Our Role Delivering Better Data

Data stewardship is the role of ensuring the ethical and responsible creation, collection, management, use and reuse of data so that they are used for public good and benefit the full community of data users. 

As the National Statistical Institute (NSI) of Ireland, the CSO is trusted to provide this formal role of coordinating data standards across the civil and public service. The CSO also supports the use of data in the public interest by supplying various data services to public bodies, including secondments of statisticians, open data supports, ‘pathfinder projects’ (such as the CSO working with the Higher Education Authority to produce data on graduate outcomes and remuneration), safe researcher access to data (See 'Data Stewardship and Data Access' below), and methodological and quality services. 

Data stewardship is how the CSO uses its skills and services in a responsible way to realise the full potential of our national data assets for the benefit of the people of Ireland. Better data leads to better insights and outcomes.  Provision of data-informed public goods and services requires sound data governance, public trust, and data reliability. Our role as data steward aligns with and is informed by the Fundamental Principles of Official Statistics. The benefits of using agreed standards and methods include lower costs to the taxpayer, more ability to provide “real time” statistical outputs, and a reduced requirement for respondents to provide the same information to multiple organisations.  

The CSO’s long-term strategy, CSO 2030 (PDF 1,167KB) envisages that the CSO will provide statistical leadership nationally and advocate for the management of data as a strategic asset, driving the development of the national data ecosystem and championing the expansion of the National Data Infrastructure (NDI). The CSO Statement of Strategy 2020-2023 (PDF 651KB) is also available.

For Data Stewardship to work, data needs to be organised and structured; be governed appropriately; be used ethically; be protected, and the use of the data must be based on legislation.  
 
In practice this means ensuring data gathered by public authorities is done using agreed standards so findings can be defined, measured, and presented in a more consistent way. It also includes the linking of data across different areas. 
 
For example, information on household relationships or marriage is required to forecast future needs for social and economic programmes and in measuring the effect of policies and programmes. Another example is standardising the question across Government departments and agencies on current main activity status and will include harmonised response options in relation to those at work or unemployed, students, and those who are retired. 
  
The CSO is leading the work to standardise such definitions as well as the linking of data to help create better data integration and usage. Data linkage or data matching is where two or more pieces of data are put together to provide greater insight. For example, the CSO’s Irish Population Estimates from Administrative Data Sources (IPEADS) estimates the population of Ireland in between Census years by applying a CSO-developed methodology for measuring activity using administrative datasets. The result is a series of population statistics that are entirely based on administrative records. Individual privacy is strongly preserved at every stage of producing IPEADS statistics. 
 
The benefits of using administrative data, as demonstrated by IPEADS, include reduced cost, reduced burden on respondents, improved timeliness and quality, and greater frequency of results. 
 
All statistical projects that involve linkage between existing or administrative data sources are subject to the CSO’s Data Protocol and must meet a Privacy Impact Assessment. The CSO publishes a register of all projects in which it links administrative data. 
 
Under the Statistics Act,1993, the CSO has the legal right to access data collected by other civil and public bodies.  

Data stewardship, among other things, promotes the responsible collection, management, and use and reuse of data so it is used for public good and benefits the full community of data users. Data stewards manage and coordinate the interactions in the data ecosystem.   

The CSO utilises administrative data for statistical purposes under the provisions of the Statistics Act. All internal staff requiring access to data must comply with stringent governance processes before access is granted. Under the Statistics Act, the CSO may also provide access to the research community to Research Microdata Files (RMFs) to support evidence-informed policymaking. This access is granted under strict conditions.  

Our data controls include a pseudonymisation process which includes the removal of identifying information such as name and address details, and Protected Identifier Keys (PIKs) are used in place of identification numbers. This process protects the original identifier numbers while also preserving the ability to link across datasets. The process also involves rounding the date of birth to the first of the month, which allows calculation of age while protecting actual date of birth. This pseudonymisation process applies to any access request.  

When it comes to accessing RMFs by researchers, robust protocols are in place for the application and approval processes. For research access, only registered researchers from registered research organisations in Ireland can apply to access researcher datasets with more stringent approval processes applied. In addition, there are further technical safeguards in place around researcher access to ensure the confidentiality of the data. For instance, only a sample of the pseudonymised file is available to researchers. As well as these technical security measures, all names (personal and enterprise), addresses, PPSNs, and date of birth, will have been removed. Although these identifiers are removed, the datasets are still treated as confidential.  

To further protect data security, all researchers granted access to CSO data can only use that data for statistical purposes. All such researchers are appointed as Officers of Statistics which obliges them by law to respect the statistical confidentiality of data to which they have been given access. The means they are personally responsible for protecting the data and if a breach occurs, the person responsible could be subject to potential prosecution under the Statistics Act.