In 2013 the Director-General of the Central Statistics Office (CSO), Mr. Pádraig Dalton, the Director of the Irish Prison Service, Mr Michael Donnellan, and the Director of the Probation Service, Mr Vivian Geiran signed a Memorandum of Understanding between the CSO and the Irish Prison Service and Probation Service (PDF 663KB) to ensure effective co-operation between the three agencies with regard to the production of statistics in accordance with the procedures and requirements of the Statistics Act 1993.
Both the Irish Prison Service (IPS) and Probation Service (PS) agree to provide the CSO with administrative micro-data and/or aggregate data on persons from their information systems where it is necessary for the production of statistics. The CSO use the micro-data provided by IPS and PS to generate and publicly disseminate annual recidivism statistics.