Vacancy: Director General of Central Statistics Office

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15 replies on “Vacancy: Director General of Central Statistics Office”

They have omitted the requirement for the successful candidate to have flammable pants, surely.

The CSO has 700 permanent staff? What?

I had assumed there would be about 20 of them – 50 at a stretch.

The UK’s Office of Nation Statistics has about 3,302 staff, so we have slightly less than three times the staff on a per capita basis.

That certainly sounds worse than it is, with much of the tabulating work now being done in an automated way the core staff required for statistical analysis is probably quote similar whatever the size of your country.

That having been said I would be interested in comparing the chiefs/indians/layers ratios between the UK, France’s INSEE and Ireland in various government and private structures.

I had always thought Ireland’s love of long and steep hierarchies and need to replicate the administrative structure of countries ten times our size is nonpareil but I do not have the hard evidence to back it up.

If only we had a national statistics office well staffed enough to compile this kind of information!

@Zhou

A two week window is the standard amount of time….. when it’s already been decided who’s getting the job.

@Bork

“Hire John The Optimist.”

Jesus wept. That guy’s even better at PR than I am.

@PR Guy
The Gardai won’t be impressed.
A whole battalion of men and yet they have not published a comprehensive transport report since 2008 / 09 !!

@PR Guy

“The CSO has 700 permanent staff? What?”

Unbelievable! Sounds like some kind of “make up jobs set up” which one might come across in Greece where the Public Service is often perceived as “proxy” for the social welfare system.

IMHO the incumbent would be wise conduct a “survey” of how up to 500 CSO staff could be re-deployed into public sector areas where staff shortages exist before the general public start demanding 30%”across the board paycuts” and become cynical when hearing claims/complaints about “staff shortages”.

If the general public start hearing work force fgures like that it is very hard to see how calls for deep paycuts could be restricted only to staff earning above the average wage when the current agreement expires late next year.

As I understand it “redeployment” was an important element of the Croke Park agreement.

Most of the statistics generated by the CSO are required to be generated by Eurostat. You don’t get to produce fewer just because we have a smaller population. (This is an example of the fixed costs of nationhood. You wouldn’t expect our cabinet to be one-twelfth the size of the UK’s, would you?) It should take fewer statisiticians to produce those statistics here than in a bigger country, because, for example, they have to survey fewer firms, but it’s daft to expect our CSO to be the same size as the UK’s or France’s after adjusting for population.

If Eurostat want the data they can outsource the sending of CSO letters out to companies etc and the data entry of replies…They can crunch the numbers themselves.

I assume some efficiences could be made.

It should be possible to standardise and use similar systems as countries such as Finland, the Netherlands and Belgium and like the ROS system, eliminate manual forms for all company data (if that’s not used already, some other country must be using such a system).

I know from my own experiece in business, CSO forms do not get priority attention. That can be solved by penalising late online entry.

CSO staff give a positive image of the public service, from my own experience. It’s good that the organisation has been taking steps in recent years to develop a higher profile as it provides an important service.

@Aedin D

“You don’t get to produce fewer just because we have a smaller population. (This is an example of the fixed costs of nationhood…..”

So would it fair to presume that a nation like Iceland has several hundred staff in itś statistics office or Luxembourg or Cyprus, Malta etc. I wonder where they get all the people to staff their statistics office in order to meet the “fixed costs of nationhood”?:)

@Livonian
They are performing a very important duty for future historians.

The cataloging of the complete destruction of Irish society during the credit inflationary stripping & money deflationary stripping phases.

People will wonder in amazement by it all – lets hope they don’t do a Four courts on the stuff.

A little basic statistics would be helpful here oddly enough. Doubling sample sizes doesnt result in a halving of standard errors. Large countries such as UK and France get the benefits of scale that Ireland simply cannot, so we would end up surveying similar numbers of entities to get similar levels of results.
The rolls royce model in business statistics is Sweden. In Sweden the Revenue service has a direct connection to the tills of retailers and can share their data directly with their CSO equivalent. Imagine how quickly one could produce accurate RSI numbers for example in this context.

‘So would it fair to presume that a nation like Iceland has several hundred staff in itś statistics office or Luxembourg or Cyprus, Malta etc.’

Luxembourg – population 500,000, statistical office site lists about 200 staff:

http://www.etat.lu/annuaire/?idMin=89

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