Government spending on services and tax breaks for families in Ireland is below the OECD average, according to new research from Unicef, the UN body set up to promote the welfare of children worldwide.
The findings are contained in UNICEF’s latest report card research, which has been running for two decades. It uses national pre-Covid data from EU and OECD countries to compare them across several measures of childhood wellbeing and development .
It also found that Irish adolescents had one of the lowest rates of life satisfaction among the EU/OECD countries, at 72 per cent. When asked to rate their satisfaction with life out of 10, 28 per cent of Irish teenagers said it was lower than five.
Teenagers in the Netherlands were the most satisfied with life, while those in Turkey had the lowest levels of satisfaction at 53 per cent, according to the research.
However, ranked among the best when it came to child wellbeing in the 12th spot, with the Netherlands in the top spot, followed by Denmark and Norway.
