Jack Chambers (Dublin West, Fianna Fail)
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The CSO is Ireland's national statistical institute and is responsible for the production, co-ordination and qualitative oversight of official statistics for Ireland. The CSO is an independent office of the Civil Service, under the aegis of the Taoiseach. The National Statistics Board, with the agreement of the Taoiseach, has the general function of guiding the overall strategic direction of the CSO under the Statistics Act 1993. This independent position reflects international best practice for the organisation of official statistics. The role of the director general of the CSO, as prescribed by the Statistics Act 1993, provides that the officeholder act independently and exercise sole responsibility in professional statistical matters.

EU legislation introduced in 2015 fundamentally changed the role of national statistical institutes throughout the Union. Following the enactment of this legislation, the director general of the CSO now has responsibility for co-ordinating and overseeing the quality of all European official statistics in Ireland. It is thus the responsibility of the CSO to ensure that all compilers of European statistics in Ireland adhere to the quality and methodological standards set out by the EU and detailed in the European statistics code of practice. Under the terms of the Statistics Act 1993, the director general may request any public authority to consult and co-operate with him or her for the purpose of assessing the potential of records as a source of statistical information. In addition, the Act stipulates that a public authority shall consult with the director general where it intends to introduce, revise or extend the retrieval of information or make a statistical survey.

There is a significant international dimension to the work of the CSO. The EU institutions - EUROSTAT and the European Central Bank, ECB, primarily - the International Monetary Fund, IMF, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, OECD, and other international bodies are all important users of official statistics. These bodies also have a significant role in defining and monitoring standards for the compilation of comparable information. The CSO subscribes to the standards set out in the UN's fundamental principles of official statistics and the European statistics code of practice. Indeed, the CSO will undergo a review of its alignment with these standards in February 2022 known as a EUROSTAT peer review. The review process forms part of the European statistical system strategy to monitor the implementation of the code of practice. The objective of such reviews is to consider the compliance of members with the code of practice to ensure the implementation of the common quality framework underpinning European statistics and to help the statistical authorities to further improve and develop their national statistical systems. The reviews cover all the member states of the EU and the European Free Trade Association, EFTA, as well as EUROSTAT. The CSO will be assessed under the 16 principles of the European statistics code of practice. The outcome of the peer review will be a set of recommendations to assist the CSO to further improve and develop the Irish statistical system.

The CSO plays a vital role in the functioning of the State in providing independent and verifiable data to citizens and policymakers on a broad range of topics including social, economic and environmental issues. The ability of the CSO to inform has been evident throughout the pandemic. It delivered on the vast majority of the planned statistical work programme for 2021, publishing 439 releases and publications. Of these, 40 were new products providing insight into issues as varied as the business impact of Brexit on SMEs, productivity in Ireland in the period 2010 to 2019, the rental sector in Ireland and ecosystem accounts.

The CSO has continued to publish a series of new surveys, outputs and formats to capture the evolution of Ireland's economy and society since the Covid-19 outbreak. Alongside the new products developed and delivered to provide additional insight, the CSO has provided statistical and analytical expertise and new data services to support the analysis of health data sources in a safe and secure environment. The CSO has continued to supported epidemiological modelling, analysis of both health and real-time data, and analysis to provide insight regarding trends and identifying emerging issues, all to support central government's response to the pandemic.

The planned 2021 census of population was deferred because of the Covid-19 pandemic and will now take place on 3 April 2022. The publicity campaign for the ten-week live-census field operation will commence with a launch on 3 March and cover all media channels, informing people about the census and their obligations and encouraging responses. The delivery of forms to the public will commence at the end of February, with all forms expected to be collected before the end of May. The processing of the forms will begin immediately on receipt and is expected to run until the end of December. A preliminary population count will be released before the end of June. The CSO is making every effort to ensure that the census being undertaken will be comprehensive, inclusive and safe and will provide valuable and accurate data for our country in the years ahead.

