Due to their assiduous collection of data, supermarkets know much more about their shoppers than the shoppers themselves. It makes them informed, effective and rich. Tesco reported profits of €85.5 million in its Irish shops in 2022. Cash may be king, but data is the kingmaker.
Why is it then that the collection and dissemination of data by the State is so haphazard, with basic information uncollected, unavailable or unintelligible?
Thanks to the statisticians of the Central Statistics Office, over a decade into a housing crisis we are finally getting a handle on how many new houses are being completed each year. There are still issues but we are much closer to reality than not long ago when we were we were over-reporting completions by 58 per cent.
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The Dublin Housing Supply Co-ordination Task Force calculates housing under construction by eyeballing developments and not just paperwork. It is excellent data, but only covers Dublin and is always months in arrears. Its 2023 data is consistent with the slowdown in national housing completions in the first half of 2024 recorded by the CSO, meaning this year’s Government output target (33,450) is under severe pressure.
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Last month, speaking on South East Radio, Minister for Housing Darragh O’Brien was bullish in insisting that this year’s target would not only be met but exceeded because he knows “what’s in the pipeline”. If so, why isn’t everybody else aware of that data, including the CSO?
Data black holes abound. Whether housing, road safety or other crisis areas, we are not collecting or collating enough data from available sources nor making it publicly available
Rising new house prices inflate the value of zoned land, and the price paid for land is an important part of the cost of developing new houses (see the Kenny Report of 1973). Notwithstanding this relationship between land and housing, Ireland still has no register of land price transactions as it does for residential property. Seemingly unappreciative of how important this information is for strategically managing housing supply, the Minister for Justice has, in my view, incorrectly rejected such a register citing, among other things, the catch-all excuse of data protection and personal privacy. However, such data is available elsewhere in Europe under GDPR regulations.
Recently, there was a significant difference between the Residential Tenancies Board’s (RTB) estimate of the number of tenancies in Ireland and data from Census 2022. The census recorded some 330,632 households in the private rented sector, but the RTB recorded just 246,453 in December 2022. Somewhere along the way over 84,000 tenancies went absent without leave.
We now know reasons for this discrepancy include 48,000 informal rental agreements that don’t require registration with the RTB and some 25,000 tenancies that required registration but never were.
But hang on a second: does this mean there are many more landlords in Ireland than we’ve been told? It seems so. Further RTB research shows the number of landlords is up almost 7 per cent in the year to March 2024. Most likely eventually complying with the law. However, if a landlord sells their house, we have no official data to tell if another landlord has bought it.
Surprisingly, there were nearly 34,000 properties recorded as “available to rent” in Census 2022, a remarkable figure given the limited supply on offer publicly. The extent of the short-term let market, a lot of which is operating illegally, is an estimate. Monthly homeless statistics (14,303) exclude more than 2,300 homeless asylum seekers, as well as rough sleepers and families in domestic violence refuge centres.
Accuracy is important. Into these data vacuums slip the political extremists and lobbyists with their own data, agendas and solutions.
The absence of meaningful figures goes far beyond housing. There is no official number of data centres in the country currently consuming some 21 per cent of our electricity supply annually. The best estimate is 82.
Similarly in road safety. The European directive on open data “mandates the release of public sector data in free and open formats”, yet it is difficult to get useful data on the issue in Ireland. Here we are very much at odds with our neighbours. At least 10 European countries have more publicly available information than the fragments that get released in Ireland, even to officials directly responsible for road safety.
In the UK, Stats 19 provides road safety data which is updated every six months and is available for the public to view and download. In Sweden, Strada (Swedish Traffic Accident Data Acquisition) combines police-accident and hospital-injury data which complement each other as many road accidents go unreported but casualties end up in hospital, especially cyclists. Although cyclists and pedestrians accounted for nearly 30 per cent of all Irish road fatalities in 2023, Ireland doesn’t systematically connect emergency hospital and Garda information.
Average EU road deaths are down 10.3 per cent since 2019; Ireland’s are up 32.1 per cent. Very much the wrong direction of travel.
A reluctance by coroners to record suicides on death certificates, especially single-vehicle collisions when the evidence points to suicide, also creates inaccurate statistics and an underreporting of the issue. In 2020, the last year of available data, 504 people died by suicide, with just one recorded case of “intentional self-harm by crashing of motor vehicle”. This is not credible.
The absence of meaningful figures goes far beyond housing. There is no official number of data centres in the country
Data black holes abound. Whether housing, road safety or other crisis areas, we are not collecting or collating enough data from available sources, especially over time periods, nor making it publicly available. We are sometimes using the wrong sources, and data is not being released as it should be, even to those with a vital role to play. Government departments are discontinuing or changing data series, making meaningful analysis difficult. Information is taken down from State websites and simply deleted, which conveniently helps politicians and officials avoid scrutiny and accountability.
This all leads to contestations over rudimentary information (housing completions, number of landlords), stymies potentially life-saving research (road safety) and facilitates policy-by-anecdote (take your pick).
Poor data allows for misinformation, the distortion of facts and ultimately the poor allocation of taxpayer-funded resources. Good data does the opposite. Just ask Tesco.
Dr Lorcan Sirr is senior lecturer in housing at the Technological University Dublin
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