Locked-down savers help lift Irish household wealth as tax revenues take lockdown hit

The overall wealth of Irish households climbed to a record €831bn, or €166,930 per person, the Central Bank said, boosted by locked-down savers who couldn't spend, and helped by a stockmarket-rise to pensions and house prices that escaped a once feared rout.  

The aggregate figures are a snapshot at the end of September, which the Central Bank and other economists caution say little about the distribution of wealth and how individual households fared as unemployment surged during the crisis.

The Central Bank said, on aggregate, households saw their pay fall by €1bn in the quarter, while households via pandemic unemployment payments and the wage-subsidy scheme boosted social transfers by €2.9bn, while consumption fell by €1.3bn.

"These counteracting movements lessen the impact of unemployment and the fall in pay experienced by household net worth in aggregate," it said.

Central Bank figures last week showed deposits surged by a record €14.2bn for the whole of 2020. 

Goodbody chief economist Dermot O'Leary said that compared with the financial crisis, Irish households were in good shape to weather the Covid-19 crisis and that the rise in deposits boosted hopes for consumers spending later this year. 

Meanwhile, exchequer figures for the first month of the year showed the dramatic effects of the pandemic.

Vat tax revenues fell to €2.36bn, down by €343m from January 2020 before the onset of the pandemic, and excise duties fell to €410m from €512m over the same period.