The CSO has developed a significant new national survey on the prevalence of sexual violence in Ireland. The survey involves the collection of highly sensitive personal data from householders in a manner that is confidential, ethical and designed to support accurate and reliable survey results. Achieving an appropriate sample, ensuring confidentiality and offering appropriate supports to participating householders and CSO staff are all key priorities. A pilot survey was conducted between April and June 2021, which has informed arrangements for the formal survey, the field operation of which is planned to commence in June 2022 and run until November.

Work is progressing on the data collection and processing of the next wave of the State's longitudinal study of children and youth, Growing Up in Ireland, from 2023. A questionnaire for the pilot survey of the 25-year-old cohort will go into the field in April or May 2022. Planning is under way to return face-to-face collection at airports and ports, which ceased in March 2020.

The household budget survey, which was delayed because of its requirement for in-household interaction with a CSO field interviewer, will go into the field later this year, surveying all members of a sampled household on their expenditure. Data collected from this survey are used for many purposes but are now required to re-weight the consumer price index. The CSO has also continued to develop new interactive graphics and infographics, new formats such as bulletins and frontier series, and outputs to provide the additional insight needed by the public, businesses and policymakers both on the impact of the pandemic and across more general social, economic and environmental issues. The CSO produced 189 press releases and 127 infographics in 2021 to support understanding of the data and provide insight for citizens, businesses and policymakers alike.

The CSO has continued to publish key economic indicators and tracked the impact of the crisis on business sectors and the economy via monthly exports and imports of goods, the quarterly national accounts, government deficit and debt, the quarterly balance of payments, the labour force survey, the monthly unemployment and live register, the survey on income and living conditions, births, deaths and population estimates, the consumer price index and the harmonised index of consumer prices, the wholesale price index, monthly industrial production and turnover, and the retail sales index, among others.

Being both trustworthy and confidential are core strategic values for the CSO. Security is embedded in its culture. Significant attention and awareness are allocated to the protection of CSO data and information systems from unauthorised access, use, disclosure, disruption, modification or destruction. Continuing development of the organisation's security capability is ongoing. A series of both practical and tactical measures are being implemented to militate against cyberattacks. These include, but are not limited to, security reviews, annual cyber training, continuous strengthening of data governance and the ongoing deployment of new technology security initiatives throughout the organisation.

As Ireland continues to move out of the pandemic, the CSO will provide necessary insights into how our economy and society is reacting and progressing. It is crucial that the office has sustainable, secure access to data and can reuse high value data sources in the form of administrative data and some private data sources to provide timely and accurate data that are meaningful to policymakers.

The quality of data is crucial and the CSO is driving the building of national data infrastructure and the use of unique identifiers such as the personal public service number, PPSN, Eircode postcodes and business identifiers to ensure that data throughout the Civil Service and public service is collected, managed and shared efficiently and effectively. This work will support the Civil Service renewal action plan themes of digital first and embedding innovation and evidence-informed policy and services.

The CSO has the unique expertise to support and deliver on both these themes within the office and across the Civil Service. This will build on the quality of data across the data ecosystem, which will support the delivery of official statistics and deliver insights for the creation and evaluation of policy.

The office is also embarking on a digital transformation journey, enabling it to modernise and provide for the capability to meet increasing Government, business and citizen expectations for digital services. A digital first census forms the centrepiece, enabling the citizen to complete future censuses of population online. The office has obtained €1.5 million from the national recovery and resilience plan for the development of an online platform for data collection. This funding will assist with the planning and implementation of the digital census programme of work on a multi-annual basis. The CSO has acquired this funding for five years to a total value of more than €9 million.

Turning to the office's budget, the net allocation for 2022 is €103.485 million. The increase in 2022 reflects the cyclical impact of CSO’s activities, primarily for the additional staff required for the 2022 census. This census of population includes an uplift in census headquarter staff plus provision for more than 5,500 temporary staff, who are required to distribute and collect the census forms.

Members of the public are increasingly aware of, and able to access, statistics and indicators on the social, economic and environmental issues, as demonstrated by more than 23 million web hits on the CSO website and more than 19 million hits on PXStat in 2021.

The funding provided reflects the Government’s commitment to the CSO to meet its obligations under national and EU law, continue to develop the Irish statistical system, deliver a census of population and produce new outputs to meet domestics demand through the provision of trusted and robust official statistics.