Sean Barrett (Independent)

I join Senators Conway and Mooney in welcoming and praising the Minister of State, Deputy Kehoe. It is extremely important to have a strong Central Statistics Office, CSO. It is also important to recognise its great level of expertise and its many achievements worldwide. The person missing from this debate - I am sure he is looking on from some vantage point - is the late Garrett FitzGerald, who was the leading customer of the CSO for many years. He is now frequenting another CSO, namely, the celestial statistics office, and I do not doubt that he is pestering St. Peter and others to ensure that they submit their data on time.

The Minister of State indicated that:

The director general of the office is fully independent in regard to professional standards and the content and timing of the information published by CSO. This independence is essential to ensuring that the public can have complete confidence that the statistics are impartial; and it allows debate to focus on the implications for society of the numbers published.

This is most important and it has been a feature of the Central Statistics Office during its lifetime. The first director, Dr. Roy Geary, was absolutely eminent in the sphere of international statistics and he published hundreds of journal articles. He used to write such articles in the evenings have spent all day carrying out his work on statistics. Dr. Geary was one of the leading innovators in his field. His successor, Dr. Donal McCarthy, became the president of University College Cork, UCC. This is, therefore, an area in which there is massive expertise and the latter has been built upon the independence to which the Minister of State referred. I ask that he bring back to the Cabinet the message that we should have an economic service, for want of a better term, which is similar to and as independent and professional as the CSO. The Wright report highlighted the serious deficiencies that exist in the level of economic expertise available to the Government.

Sir Gus O'Donnell, secretary to the British Cabinet, joined the UK Civil Service as an economist and perfected a system to facilitate information flows from other economists throughout that service. He is due to retire soon and with a name like his I am sure he would make himself available to advise the Government - perhaps he could speak in the Seanad - on how to encourage greater professionalism. I am of the view that the CSO provides the model in the context of what constitutes a successfully operating public agency.

The Minister of State also indicated that "all Departments are now required to prepare data strategies and a number of Departments and offices have established statistical units staffed by professional statisticians on secondment from the Central Statistics Office." On several occasions, particularly in the presence of the Minister of State at the Department of at the Department of Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation, Deputy Sherlock, the House has discussed the problems that exist in the context of quantification, statistics, etc. The CSO has an international reputation and perhaps some of its staff could come to the Houses to explain to Members - perhaps in the audio-visual room - the position with regard to newly emerging statistics and so on. The staff on secondment to whom the Minister of State referred could also spend time bringing Members up to date on statistics and quantitative methods. In view of the fact that a large group of students were present in the Gallery until a moment ago, perhaps the staff in question could also visit schools in order to educate students on this subject. There is a need to overcome Irish people's fear of quantification and statistics. The CSO could lead the way in this regard.

When Lord Beveridge retired from his position as director of the London School of Economics, he stated in his farewell address that "economic and political theorising not based on facts and not controlled by facts assuredly does lead nowhere". There is no question but that we need the facts. Lord Beveridge also stated that it "matters little how wrong we are with our existing theories if we are honest and careful with our observations". The information the Minister of State has brought before the House today is extremely important and I am of the opinion that all discussions on public policy in Ireland should be informed by far more quantification and data than is currently the case.

There is a long and honourable tradition of work in the sphere of statistics and quantification in this country. We have neglected this in a way and pretended that we are backward when it comes to quantification. Some 38 years before the American Economics Association was established and 44 years before the Royal Economic Society in the UK, undergraduates in Trinity College Dublin founded the Statistical and Social Inquiry Society of Ireland, with the great John Kells Ingram one of the founders. The importance of statistics is illustrated in that regard. That learned society, with very close links to the Central Statistics Office, CSO, is one of the oldest learned societies in the world. Ingram would also have been known for his patriotic poetry about 1798 but the society was set up during the Great Famine to illustrate how important it was to have statistics.

The pressure of social problems demanding attention led the society's youthful founders to attempt the establishment of such an institution. It has not occupied itself with dilettante statistics collected with no special purpose or tending to no definite conclusion but has from the first applied itself in the spirit of earnest inquiry to the most important questions affecting the condition of the country. An extract from its journal reads:

Our business is to discover and demonstrate, by the application of scientific principles, the legislative action appropriate to each phase of society and each group of economic conditions. At what precise time, and in what particular form, our conclusions should be adopted in practice, is a question of political expediency, which those who are acquainted with the varying exigencies of public life can determine better than we. But it is encouraging to know that in endeavouring, by our researches and discussions, to overthrow error and to establish truth, we are labouring at no unpractical - no hopeless- task; that any wise suggestion developed here may one day become a beneficent reality; a living agency for good; and that thus, without sitting in the councils of the State, or mingling in the strife of parties, we may, each of us, do something towards the improvement of the institutions of our country.

Patriotism shines through that and there was a practicality in getting the society up and running, which led to a statistics office. It is an inspiration.

Another aspect mentioned by my colleague, Senator Conway, should see the CSO commended. For years, the statistical abstract had a Northern Ireland supplement. Unfortunately, after 1922 the two parts of Ireland did not have a dialogue for about 40 or 50 years but the CSO was a terrific exception with a statistical abstract for Northern Ireland as a precedent we have happily followed to the present harmonious state of North-South relations.

The Central Statistics Office is a model in professionalism and how bodies can reach to other Departments in order to overcome quantitative deficiencies. That should be extended to our schools and education and there is much expertise in Cork and its university's department of statistics. It has been a very valuable national asset and people like Messrs. Roy Geary and Michael McCarthy have had an international reputation. I would commend this body at all times, nearly as strongly as Dr. Garrett FitzGerald used to. I wish it well in development.

Perhaps we could get data earlier? We had all the necessary data to indicate that the banking system was about to implode but so many mountains of data come to us that we may have taken our eye off the ball. Every time we get important CSO data perhaps we could use the audio-visual room to view it, and perhaps personnel in Cork could explain data to Deputies and Senators. That would be another improvement on what is already a terrific record.