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This paper addresses the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on children. It is based on desk-based research carried out in the first half of 2021 for a report commissioned by Barnardos. The aim was to assess the various social, economic and political factors shaping the context of policy and provision for children in Ireland now and in the short-term future, with particular emphasis on the Covid-19 pandemic.
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Policymakers all over the world have started using behavioural public policy instruments to encourage behavioural change in various areas such as health, finance, and the environment (UN Behavioural Science Group 2021). These instruments rely on insights from behavioural economics and psychology on how people behave and how they interact with their decision environments. The behaviourally informed approach contrasts with policies that are guided by theoretical models on how people should behave in given situations such as the rational actor model from economics (Thaler 2015). Behavioural insights allow policymakers to better anticipate how people actually react to policies and to design behaviourally informed interventions that can help citizens to make better choices for themselves and for society (Hansen 2019).
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Under Innovation 2020 (ICSTI, 2020) the Irish government committed to almost doubling the science budget from €2.9 billion to €5 billion over a five-year period. In 2020, public expenditure on research and innovation in Ireland was under a billion euro, with just over a billion by Irish higher educational institutions in 2020 (DFHERIS, 2022a). Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) is the largest competitive funder of research in Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths (STEM) and the most highly funded. Its importance is to increase further given the decision (DHERIS, 2022a) to combine it with the more modestly funded Irish Research Council (IRC), the largest competitive funder of research in Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences. The merger is depicted as facilitating multi-disciplinary research and increasing the number of female researchers.
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Maths is the basis for the most advanced discoveries in science such as satellites and robotic surgeries. Yet, one rarely thinks that these triumphs were grounded during maths classes in primary and secondary schools. These schooling years will prepare individuals for the workforce, and some of them to apply for a university degree. Recent international large-scale assessments found an average high maths score for Irish students compared with other countries. However, when the students’ distribution across the levels of maths performance was analysed, the percentages of Irish students who succeeded in the most complex items, were lower in comparison with other countries with the same average scores
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This is the second in a series of papers that aim to give an overview of some of the ways in which the COVID-19 pandemic has changed Ireland. This paper examines the impact of COVID-19 on travel, both domestic and international. The paper analyses the sharp decrease in travel following the onset of the pandemic and shows how, even when demand for travel resumed in 2022, the knock-on effects of COVID-19 still impacted people’s ability to travel, especially overseas.
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In many countries, consultants employed by public hospitals are allowed to provide private, fee-paying consultations as part of their workload, that is, within the public hospital.[i] This specific form of dual practice enables the patients who can afford to pay for private consultations, either themselves or via some private health insurance, to gain faster access to outpatient consultations and elective care. Despite the fact that it is common practice in many countries, the provision of private care within private hospitals has not received as much attention in the literature.
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Policy makers, practitioners and researchers have shown a growing interest in understanding how best to promote adolescent wellbeing. This is in part due to increased concerns around adolescent mental health (i.e., depression rates; Hankin, 2015), paired with growing volumes of empirical evidence suggesting that adolescent wellbeing is positively related to academic achievement, classroom engagement, and life-long success
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Suicide has been designated as a critical public health problem by the World Health Organisation (WHO 2014) as well as by successive Irish governments since the 1990s. According to the WHO (2022), more than 700,000 people die each year by suicide representing one in ten deaths worldwide and the figure is considerably higher for younger age cohorts.
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This is the first in a series of papers that aim to give an overview of some of ways in which the COVID-19 pandemic has changed Ireland. This paper examines some the key statistics that illustrate the impact of COVID-19 on Irish society since Ireland’s first confirmed case on 29th February 2020 and it focuses on healthcare, social care, and the labour market
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The term “unscheduled” healthcare refers to care that is generally provided with less than 24-hour notice, with general practitioners (GPs) the most common first point of contact for this type of unplanned care
