Catherine Martin (Dublin Rathdown, Green Party)
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The National Well-being Framework is an important tool for improving our understanding of how people’s quality of life is changing across a number of varied dimensions. The Department of the Taoiseach, which has responsibility for the National Framework in conjunction with the Central Statistics Office, has chosen a rich set of indicators for the national well-being dashboard, that conveys a concise, yet much more rounded picture, of how people’s lives are changing than would be given by purely income-based measures.

A formal review of the Framework has been committed to in approximately three years. While Government continues to assess the best indicator sets for inclusion in the Well-being Dashboard, the CSO (which hosts the well-being indicators) remains of the view that changing the indicators at any earlier point would undermine the credibility of the dashboard and the trends being measured. Maintaining the number of indicators at a reasonably small number to ensure accessibility is also considered important.

My Department is in the process of developing a separate Well-being Framework that will evaluate the sectors under its remit, which play such an important role in enriching people’s lives and have a significant impact on their well-being. The development of the Departmental Framework has been informed by a wide range of evidence and existing practice, including both our own National Framework and those that have been implemented in other jurisdictions such as Wales and New Zealand. Indicators for language and culture are likely to be key components of our Well-being Dashboard, which is building on the work already done by my officials in identifying appropriate data sources that can provide indicators across each sector.

As part of our interaction across Government on the Well-being Framework and related matters, my officials have had discussions with their colleagues in the Department of the Taoiseach to ensure that our framework aligns with and supports the National Framework. The work we are doing on how language-related and cultural activities interact with people’s well-being will feed into the future development of the National Framework and the inclusion of indicators on language and culture will be considered in this context.