Dr. Nat O'Connor:

The main poverty statistics are gathered by the Central Statistics Office, CSO, which is independent of the Department of Social Protection. Its method is national survey. The Deputy is quite right to say that it may not be going into homeless services or family hubs, but it generally does a good job of balancing its survey. It also looks at welfare rate data and Revenue data to make sure it has the full income distribution. We would be quite confident that the survey on income and living conditions, SILC, data from the CSO is quite accurate and the exclusion from survey of the couple of thousand people in homeless services would not skew it that much.