Ms Colette Bennett:

First of all, it is rigorous. I cannot speak about whether there are similar organisations doing similar things with the same data. There does not seem to be a coalition of us doing it, but in regard to our own methodology, what we do is we select data that are comparable across the EU14 and then we overlay the dataset. The data come from official sources such as EUROSTAT and also Departments and trustworthy sources such as Transparency International, for example. Then we have overarching rules around relevance and applicability, so the data must be directly related, either an exact match, or a very similar match in terms of monitoring the SDGs. Some indicators for the data that we might look at for stunting or wasting would be less relevant to Ireland in terms of malnutrition. When we talk about hunger, we talk more about food sustainability. We also look at quality. The vast majority of statistics are from official sources: EUROSTAT, UN datasets, the OECD, the World Bank, the World Health Organization, Transparency International and Gallup.

We look for the most recent available data, but some data are still a couple of years behind. That is why our health data set is not taking account of Covid just yet. We hope that will be comparable for next year. For coverage, there must be something comparable across all 14 states. Otherwise, the index falls apart. We can only include indicators where we have the data availability for all 14 of the EU countries that we are looking at.