Poverty transitions in Ireland: An analysis of the Central Statistics Office (CSO) Longitudinal Survey on Income and Living Conditions (SILC), 2004-2015

In this report, we use Irish SILC data from 2004-2015 to examine poverty and deprivation transitions among various social risk groups – groups experiencing 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. We exploit 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. We also examine how different groups were affected at different times (pre 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.