This evening, Thursday 21st November, the CSO will launch a new Code of Practice for the compilation and dissemination of Official Statistics in Ireland. This launch will be hosted by the Statistical and Social Inquiry Society of Ireland at a special symposium ‘Safeguarding trust in Official Statistics - launching a Code of Practice for the Irish Statistical System’.
This new Code of Practice will be launched by the Director-General of CSO. There will also be contributions from Dr Patricia O’Hara (Chairperson of the National Statistics Board and member of the European Statistical Governance Advisory Board), Mr Walter Radermacher (Director General of Eurostat) and Mr Martin Frazer (Secretary General of the Dept. of the Taoiseach).
In November 2011, the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform published the ‘Public Service Reform’ plan which outlined how customer services and public sector efficiency was to be improved over the coming four or five years. This plan explicitly recognized that good quality data and information was essential to deliver on these ambitions. As part of this plan, the Central Statistics Office (CSO) was assigned the task of developing ‘a code of practice and standards for the gathering and use of data for statistical purposes in the Public Service’. The Code of Practice for the Irish Statistical System addresses this directive.
The Code of Practice for the Irish Statistical System will help to align national practices with European norms. While a code of practice for official European statistics has been established for almost a decade a European Statistics Code of Practice was first published in 2005, a national code of practice providing guidance on the compilation of official statistics has never been put in place. The aim of the code outlined in this paper, is to provide a set of simple guidelines or rules that are designed to synchronise standards across all official statistics in Ireland and not just those published by CSO. The Code of Practice for the Irish Statistical System are consistent with, but only a subset of the European code, reflecting the current maturity and absorptive capacity of the Irish Statistical System.
The idea of an ‘Irish Statistical System’ was clearly envisaged in the drafting of the 1993 Statistics Act, but the concept was first clearly articulated by the National Statistics Board in their seminal 2003 – 2008 ‘Strategy for Statistics’. Ten years later, the launch of the Code of Practice for the Irish Statistical System is now another important milestone in the formal development and acknowledgement of that system. To support the Code, a website (www.isscop.ie) has been developed along with a formal logo to help brand the code and the system itself.
The symposium will be held on Thursday 21st, November 2013 at 6pm at the Royal Irish Academy, 19 Dawson Street, Dublin 2. Everyone is welcome.
For further information contact
Ann Hickey on 021 453 5508
Fax 021 453 5492
E-mail: isscop@cso.ie
Central Statistics Office 21 November 2013
– ENDS –
-- ENDS --
