In order to facilitate the use of open source technologies, the CSO has developed the 'csodata' R package to allow fast and easy access to PxStat tables for users of the R programming language. This package is now available on CRAN, the largest repository of R packages, at https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=csodata. The package is also available on GitHub at https://github.com/CSOIreland/csodata . This package makes use of the PxStat API in order to retrieve PxStat tables and then imports them into R as a data frame which users can analyse at their leisure.

The package can be used to download all PxStat tables, as well as a table of contents listing all current tables. In addition, geographic data files covering Ireland in varying degrees of granularity can be downloaded from the CSO website using the package for the creation of maps. Functions are available to examine and search all available titles by keyword, as well as examine the metadata of selected tables. Downloaded data can be cached for quicker retrieval.

A quick start guide can be viewed at https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/csodata/vignettes/quick_start_guide.html to help new users jump into using the csodata package.

The Government of Ireland is dedicated to promoting and facilitating the use of open technologies and open data. Since the Open Data Initiative in 2014 this has been the under the oversight of The Department of Public Expenditure and Reform. The current policy is set out in two documents: The Open Data Strategy 2017-2022 and the Public Service Data strategy 2019-2023. The quality and maturity of Ireland's open data has improved rapidly, being ranked as having the highest data maturity overall in the EU for three consecutive years (2017-2019), after starting at #20 in 2015. The csodata package continues these efforts to make public sector produced data both open and widely accessible.