Mr. Brian Ring:

I thank Senator Conway-Walsh for her questions. I would have been part of the digest team since 2009, so I would have been involved in the statistics for 2013.

The Senator is absolutely correct that we would have informed users of the caveats around agricultural employment. We would have urged caution in the interpretations of the trends at that time. In terms of the message behind what we were saying, we would have acknowledged that we had issued with our figures for agriculture but what we had said at the time and what we still believe is that the sum of the parts was correct, that the overall change in employment at that time was correct but the distribution across what we referred to as the NACE or the industrial sectors at the time was where we had the problem. At the time that would have arisen from the work we have done, which we are continuing to do at present. We are still working towards retrospectively revising the data to take account of what the Senator is saying. We are capturing data from houses which would be termed agricultural. Agriculture would stand out uniquely among the 14 broad sectors from which we produce data as being very focused on the location of the person in employment because agriculture would be very closely linked to farmers and farmers are very closely linked to farm dwelling. What we would have said was that we were happy with the overall figures we would have published at that time to which the Senator refers but we would flagged caution at that time in 2013 about the distribution across the sector.