Madam, – Dr Garret FitzGerald’s column (Opinion, March 19th) on the forthcoming census concludes that we Irish have a very good record of co-operation with the census “based on public confidence both in the quality of our census data and in its confidentiality”. This may have been true when the Central Statistics Office (CSO) alone was managing the data.
However, the CSO is assisted this time round with its data “capturing” by CACI (UK), a subsidiary of CACI International, which supplied “interrogators” for the US Department of Defence in Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Amnesty International cites an internal Pentagon report (the Fay Report) which describes specific human rights abuses committed by CACI employees.
Perhaps “public confidence” in the census process is no longer at the levels which Dr FitzGerald suggests. Unfortunately, the Statistics Act makes no mention of morals or ethics, nor indeed does the tendering process. – Yours, etc,