Pat Rabbitte (Dublin South West, Labour)

It is a constructive point and purely intended as such. We need to take urgent action on the matter and the answer provided by the Minister of State bears out statistically the truth of that.

In respect of the one sixth of houses in the jurisdiction that are not habitually occupied, what rule of thumb did the CSO apply? We had some exchanges previously on the issue of the shortfall — where enumerators returned time after time to houses and still failed to get people to comply — and the Minister asked the senior statistician to write to me on it. He made the point that they were able to persuade the majority of those of the need to comply. However, in the case of those who did not comply, for whatever reason, have any prosecutions been initiated?

The letter I received states that in a small number of cases instructions were issued to field staff to provide direct estimates of the age, sex and nationality of individuals whom they knew to be present, but who went out of their way to avoid enumeration. Is this saying that when enumerators visited a house or an apartment block, they were asked to make a stab at the number of persons they believed to be resident there and that as a result a guesstimate was made of the number of people who sought to evade compliance? Is that guesstimate included in the figures from the CSO? In respect of those who were not persuaded to comply, have prosecutions been or will they be initiated?

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