Mr. Pádraig Dalton:

I thank the committee for the invitation to the Central Statistics Office to attend today's meeting. The Central Statistics Office operates under the terms of the Statistics Act 1993, which sets out the mandate of the office and the standards by which it must conduct its business. Independent, objective, trusted and high quality official statistics are the cornerstone of any developed democratic society. A key element in ensuring that trust and quality is the legal guarantee in regard to the confidentiality of statistical returns made to the CSO.
The CSO compiles a broad range of official statistics across a range of subject areas, including social, environmental, economic and business statistics. Some of its key outputs include the measures of GDP and GNP, debt and deficit, employment and unemployment, income and poverty, inflation, travel and tourism, demography and the related indicators of migration and population. Official statistics have always played an important role in informing decision-making across a whole host of users of statistics, including those in the policy domain. This is still very much the case and is a considerable focus of the CSO. However, increasingly official statistics are being used for monitoring purposes by a range of institutions, national and international, and by the markets in terms of monitoring the ongoing performance of our economy and society as a whole. This shift has been evident to all of us over the past number of years. The CSO has been very conscious of the focus placed on its data by the IMF, ECB, EU Commission and, of course, the markets. As a result of this shift in focus many of the activities of the CSO are now the subject of formal monitoring and compliance visits by the EU Commission to validate our statistical processes and adherence to the prescribed statistical rules and methodologies.
As set out in the Statistics Act 1993, the functions of the CSO shall be the collection, compilation, extraction and dissemination for statistical purposes of information relating to economic, social and general activities and conditions in the State. The CSO's mandate does not include any formal role in respect of genealogical activities. However, we are acutely aware of the strong genealogical interest in historic records and the success of the online release of the Census 1901 and 1911 records. Section 35 of the Statistics Act provides for a 100 year rule in regard to the release of subsequent census of population records. This is the only exception specified in the Act.
Due to the nature of its work, the CSO is entrusted by its respondents, business and person-based, with a large quantity of extremely sensitive information. The legal guarantee provided by the CSO to these respondents is central to its ability to collect information and is central to many of the official statistics compiled by CSO on a regular basis. The information give to the CSO is subject to the conditions on use of information and statistical confidentiality as set out in sections 32 and 33 of the Statistics Act 1993. It may only be used for statistical purposes and must be kept confidential.
In this context, maintaining compliance levels or response rates is a continuous challenge for all national statistical institutes. A key element in the achievement of this objective is the integrity and reputation of the CSO in terms of protecting information provided to it for statistical compilation purposes. The CSO recognises the work of the committee and the plan to capture the full value of our genealogical heritage within existing legislation. We are happy to explore ways that this office can contribute to furthering the goals of the committee, while maintaining the integrity of the confidentiality commitment given to respondents and the confidentiality of the information provided by the CSO.