Wellbeing in Ireland 2025

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Well-being - Survey on Income and Living Conditions (SILC) 2025

The Central Statistics Office have published Well-being - Survey on Income and Living Conditions (SILC) 2025 and report that in 2025, 26.5 per cent of respondents reported high levels of overall life satisfaction, broadly unchanged from 26.4 per cent in 2024. Average satisfaction with household finances was notably higher among owner-occupiers, at 7.2, compared with 5.9 among those living in rented accommodation. One in five women (20.0 per cent) reported feeling downhearted or depressed at some point in the four weeks prior to their SILC interview, compared with just over one in ten men (11.1 per cent).

 

Life satisfaction tended to increase with age, with 36.5 per cent of those aged 65 and over reporting high satisfaction, compared with 22.1 per cent of respondents aged 25 to 49. Those unable to work due to long-term health issues reported the lowest average life satisfaction score, at 5.8, while retired respondents reported the highest, at 8.0. Feelings of loneliness were significantly more common among separated (34.1 per cent), widowed (28.3 per cent), and divorced (30.5 per cent) respondents, who were around three times more likely to report loneliness than married individuals (9.4 per cent). Among those living in consistent poverty, 41.8 per cent reported feeling downhearted or depressed at some stage in the four weeks prior to interview, compared with 14.6 per cent of those not experiencing consistent poverty.

 

The Key Issues

Loneliness and Isolation

The Roadmap for Social Inclusion 2020-2025 committed to ‘developing the necessary actions to tackle loneliness and isolation, particularly among older people’. Data from Healthy Ireland Survey 2023 finds that across all ages and sexes, 3.9 per cent of the population report often or always feeling lonely, 9.9 per cent report feeling lonely some of the time and 12.1 per cent report feeling lonely occasionally. The current and growing body of evidence points to the detrimental effect of loneliness on health as well links to lower interpersonal trust, leading to lower societal cohesion.

Inequality and Poverty

The problem of inequality is not merely one of democratic principle, it is materially consequential. Without social transfers, 33.2 per cent of the population would have been below the poverty line in 2025. Such an underlying poverty rate suggests a deeply unequal distribution of direct income. Analysis presented at Social Justice Ireland’s conference ‘The Social Justice Movement – A Fifty-Year View’ demonstrates that income inequality has remained stubbornly stable over the past fifty years. While the total value of income has increased, not much has changed about its distribution. The share of total household disposable income going to the top 20 percent of households between 1973 and 2022 has steadily remained between 40 and 45 per cent. While the share going to the bottom 20 per cent of households has remained around 5 per cent. Each year, Social Justice Ireland calculates the rich-poor gap. As a result of all of the tax and welfare measures adopted in Budget 2026, the rich-poor gap will decrease by €12 per week (€633 per annum) in 2026. The cumulative rich-poor gap will stand at €978 per week (€51,000 per annum) in 2026. Although the gap will decrease relative to the outcome from Budget 2025, next year’s gap will still be the second highest level we have recorded since our analysis commenced. Over the last decade (2016-2026), the richpoor gap has widened by €9.29 per week
(€485 per annum) meaning the gap between those with the highest incomes and those on the lowest has widened as a result of policy choices - an outcome we regret. 

Using data from the CSO’s 2025 Survey in Income and Living Conditions (SILC), Social Justice Ireland calculates that 687,784 people are living below the poverty
line. Energy remains one of the key drivers in the increased cost of living, and rising oil and gas costs are behind recent spikes in prices. It must be borne in mind that while the rate of inflation may have fallen, prices continue to rise: a fall in prices would require deflation. Those at the bottom need to be supported if they are to afford higher prices. When it comes to tackling poverty, the impact of social welfare supports cannot be underestimated. 
 

Housing and Homelessness

Housing affordability continues to be a critical issue in Ireland. The on-going failure of Government policy in this area for more than a decade has produced a crisis of unprecedented proportions across much of Irish society. It has been SEVEN years since the number of people in state-funded emergency homeless accommodation first exceeded 10,000 people (in February 2019). Although there was a decline in homelessness amid the Covid-19 pandemic, since then the number has risen steadily. 

Housing costs in Ireland, including costs for energy, are 87 per cent higher than the EU average. The effect of housing costs on the living standards of low-income households is illustrated clearly by the statistics above. This provides insight into the scale of housing costs (rent, mortgage interest) many households face and highlights how dramatically these living costs reduce disposable income. Housing costs significantly impact on the living standards of renters and in particular low-income families who live in accommodation provided by local authorities or receive social housing supports. After housing costs, just over 45 per cent of renters live on an income below the poverty line with this rate being 40 per cent for local authority tenants and 58 per cent for those on HAP, RAS and in receipt of rent supplement. These rates compare to an after-housing costs poverty rate of one in five for the whole population and less that one in ten for households who are owner occupiers. After housing costs, there are big increases in poverty for single parent households, people who are unemployed, those who are long-term ill and disabled, and those who live alone. 

Policy Proposals

  • Develop a national action plan aimed at tackling loneliness and isolation
  • Benchmark core social welfare rates to 27.5 per cent of average weekly earnings in 2025 as a first step towards indexing social welfare rates against wages.
  • Acknowledge that Ireland has an on-going poverty and deprivation problem.
  • Adopt targets aimed at reducing poverty and deprivation among particularly vulnerable groups such as children, lone parents, jobless households, and those in social housing.
  • Examine and support viable alternative policy options aimed at giving priority to protecting vulnerable sectors of society.
  • Set a target of 20 per cent of all housing stock to be social housing and achieve this through directly building more social housing and decentralising
    responsibility for social housing to Local Authorities.