The identification and management of national data needed to meet Ireland’s SDG reporting requirements is undertaken by the Central Statistics Office (CSO).  The CSO has direct responsibility for sourcing, developing and quality assuring the data for the Irish SDG Indicator set. To be effective in this role, the CSO assesses the availability of data for global indicators within Ireland, namely to:

• identify data providers and data sources for SDG indicators
• identify data and methodological gaps
• consider data disaggregation requirements

Due to their cross-cutting nature, the monitoring and reporting of SDG progress requires close collaboration between the CSO and national policy makers. Under the previous Implementation Plan, the SDG data governance board (SDG-DGB) was established to source, develop, and report on the statistical data for the Indicators in each of the SDGs and interlinked targets.

The SDG-DGB is chaired by the CSO, and membership comprises of representatives from each of the Government Departments and Agencies. The SDG-DGB meets quarterly.

The second VNR presented in 2023 uses the UN indicators.

The CSO has also published a series of individual SDG Goal reports on UN SDG indicators data for Ireland.