Ms Fiona O'Riordan:

I am responsible for the collection of data at household level. We do sample surveys on a regular basis - almost all the time, unlike the census, which is only done every five years. It is a much bigger event because every single household in the country is contacted, whereas we have sample surveys in which we contact about 12,000 households. They are sampled based on different stratifications and criteria. The surveys we do are, as the Senator described them, qualitative. They ask about people's experiences. As the Senator mentioned, on 30 March we will publish the sexual violence survey which we conducted last year. It spoke to people's experiences of unwanted sexual experiences.

We also had an equality module in 2019 which similarly dealt with people's experiences. We have lots of surveys like that which we do in consultation with other Departments and research bodies. The Senator also spoke about the role of the universities. We have considerable interaction with universities because we give them our research microdata files, RMFs, which are anonymised or semi-anonymised files on which they can do further research based on the questions we have asked. They are qualitative in nature, as the Senator described them. They ask about people's experiences. The problem with them in this context is that they are sample surveys and they cannot be disaggregated to the level that people would like them to be. However, we get a sense of person. On some occasions we can do different things with the data by matching them to other data etc. We do that on a regular basis.