Matt Carthy (Cavan-Monaghan, Sinn Fein)
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760. To ask the Minister for Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht the deprivation rates in each of the electoral areas in the State for each of the past three years and at present in 2025, in tabular form; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [53431/25]

Jerry Buttimer (Cork South-Central, Fine Gael)
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Pobal’s HP Deprivation Index is Ireland’s primary social gradient tool, used by many Government Departments, including my own, and state agencies for the identification of disadvantage, in order to target resources towards communities most in need.

The Index is a robust and reliable tool, using data from Ireland’s census to identify relative levels of affluence or disadvantage across geographic areas throughout the country.

The current iteration of the Index uses data from Census 2022, analysing ten measures of an area’s levels of disadvantage. These include educational attainment, employment status and the numbers living in individual households. The Index breaks down deprivation scores across Ireland's Electoral Divisions, and is publicly available at www.Pobal.ie. As the index is a measure of deprivation in the context of the 2022 census, it is not a tool for annual measurement of deprivation levels