Mr. Pádraig Dalton:

Again, everywhere we collect information now, we ask people to provide us with their Eircode postcodes. For the census we were able to get the Eircode postcode at the point of collection so we will now be able to produce the broad range of statistics we collected from the census down to a variety of regional breakdowns, from electoral division area up to nomenclature of territorial units for statistics, NUTS 3 level, namely, county level, and NUTS 2 level. We provide data by, for example, diocese and Garda region, so if somebody provides us with the digitised boundaries, we can build any regional structure from the bottom up because we have the Eircode postcode. We now do this across all our surveys. The Eircode postcode is now part of the core data collection within the CSO and provides us with the potential to produce far more regional data than we were able to produce previously.