In this report, we make use of the analytical approach previously developed by the
ESRI (Keane et al., 2014). We then provide an up-to-date picture of the overall
gender impacts of budgetary policy from the start of the recession (2008) to 2018.
This period is split into an austerity period, running from 2008 to 2012, and a
recovery period, running from 2012 to 2018. This allows us to identify how the
gender impact of Irish tax-benefit policy has evolved from austerity to recovery.
Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, we embed this analytical capacity within
SWITCH, the ESRI’s tax-benefit model. This ensures that, in future, gender impact
assessment of budgets can be routinely undertaken by government departments3
and by ESRI researchers. This can be done both in the development of options prior
to the budget, to help gender-proof policy reforms, and in the assessment of the
impact of policies actually chosen in the budget. The project, therefore, not only
helps to answer questions about the impact of past policy but will also serve to
ensure that the need for gender impact assessment of tax and welfare policies – as
identified, inter alia, in the Programme for Government (2016) – can be met more
readily in future
