Frank Feighan (Sligo-Leitrim, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Deputy for raising this matter and welcome the opportunity to discuss Ireland's progress towards its sustainable development goals. A renewed focus is currently being given to progress Ireland's commitments to agenda 2030 for sustainable development.

Substantial progress has been achieved in recent months in respect of reviewing Ireland's implementation of agenda 2030. The Department of the Environment, Climate and Communications has overall responsibility for promoting the sustainable development goals and overseeing their coherent implementation across government.

The Department is currently developing Ireland’s second SDG national implementation plan, in which key priorities and actions have been identified to further successful SDG implementation across the Government and to promote awareness of the goals. It is intended that the draft plan will be made available shortly and that it will form the basis of discussion at the next SDG national stakeholder forum. It is important to emphasise that given the broad scope and cross-cutting nature the SDGs, the Government recognises that strong and effective governance arrangements are essential to ensure high level engagement with the 2030 agenda. For this reason, the established SDG governance arrangements of a senior officials group, which is chaired by the Department of the Taoiseach and which is supported by the interdepartmental working group chaired by the Department, will remain an integral part of the next plan. To ensure that Ireland’s reporting on SDG progress is both comprehensive and relevant to its national circumstances and level of development, the identification and management of national data is carried out by the Central Statistics Office in consultation with the SDG interdepartmental working group.

The Central Statistics Office, working in conjunction with Ordnance Survey Ireland, has developed an online GeoHive data hub to provide spatially relevant information on our progress towards targets under the SDGs. As part of this initiative, the CSO has published of individual SDG goal reports. Goals 1-11 are available online and the remaining SDG goal reports will be published in the coming months.

Social Justice Ireland has produced an index of its own design, which ranks Ireland’s performance under all 17 SDGs. I welcome the publication of the 2022 report which has measured Ireland’s economic, social and environmental performance in relation to the SDGs. The 2022 report ranks Ireland tenth out of 14 comparable countries. It is ranked ninth on the economy, eighth place in the social category and ninth on the environment. Ireland is in the top five for three of the SDGs, which are goal four, quality education, goal 11, sustainable cities and communities and goal 14, life below water. A good score on goal 16, peace and justice, indicates that Ireland is a relatively safe place to live, with reasonably good, transparent, effective and accountable institutions.

In areas that have identified where work is needed to address some important sustainability issues, significant progress has been achieved in relation to goal 7, affordable and clean energy, goal 12, responsible consumption and production and goal 13, climate action.

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