Ms Colette Bennett:

Social Justice Ireland welcomes the opportunity to discuss the sustainable development goals with the committee. As others have said, the SDGs are a blueprint to achieve a better and more sustainable future. Since before their introduction, when we talked about the millennium goals, Social Justice Ireland has produced a report every year as a contribution to the debate on the shape of Ireland, Europe and our world in 2030 and beyond. The aim of our sustainable progress index is to inform interested parties, including Irish and European citizens, policy-makers and business people, on how to adopt sustainable development actions. Our central goal is to show how Ireland compares relative to our EU peers. Knowing where we stand, identifying the most pressing sustainability challenges, and critically examining our performance is essential if we are to ensure a sustainable future for our country. Our latest report, published in February 2023, utilises 82 indicators across the 17 goals to arrive at our final index scores. As in previous reports, the focus of our analysis is the EU14 countries. It was formerly the EU15, but we have knocked one off for obvious reasons. Comparing relative performance among countries from a similar regional or income group is valuable in this context and the overall index is split into three sub-indices, namely, ones concerning the economy, the society and the environment.

The economy index relates to SDGs No. 8 on decent work and No. 9 on industry and innovation. Despite significant improvement in many aspects of the economy, especially, GDP and GDP per capita, and notwithstanding the issues with using those indicators as a measure, our broader measure of the economy shows there is significant room for improvement and Ireland ranks ninth relative to its EU peers on the economy index. We compute the society index by combining eight SDGs. Ireland is sixth overall here. Our relatively favourable position is driven by strong performance on the education theme of SDG No. 4, relatively good performance on peace and justice goals under SDG No. 16 and good health and well-being under SDG No. 3. The other SDGs in the society index are No. 1 which has the heading "No poverty", No. 2 is "Zero hunger", No. 5 is "Gender equality", No. 10 is "Reduced inequalities" and No. 17 is "Partnership for the goals", on which we rank seventh to tenth place.

Our analysis on the environment index sees Ireland in ninth place out of our EU14 peers. This implies our country faces significant challenges in meeting our commitment to the environment goals set out in Transforming our World: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. This index covers SDG No. 6. on clean water and sanitation, No. 7 on affordable and clean energy, SDG No. 11 on sustainable cities and communities, No. 12 on responsible consumption and production, No. 13 on climate action, No. 14 on life below water and No. 15 on life on land.

When it comes to our strengths, Ireland is in the top five for just three SDGs, namely, quality education, good health and well-being and sustainable cities and communities. The good score on SDG No. 16, headed "Peace, justice and strong institutions", indicates Ireland is a relatively safe place to live with reasonably good, transparent, effective and accountable institutions. Ireland's relatively good performance on good health and well-being does not take account of the Covid-19 pandemic due to the way we have to score the data that can be collected. However, the crisis has underlined the importance of every country having not just a good health system but an effective social protection system, as well as universal health coverage. We continue to perform very well on SDG No. 4, "Quality education", and this is is much as expected. From basic education to tertiary education, Ireland’s reputation for quality education is evident in the data, although some consideration should be given to the low rate of adult participation in learning and lifelong learning.

As to weaknesses, challenges lie ahead for progress on achievement of some goals. For example, several of the SDGs reflecting the environment present a less favourable picture of Ireland. Clearly, there are pressing sustainability issues that must be addressed, as reflected by the ranking of SDG No. 7, "Affordable and clean energy", SDG No. 12, "Responsible consumption and production", and SDG No.13, "Climate action". The low score on SDG No. 2, "No hunger", emphasises the need to embrace fully the idea of sustainable agriculture, while Ireland’s rank on SDG No. 9, "Industry, innovation and infrastructure", points to the need for further policy action with regard to logistics and broadband capacities.

Several of the SDGs are in the middle of the rankings, which implies there is a fair bit of scope for improvement. We should not be complacent in this. The objective of the 17 SDGs as part of the 2030 agenda was to set universal goals that meet the urgent environment, political and economic challenges evident in our world. Continuous monitoring of all the indicators that make up the goals is required in order to fully meet the aims of the 2030 agenda.

On how we are doing overall, the SDGs provide an ambitious, comprehensive plan of action for people, planet and prosperity. The goal of the SDGs is to change the perspective of public policy and we have shown the scale of the challenge facing Ireland under the headings of economy, society and environment. As for our composite sustainable progress index, we have argued previously there is merit to presenting one statistic to capture progress as it can quickly draw our attention to potential problems or issues that need to be addressed. The benefit of the aggregate measure here is it provides a simple report card to track Ireland’s overall performance on the SDGs compared to its EU peers, which are countries that have experienced similar levels of development. It is important to emphasise our analysis is based only on what can be measured. In spite of best efforts to identify data for the SDGs, several indicator and data gaps persist, especially for the environment SDGs. Those data need to be across the 14 countries we analyse. Good data and analysis remain critical to ensuring the SDGs become useful tools to support policy-making. As in previous years of the composite sustainable progress index, we see the Nordic countries, along with the Netherlands, top the rankings. Ireland is in eighth place in the sustainable progress index 2023.

The SDGs call on all nations to combine economic prosperity, social inclusion and environmental sustainability. Our analysis shows enormous challenges remain for Ireland under each of the three headings. For more information on this, all of our sustainable progress index can be accessed on our website, socialjustice.ie.We welcome any questions members may have.