Hi! This package provides a convenient means of importing CSO data tables which are stored on Statbank. To install, use the following (requires devtools package):

devtools::install_github("brendanjodowd/CSO")

Use the function get_cso() to import data tables, where the argument is the 5 character code for the data table. To import monthly unemployment data, for example, use:

unemployment.data <- get_cso("MUM01")

To help you find relevant data, the package also contains a dataframe called 'statbank' which contains titles and table codes for all of the data tables held on Statbank. So, to find data tables containing information on unemployment, for example, you could use:

unemp.tables <- statbank[grepl("unemployment" , statbank$Title , ignore.case = TRUE),]

or, for tidyverse fans,

unemp.tables <- filter(statbank, str_detect(Title , "Unemployment"))

CSO data often contains a time variable, such as 'Month', 'Quarter' or 'Year'. The function get_cso() converts 'Month' to type date (the first day of that month), and 'Year' to type numerical. The variable 'Quarter' comes in as a string, and is of the form (e.g.) 2010Q1.

The shapes data for counties and administrative counties are derived from shapefiles produced by Ordnance Survey Ireland (OSi) and taken from their Open Data Portal. A standard Creative Commons licence applies to this data. Open Data is data that can be freely used, re-used and redistributed by anyone - subject only, at most, to the requirement that the source of the information is to attributed. For more about the Creative Commons Licence, see here. For more about OSi, see here.