Report Launch: Poverty Transitions in Ireland

Venue: ESRI, Whitaker Square, Sir John Rogerson's Quay, Dublin 2

On 7 December, an event will take place to launch a new report titled Poverty Transitions in Ireland by Raffaele Grotti, Bertrand Maître, Dorothy Watson and Christopher T. Whelan. The key findings from the report will be presented, followed by a Q&A session.

Slides for this presentation can be found HERE

The report and the associated press release are available HERE.

Report description

In this report, Irish SILC (Survey on Income and Living Conditions) data from 2004-2015 is used to examine poverty and deprivation transitions among various social risk groups – groups who experience an increased risk of poverty due to non-class personal or family factors.  Social risk groups include lone parents, people with a disability, young adults, children, working-age adults and older adults.

The research exploits the longitudinal component of the data and primarily focus on cases where information is available for two consecutive waves. The report examines entry and exit rates into deprivation and poverty as well as the incidence of consistent poverty and deprivation (in both years). Lone parents emerge in all the analyses as the group most affected by poverty and deprivation. The relationship between poverty and deprivation is investigated and a modest overlap between the two is found.

The research also examines how different groups were affected at different times (pre-recession and post-recession). While persistent deprivation increased with the onset of recession, the pattern for persistent poverty is less clear. Finally, an additional contribution of the paper is to examine the severity of attrition in the data, which leads to substantially reduced sample sizes and a slight underrepresentation of young adults and those with higher levels of education.