Wellbeing: Measuring What Matters
This report by Social Justice Ireland provides an independent assessment of wellbeing in Ireland, offering a more inclusive and equitable framework for measuring progress. It prioritises indicators that better reflect the lived experiences of individuals and communities, ensuring that policymaking addresses inequality, sustainability, and long-term resilience.
Each year, the Government of Ireland publishes a wellbeing report, Understanding Life in Ireland, to assess the quality of life across economic, social, and environmental domains. This framework plays an increasingly important role in policymaking, including its use in the Budgetary process and in shaping discussions during the National Economic Dialogue, the Summer Economic Statement, and Budget Day documentation. It is essential to critically assess both the evolving priorities within the framework as well as how comprehensively it represents the wellbeing of all segments of the population. However, the Government’s 2024 wellbeing report presents a limited perspective, focusing on aggregate trends while removing equality and sustainability from its core measurement approach (elements that had been included in the 2023 edition). While these issues are acknowledged in the narrative, their absence from core metrics makes it difficult to assess who is benefitting from progress and whether the gains are sustainable in the long term.
In this paper, we critically examine the Government’s report Understanding Life in Ireland: The Well-being Framework 2024, recalculating the indicators using the Government’s own 2023 methodology – one that explicitly integrated equality and sustainability. We then assess the effectiveness of the Government’s chosen indicators and their ability to capture the complexity of wellbeing across different social groups. Finally, we present an alternative wellbeing framework, informed by public consultation, that reinstates equality and sustainability more explicitly into the wellbeing measurement. This alternative approach offers a more holistic and inclusive framework that better reflects the realities of diverse population groups and ensures that policymaking genuinely enhances the quality of life for all.
By focusing on equitable wellbeing outcomes, the alternative wellbeing framework aligns closely with Social Justice Ireland’s vision for a new social contract, which emphasises inclusive growth, sustainable development, and social cohesion. The results of Social Justice Ireland’s alternative wellbeing framework paint a troubling picture of societal wellbeing. While some areas show modest improvements, substantial disparities persist, and progress in key dimensions remains fragile and uneven. In particular, the lack of focus on equality and sustainability in the Government’s Wellbeing Framework risks presenting an overly optimistic picture that does not accurately reflect the lived realities of many.
Our analysis finds that, while Ireland has made progress in several dimensions of wellbeing – including improvements in education, community participation, and employment – deep inequalities persist. Housing affordability remains a significant challenge, with renters and low-income households facing increasing financial strain. Income inequality is widening, and environmental sustainability indicators show little to no progress. These disparities highlight the need for a more holistic and balanced approach to measuring wellbeing, one that ensures no group is left behind.