CSO: Irish are healthy, wealthy, and wasteful

We are living longer, we are still quite wealthy (relatively speaking), and we generate a lot of waste — the latest publication from the CSO tells us much about ourselves, some of it quite surprising.

Entitled Measuring Ireland’s Progress 2013, the report takes existing data and strings it together in the form of tables and interactive graphs, using numbers to paint a picture of how Ireland has progressed — or not, as the case may be — and how we fare against our European neighbours in various categories.

We learn that Ireland had the joint highest fertility rate in the EU in 2012, and that just over one third of live births were outside of marriage — a little below the EU average.