Ireland vs EU28: Our report monitoring Ireland’s progress in achieving the SDGs

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In February 2018, Social Justice Ireland published its Sustainable Progress Index 2018, analysing Ireland’s performance under each of the 17 SDGs and benchmarking our performance against our EU15 counterparts.

In our latest report in this area, Ireland vs EU28:  Monitoring Irelands Performance towards Achieving the SDGs, we have now expanded this analysis to include all EU28 countries in our study and compared Ireland’s progress to the EU28 average.  This report ends with an ‘at-a-glance’ classification of Ireland’s Progress on the SDGs over time, mirroring the format used by Eurostat in their 2017 report Sustainable Development in the European Union. 

Two time frames are considered within our report: the short-term, which assesses progress over the past five years, and the long-term (depending on data availability) which examines trends over the past fifteen years. Overall, the report concludes that the EU has made progress towards the 17 SDGs over the past five years. The improvement of goals has occurred at different paces for different goals, ranging from moderate to significant progress.  However, the report highlights that progress towards achievement of a specific goal is not necessarily satisfactory for the EU. Specifically, progress alone on an SDG does not imply success!

Social Justice Ireland now urges Government to do more to advance Ireland’s progress towards achieving the SDGs, specifically, to document the specific SDGs to which each new policy relates and the impact of Government policies in achieving Ireland’s goals.