As of April 2024, the estimated number of people under the age of 18 in Ireland was 1.23 million, with a further 458,800 people estimated to be aged between 18 and 24 years.
In 2024, 9.3% of 15 to 19-year-olds reported using e-cigarettes daily and 7.9% reported being daily smokers.
In the 2023-2024 school year, there were 61,479 new entrants starting Junior Infants in national schools.
In 2023, 20,932 households with children were identified as needing social housing, down from 24,646 in 2020.
Over four times as many females (15.6%) than males (3.6%) aged 15-19 reported feeling lonely often or always in 2023.
In 2023, 99% of newborns were visited by a public health nurse within 72 hours and 86% of infants had their 9–11 month developmental check completed before reaching 12 months.
Almost 90% of 11-year-olds (89.9%) felt happy with their lives in 2022.
The number of unpaid carers under the age of 15 was 4,759 in 2022 of which more than one in ten (565 or 11.9%) provided more than 42 hours of unpaid help per week.
CSO data in this Hub will be updated as new releases are published while data from other sources will automatically be updated once it becomes available. The Hub will evolve and expand over time to incorporate new CSO data as it becomes available as well as new data from national and international external sources. As the Hub grows, the CSO will incorporate the feedback from users of the Hub and specifically feedback from children and young people.
An annual snapshot of findings using the latest data from the Hub will also be published. The Hub uses our open data portal, data.cso.ie, or PxStat, which allows users to search for data relevant to them, download it, and create visuals in a way that suits them best.
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Children and Young Persons Hub
The Central Statistics Office (CSO) has today (17 February 2025) launched a new platform for information on children and young people in Ireland. The Children and Young Persons Hub has been developed by the CSO to serve as a single source for key information on children and young people using the latest data from the CSO and other public service bodies. This is part of a series of hubs the CSO is developing to improve access to timely and important statistics across key policy areas.
The new Children and Young Persons Hub provides a wide range of information, broken down into eight main themes: Population; Education; General Health; Mental Health; Activities; Relationships; Society, and Deprivation and Poverty.
This innovative one-stop-shop for data on children and young people in Ireland means users will be able to easily locate the most up-to-date information on subjects such as population projections; household compositions; health; education; activities; relationships; deprivation, and well-being indicators (See Editor’s Note below for more information).
Statistician's Comment
Commenting on the Children and Young Persons Hub, Dr. Caragh Stapleton, Statistician in the Growing Up in Ireland Division, said: “The purpose of this new Children and Young Persons Hub is to collate statistics on the lives of children and young people in Ireland from the CSO and other public sector organisations in one easy to find location.
The lives of children and young people in Ireland are full, complex, and dynamic. They have a variety of lived experiences, interests, and aspirations which reflect changing attitudes and structures in the wider society. This new Children and Young Persons Hub captures the lived experiences of children and young people in Ireland in real-time, as new data becomes available.
Children and young people not only represent our future, but are active members of our present society. By providing data in one centralised location, the hub can assist policy makers in evidence-based decision making to improve the outcomes of children and young people in Ireland.
The Hub provides users easy access to the most up-to-date statistics on a range of key themes related to children and young people as they are published on our open data portal. The structure of the Hub allows the flexibility to add new data as it becomes available, to include new topics, and to have more regular updates.
We also wish to embed the feedback of children and young people into new iterations of the Hub so that, as it grows, the data and statistics that children and young people want to see will be easily accessible to them. The CSO welcomes comments and suggestions from users on this new platform which can be sent to cyphub@cso.ie.
The CSO’s Growing Up in Ireland Division extends its appreciation to the Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth, and the Child Poverty and Well-Being Programme Office in the Department of the Taoiseach for their assistance in the development of the Hub. We also thank the large number of other government Departments and agencies such as the Department of Health and the Department of Education who allowed us to incorporate their data into the Hub.”