://www.per.gov.ie/wp-content/uploads/REV-2018-compressed.pfd) with 6 Departments including indicators relating to gender equality objectives.  Those Departments are:  Transport, Tourism and Sport; Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht; Children and Youth Affairs; Education and Skills; Health; and Business, Enterprise and Innovation.

The Committee's role is to oversee and monitor gender budgeting processes, and we will be preparing a report on this matter.  

This week, we will be meeting with officials from the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform, which is responsible for developing the Equality Budgeting pilot programme.  

Among the issues we will concentrate on are: the quality of the indicators used as part of the Pilot to measure progress in each of the six Government Departments; the process used to devise the indicators; and ways in which the pilot project can be improved, and can help to inform greater use of performance information during the Estimates process.

This will be followed up by a meeting next week with the National Womens' Council to assess progress.”

This meeting will start in Committee Room 2, Leinster House at 2pm on Wednesday, 21 February 2018. Committee proceedings can be viewed live here.

Committee proceedings can also be viewed on the move, through the Houses of the Oireachtas Smartphone App, available for Apple and Android devices.