Denis Naughten (Roscommon-Galway, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I thank Mr. Mulherin for his opening comments. I want to pick up on his last comment. I know this is slightly different within his Department from within the Department of Social Protection, but the latter produces a set of statistics on a quarterly and annual basis. That is going to be used initially by the committee in starting its engagement on the indicators. The reason I am saying that is that there is a huge body of data that is being collected by every Department. What we want to do is get the right metric. We do not want to reinvent the wheel. There are a huge amount of metrics being collected on a regular basis from the Department, and what we found with the Department of Social Protection is that the committee members feel the correct basket of data is not being monitored. What would be of assistance to us is for the Department to furnish us with the data that it collects and has, so that we could use that as a template to look at what are or would be the effective indicators, rather than us trying to reinvent the wheel.

We would like to get detail on the breadth of data and statistics. In the Department's case it is probably more financial than statistical with regard to persons because it is a different Department, the Department of Social Protection. However, we would like to get that breadth of statistics so we could look at that and maybe some more effective indicators that we could both agree will deliver on the Department's objectives, but also give us a perspective of what is happening on a daily basis. I will leave that with Mr. Mulherin.