Recent evidence shows increasing wellbeing and mental health difficulties among young people in Ireland (Carroll et al., 2024) and internationally (WHO, 2021). This evidence emerges against the backdrop of significant policy focus, with the Department of Education publishing the Wellbeing Policy...

The effects of poverty in childhood can last a lifetime. Research shows that children living in poverty have lower levels of health and wellbeing, attain lower levels of education, have lower levels of occupational attainment and are more likely to be poor in adulthood. In this report, we focus...

Just resilience is a conceptual framework to guide equitable, persistent and transformative adaptation to climate change impacts, ensuring that systems are robust and can shift when previous equilibria become unsustainable. Much research exists to define this concept, with much less instruction...

Irregular employment, broadly understood as employment that is insufficiently covered by formal arrangements either in law or in practice, presents problems for the State in terms of tax revenue and regulation, whether it is undertaken by Irish, EU or non-EU nationals. For non-EU nationals,...

This paper examines the economic and environmental impacts of the adoption path of electric vehicles (EVs) and home retrofitting in the form of heat pumps (HPs) projected in the recent Climate Action Plan (CAP21) for Ireland. This analysis assumes the level of carbon tax follows the path...

The EU Water Framework Directive (WFD) outlines an integrated framework for water management. The major objective of the WFD is that member states should achieve at least good ecological status of all national waters. This ambitious target can only be achieved with efficient water management...

Assessing the contribution of intangible investment to growth is a challenging and complex task for any country. However, it has become increasingly difficult to determine both the exact magnitude of economic performance and its composition in the case of the Irish economy. This is mainly due to...

Effective planning and regulatory processes ensure orderly energy systems. Often, decisions are not made within mandated time frames or discrete consent processes are infrequent. Where multiple consent processes exist in sequence, a given delay may be compounded. These factors can negatively...

Many households lack savings to cushion them from financial shocks. While behavioural economics offers insights into why some households who want to save may fail to do so, successful behavioural interventions to increase precautionary saving are elusive. We incorporated multiple evidence-based...

In this study, a large, representative sample of the Irish population undertook a multiple-choice quiz about climate change. The 10-minute quiz was designed to engage participants and to measure their understanding, not of facts and figures, but of the scientific relationships behind climate...