Madam, – Bernard Byrne in his letter (March 26th) expressed concerns regarding the security of census data given the involvement of outside contractors “this time round”. I would like to reassure Mr Byrne that the CSO has put measures in place to protect the confidentiality of the 2011 census data.
The situation is no different from previous censuses in 2002 and 2006 when the same outside contractors were engaged to provide services for the development of IT systems similar to those being provided for the 2011 census. Furthermore, CACI International is not involved in any way in the preparation or delivery of systems for the Irish census. Its subsidiary CACI (UK) Ltd has been engaged to provide services related to the development of IT systems that will be used by CSO for the scanning and processing of the completed census forms.
All Census 2011 forms will be processed in CSO’s census office located in Swords and all staff who are employed to work on the processing of the 2011 census data will be directly employed by the CSO and will be signed-up as Officers of Statistics under the Statistics Act 1993 which legally prohibits them from divulging confidential statistical data of any sort.
The CSO has total confidence that the measures that we take to protect the confidentiality of census data are highly effective and it remains our highest priority to ensure that our record remains unblemished in this regard. – Yours, etc,