The principal role holders in this project are the Department of Health and Minister for Health, under whose auspices, specific permission for the sharing of the underlying health related datasets with the CSO has been granted; the HSE, as the operational body generating the datasets and the Data Controller of first instance; and the CSO, whose role is to receive, securely process and make available pseudonymised records for statistical use by specific members of staff of the CSO, epidemiologists and other approved health analysts involved in advising the Government on Ireland’s public health response to the COVID-19 pandemic and informing the public regarding the evolution of the pandemic health situation in Ireland.
These transfers are carried out under legal authority, using Section 11 of the Statistics Act, 1993 (co-operation and liaison with other public authorities and persons), while access to data from each of the medical databases is specifically provided for in law under Section 30(2)(b) of the Statistics Act, 1993, necessitating the formal permission of the Minister for Health, which was granted in writing on 31 March 2020.
On receipt of each dataset, the CSO becomes sole Data Controller, in succession to the HSE. This means that decisions in respect of the means and the purposes of processing of this data, once in possession of the CSO, then fall under the sole authority of the Director General. By law, pursuant to Section 13 of the Statistics Act 1993, the Director General of the Central Statistics Office has sole responsibility for, and is independent in, the exercise of the functions of deciding on the statistical methodology and professional standards used by the CSO, the content of statistical releases and publications and the timing and methods of dissemination of statistics compiled by the Office.
Section 30 of the same Act stipulates that information furnished under the Act shall be used for statistical compilation and analysis purposes only, meaning that no processing of data supplied to the CSO is permitted unless it is for statistical purposes and no other purpose shall be permitted. Section 31 enforces a prohibition on disclosure of information provided under the Act in identifiable format, which means that the Office itself, in making data available for further analysis, research or dissemination, may do so only in pseudonymised format.
Taken together, these requirements mean that data provided to the CSO may be used exclusively for statistical purposes and may not be disclosed to any third party such as to render the related individual or undertaking identifiable. These protections are designed to ensure that data furnished to the CSO for statistical purposes enjoys the highest level of legal protection against further use or re-use for any purpose outside of statistical analysis.
Go to: Stakeholder Engagement
Learn about our data and confidentiality safeguards, and the steps we take to produce statistics that can be trusted by all.