Ms Anne Vaughan:

I thank Dr. O'Reardon, and thank the Chair.

Obviously, I agree with my fellow commission members. The reason they have referred to me is that, with another hat on, I chair the National Statistics Board which provides strategic guidance to the Central Statistics Office. It is totally outside the commission work here but the references we made certainly are of interest to the Central Statistics Office, CSO. I suppose I would say this but the CSO has made tremendous strides in the national data infrastructure which is basically joining up, as Dr. Roantree has said, on an anonymised basis, administrative data using the public service number and the Eircode. There is a lot happening in that space. Researchers will always want more, but there has been good progress and there is more to be made in allowing access on, obviously, particular protocols, etc. Certainly, the statistics office and the CSO will be looking at what the recommendations are here but, in principle, will facilitate this. One only has to look at the outputs from the CSO to see what is being produced and, in Covid times, what was produced quickly. Absolutely, we are open to that.