Ms Sinéad Gibney:

While I appreciate data safeguards are required, we come up against this reluctance all the time to collect and publish disaggregated data. Particularly in our work around the public sector equality and human rights duty, there is this reluctance around the collection of equality data over legal concerns. We are absolutely clear that the collection of the equality data, including special categories of personal data, can and should be undertaken by public bodies in compliance with European and Irish data protection legislation, GDPR and the Data Protection Act. That provides that the personal data is for the specific purpose of ensuring that there is no discrimination in carrying out functions. In other words, if it is clearly defined and for the purposes of promoting equality, it can be collected lawfully.