Colm Fitzpatrick
Ireland is performing in the bottom half of 15 similar European countries on a range of social, economic and environmental indicators, a new study has revealed.
Published yesterday by Social Justice Ireland (SJI), Measuring Progress: Economy, Society and Environment in Ireland 2018 assessed performance across the United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
The report highlighted Ireland’s “particularly poor performance on low pay, long term unemployment, household debt and greenhouse gas emissions”.
Notably, Ireland ranked last in the ‘Responsible consumption and production’ category, which factors in municipal waste generated, waste not treated, and the percentage of waste water not treated. As a result, the report suggests Ireland needs to “drastically change its waste-based consumption patterns and recognise that short term economic growth policies are unsustainable”.
The report also outlined some of Ireland’s strengths, such as making the top third of rankings in quality education, with Denmark scoring highest. This was outweighed, however, by negative performances on equality and affordable and clean energy.
In response to the report, SJI director, Fr Sean Healey said: “There are positives in this report, such as Ireland making the top third of rankings in quality education (SDG 4). However, our particularly bad performance on Environment and inequalities emphasises the need for these SDGs to become an integrated part of policy formation across the board.”
Expressing a similar sentiment, Dr Catherine Kavanagh of UCC said, “We need to start looking at short term economic policies that damage families and promote inequality in the same way. They are simply unsustainable”.
The report concluded that measuring Ireland’s economic growth by GDP and other traditional measures is seriously problematic and “provides a false picture of Ireland’s reality”.
It also added that more progress is needed in areas such as gender equality which falls below the EU average and that “more needs to be done to reach the global commitments” of reducing CO2 emissions.