Dr. Se?n Healy:

Social Justice Ireland has tried to contribute. We acknowledge Deputy Bruton's comment about the difficulty of mobilising people around the 17 goals. That, in many ways, was what was driving us to be able to summarise it all in a single index score. I think that is a difficult thing to do. The easy option would have been not to do it but for us it was important.

On mobilising people, the comparison I would use would be something like GNP, GNI* or whatever. There are huge amounts of data going in there, different measures and so on but in the end you come out with a single number but it is the single number that is the focus and I think the same is useful in this context. We know we rank eighth out of 14 in our peer countries in western Europe. That says we have some distance to go and plenty of room for improvement. Then, when you look more closely, you can see which areas we are doing well on and which we are not. That is why we took the approach that we actually have taken because we do believe it is very important to mobilise people, and to mobilise policymakers around the SDGs. They provide a very useful tool in this context.