Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

No, that is perfect. I have been engaged with the Central Statistics Office, CSO, on how it calculates inflation. Obviously, the average figure is accurate and all the rest, but it does not really reflect the fact that we all, as individuals, are placed on the income scale and have different baskets and, therefore, have different rates of inflation.

As Dr. Doorley knows, the Office for National Statistics, ONS, in Britain has changed as a result of the campaigning that has been done by the activist and author who forced it to change the way that it will calculate inflation. Has Dr. Doorley or the ESRI any view on the fact that the average rate of inflation, which is used for indexation, for social welfare rates and for so many policy discussions, does not reflect the real impact on lower-income households? I thought what the Governor of the Central Bank of Ireland, Gabriel Makhlouf, did was interesting. It was a really a desktop exercise that broke it down into the poorest 20% of households in the State and the richest 20%, if you want to call them that or the highest earners with highest incomes in the State. The difference in the inflation rate between those two categories of individuals is 0.8%. Obviously, the lower one’s income, the higher the inflation rate. In the ESRI's view, would that breakdown of inflation based on decile - it also has an impact in terms of rural-urban - be a helpful addition to policy development?