Abstract

The Sustainable Development Goals Division* of the CSO developed an innovative project, ‘Measuring distance to everyday services in Ireland’, which analyses how close or far away people in Ireland live from everyday facilities, (such as schools, hospitals, public transport and post offices), and provides insights on the differences in service accessibility at regional and local level.
This report highlights the benefits to decision makers and to the people of Ireland of one part of the National Data Infrastructure (NDI), namely the EIRCODE (post code), as it provides tangible and practical examples of aggregated statistical insight that can be gleaned from data sources when they are organised and structured appropriately.
This publication originates from a memorandum of understanding signed between Ordnance Survey Ireland (OSi) and CSO where both agencies agreed to collaborate towards:
 the improved visualisation of statistical outputs [1],
 publishing certain geographies as Linked Open Data [2],
 fulfilling Ireland’s reporting responsibilities under the United Nations 2030 agenda for the Sustainable Development Goals [3]
OSi and CSO are working together on research projects that demonstrate the importance of integrated statistical and geospatial data sources in developing the NDI.
This publication calculates the shortest distance by road from residential dwellings to a set of everyday services and is based on a matching exercise involving:
 the coordinates of dwellings enumerated in Census 2016
 the coordinates of destination points for a set of everyday services
 the road network from Ordnance Survey Ireland (OSi)
This exercise uses an origin-destination routing algorithm, within a Geographical Information System (GIS), which identified the nearest location of a particular service along the official road network for over 2 million dwellings on the Census 2016 dataset.
Data is provided at local level and county level. Interactive dashboards are available to present the data in a user friendly manner.

*The project was directed by Dr Kevin McCormack, head of CSO SDG Division (Western European Delegate to UN IAEG-SDG).