Pandemic Unemployment Payment Recipients by Local Electoral Area from March 2020 to October 2021

Source and scope of the Pandemic Unemployment Payment

The Pandemic Unemployment Payment (PUP) is a scheme set up by the Government in response to the loss of income for those whose employment had been affected due to the COVID-19 pandemic in Ireland. It is compiled from returns made to the CSO by the Department of Social Protection (DSP). Payments under the scheme commenced on the week ending 22 March 2020 and will be reported as part of the Live Register release while the scheme is in place. The PUP was closed to new applicants from 8 July 2021. Under the Economic Recovery Plan, there will also be a gradual reduction in rates from 7 September 2021, while the process of possible transition of PUP recipients to a jobseeker’s payment began on 26 October 2021.

National Data Infrastructure

The National Data Infrastructure (NDI) plays an integral part in facilitating the CSO to develop new and improved statistical products for the benefit of citizens and policymakers. The core concept of the NDI involves the collection, maintenance and storage on all public-sector data holdings, of the associated PPSN, Eircode and Unique Business Identifier (UBI) whenever they are relevant to Public Sector Body transactions with customers. The DSP PUP application system has 95% of online applicants providing an Eircode. This report demonstrates how the collection and inclusion of the Eircode on public-sector data holdings greatly facilitates the provision of official statistics broken down by area or region. 

Local Electoral Area assignment

These statistics were compiled using data provided by the Department of Social Protection (DSP). Locations were extracted from the PUP dataset using Eircodes, and the Central Record System (CRS) dataset using Eircode and address string data. Eircodes provided by PUP took precedence. For individuals where these were not present, CRS was used to provide an Eircode. For the remaining cases, CRS address strings were used to identify Electoral Divisions (EDs); an address matching tool was used for this, using parameters to ensure an estimated 95% precision accuracy. The resulting Eircodes and EDs were then mapped to LEAs. Due to the way in which LEAs are constructed, a small number of EDs are split into multiple LEAs. Of the total number of 3,441 EDs, there were 42 that were in multiple LEAs. Where this occurred, they were assigned to a single LEA based on the majority area coverage.