Today, Taoiseach Simon Harris has announced the launch of a new birth cohort for the Growing Up in Ireland study that will follow thousands of children throughout their lives nationwide.
The Growing Up in Ireland national longitudinal study, which first began back in 2006, has played an important role to help understand the lives of children as they grow from birth to adulthood.
The Central Statistics Office will be interviewing parents of babies who they have invited to take part in the study.
Two groups of children have been followed since the study began - one group of children that were born in 1998 and one group born in 2008, have been studied over the past 16 years.
This new group of children born in 2024 will help to understand the changing health, socioeconomic and environmental factors across the life of the next generation of children in Ireland.
This in turn will help the Government and those in power to provide better services and programmes to meet the needs of the population.
After consultation with experts and stakeholders, it was agreed that a new study on Cohort ‘24 was required because of the ‘significant social, economic and policy changes that have occurred in Ireland, since the beginning of the Growing Up in Ireland study in 2008’.
Speaking about the launch, the Taoiseach explained, “The Growing Up in Ireland study has been of immense value in creating policy that is informed by evidence and this longitudinal study has allowed us to deliver real value in the services we provide for children and young people”.
“There is always more that we can do to improve, and having more up-to-date information on babies born now will allow us to deliver even more improvements. It will also help us to track and compare with previous groups so that we can see what is working well and what needs to change”.