Press Statement

Preasráiteas

07 February 2022

Go to release: ESS FAQs

The Central Statistics Office (CSO) will undergo a five-day Peer Review of its processes and outputs from 14 February 2022.

The CSO, as a member of the European Statistical System (ESS), is regularly reviewed by a team of experts from other National Statistical Offices in Europe, to ensure that all statistics produced meet the required standards and that the CSO adheres to all the principles as set out by the European Statistics Code of Practice (ES CoP).

The peer review process builds on the ESS quality framework and provides the necessary assurances and transparency to users that statistics are compiled in an objective and independent manner and in accordance with sound statistical principles and standards.

The CSO publishes a wide range of statistics on all aspects of our society in order to inform the public and decision makers. It has never been more important to ensure that our citizens know they can rely on the CSO as a trustworthy source of information when forming opinions or making decisions.

Commenting on the Peer Review, Jennifer Banim, Assistant Director General, Economic Statistics, who has been part of the Peer Review team for France and Luxembourg’s National Statistical Systems, said: “The Peer Review process is an important opportunity for National Statistical Offices across the ESS to benchmark themselves against a set of fundamental principles.  It’s very interesting to hear about the shared challenges facing both the larger and the smaller National Statistical Offices and the challenge of access to new data sources to meet evolving user needs is a regular topic of discussion during the Peer Review visits.  The rapid responses of National Statistical Offices to meet the pandemic-related data needs are also being captured as part of this round of Peer Reviews and will help to describe many of the innovations in official statistics identified in the Peer Review reports.”

This is the third Peer Review the CSO has undergone since 2007. Peer Review expert teams are made up of four European experts in official statistics, auditing and governance issues and includes at least one expert external to the ESS and one expert from Eurostat. The purpose of an ESS Peer Review is to improve quality and trust in European Statistics by assessing the compliance of the ESS with the principles of ES CoP. The result of the Peer Review is a set of recommendations and improvement actions to be implemented.

The 2022 CSO Peer Review team will be chaired by Jørgen Elmeskov, former Director-General of Statistics Denmark and chair of the Partnership Group of the ESS Committee. Any recommendations made by the Peer Review team to improve and develop the CSO’s statistical outputs will be published in the second half of the year.

External Peer Reviews are one of the methods used by the CSO to provide trust in our statistical outputs. Independent data, transparency, confidentiality and equal access to all are core elements of the CSO. Peer Reviews help provide assurances to the public and decision makers that all of the statistics produced by the CSO and the methodologies used to compile them meet the highest standards. It means we can compare statistics produced by the CSO as the Irish National Statistics Office to those produced by other National Statistics Offices that are members of the ESS.

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