Clare Daly (Dublin Fingal, Independent)
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593. To ask the Minister for Employment Affairs and Social Protection further to Parliamentary Question No. 223 of 28 February 2018, the reason a breakdown of the top 20 employers is not available to her Department; and when it will be available. [11563/18]

Regina Doherty (Meath East, Fine Gael)
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There are two reasons why it is not possible to provide data at the level of individual employers: one is technical, and the other concerns statistical confidentiality. At a technical level, reliably identifying a single employer, regardless of the details of corporate structures, requires the existence of an agreed ‘unique business identifier’ (UBI). However, a UBI does not currently exist in Ireland. The creation of such an identifier is identified as a key priority in the National Statistics Board’s A World Class Statistical System for Ireland: Strategic Priorities for Official Statistics 2015-2020, and is under active consideration at whole-of-government level.

More importantly still, in terms of statistical confidentiality, even if employer-level information could readily be produced, it would not be appropriate to make public information identifying individual businesses.

Notwithstanding the above, in general we can readily produce an industry sector (‘NACE’) breakdown of employers, similar to the breakdowns routinely published by the Central Statistics Office (CSO) in many statistical outputs. For further details on this classification, please see