Recent evidence shows increasing wellbeing and mental health difficulties among young people in Ireland (Carroll et al., 2024) and internationally (WHO, 2021). This evidence emerges against the backdrop of significant policy focus, with the Department of Education publishing the Wellbeing Policy...

Just resilience is a conceptual framework to guide equitable, persistent and transformative adaptation to climate change impacts, ensuring that systems are robust and can shift when previous equilibria become unsustainable. Much research exists to define this concept, with much less instruction...

This paper examines the economic and environmental impacts of the adoption path of electric vehicles (EVs) and home retrofitting in the form of heat pumps (HPs) projected in the recent Climate Action Plan (CAP21) for Ireland. This analysis assumes the level of carbon tax follows the path...

The EU Water Framework Directive (WFD) outlines an integrated framework for water management. The major objective of the WFD is that member states should achieve at least good ecological status of all national waters. This ambitious target can only be achieved with efficient water management...

Assessing the contribution of intangible investment to growth is a challenging and complex task for any country. However, it has become increasingly difficult to determine both the exact magnitude of economic performance and its composition in the case of the Irish economy. This is mainly due to...

Effective planning and regulatory processes ensure orderly energy systems. Often, decisions are not made within mandated time frames or discrete consent processes are infrequent. Where multiple consent processes exist in sequence, a given delay may be compounded. These factors can negatively...

Many households lack savings to cushion them from financial shocks. While behavioural economics offers insights into why some households who want to save may fail to do so, successful behavioural interventions to increase precautionary saving are elusive. We incorporated multiple evidence-based...

Air pollution is well recognised as a major risk factor for disease and premature mortality worldwide. In Ireland, fine particulate matter (PM2.5), which originates largely from burning solid fuel for heating, and nitrogen dioxide (NO2), derived from road transport, are the main sources...

The war in Ukraine and the subsequent increase in energy and other commodity prices has dampened the economic outlook. There are increased downside risks to economic activity and there is also considerable uncertainty around any economic projections and how they may evolve in the future. This...

In this paper, we explore the impact of recent interest rate increases on the Irish economy and chart out the potential impact using scenarios for the period 2023- 2025. We use the COSMO macroeconometric model of the Irish economy to test the impacts through credit markets and the real economy,...