Minister for Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth, Roderic O’Gorman, publishes State of the Nation’s Children 2022 report

• the State of the Nation’s Children (SONC) report provides the most up-to-date data on the National Set of Child Wellbeing indicators
• SONC charts the wellbeing of children in Ireland, tracks changes over time and benchmarks progress in Ireland relative to other countries

Roderic O’Gorman, Minister for Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth has today published the 2022 edition of State of the Nation’s Children (SONC) report. This online report provides a comprehensive picture of our children's lives by presenting key information on children’s health, behavioural and educational outcomes as well as their relationships with their parents and their friends. It also presents data on supports and services available to children. This report has been published biennially since 2006 and annually since 2020, and is prepared by the Data and Analytics Unit in the Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth.

SONC is widely used as a resource by policy makers, the research community and civil society, and aims to inform government policy on children, young people and families. The SONC reports are useful for tacking trends in relation to children’s wellbeing, they provide data that shows us where more work needs to be done and presents us with evidence of where progress is being made.

Some of the key findings in the report include:

• in 2022 there were an estimated 1,201,618 children living in Ireland. This accounted for 23.6% of the total population. Of these, 61,027 were aged less than one year, up from 55,483 in 2021
• in 2020 278 children died in Ireland, down from 284 in 2019. This equated to an overall mortality rate of 2.32 per 10,000
• for the 2021/22 pre-school year there were 3,973 pre-school services under contract to deliver the ECCE Programme to 107,778 children. Of these pre-school services, 2,590 (65.2%) met higher capitation status, up from 2,462 in 2020/21
• in 2020 61.3% of infants were breastfed on being discharged from hospital, up from 60.7% in 2019
• in 2021 there were 119,642 hospital discharges of children, up from 109,777 in 2020
• in 2018 76.9% of first class children were classified as being in the “normal” weight category according to the International Obesity Taskforce Standards. 15.5% were classified as either “overweight” or “obese”, down from 16.9% in 2015
• in 2021 Q4 there were 19,580 child welfare and protection referrals to Tusla, the Child and Family Agency, up from 17,485 in 2020
• in 2020 there were 181 births to mothers aged 10-17, up from 164 in 2019
• in 2020 there were 13 suicides by children aged 10-17, down from 20 in 2019
• in 2021 13.6% of children were considered to be at risk of poverty, down from 16.4% in 2020, while 5.2% of children experienced consistent poverty, down from 7.2% in 2020
• in 2021 there were 21,932 households with children identified as being in need of social housing, down from 24,646 in 2020
• in 2020 8,169 children aged 10-17 were referred to the Garda Diversion Programme, down from 9,842 in 2019
• in 2020 90.9% of pregnant women attended antenatal care in the first trimester of pregnancy, up from 88.3% in 2019
• in 2021 there were 5,777 children in the care of Tusla, the Child and Family Agency, down from 5,818 in 2020

Access the report, previous reports and more information about SONC.

Since 2020, DCEDIY has transformed and modernised the delivery of the report by moving to a web version, with links provided to the underlying data tables, in the CSO’s PxStat. This new format has many benefits for users, including that users always have access to the most up to date version of the data and have access to previous data and additional analysis of the data not reported on in the report. In line with the government’s Open Data Initiative the data is available in an open, machine-readable format.