Ireland has urban-rural divide in attitudes to climate change, new survey shows

Ms Mahony noted just 58% of respondents to the CSO’s surveys based in the rural border region —  counties Cavan, Donegal, Leitrim, Monaghan, and Sligo — rate climate change as being a very important issue, compared to 75% of residents of the Dublin urban area.

That disparity is less clear-cut when rural areas generally are contrasted with attitudes in all urban areas —  at 66% versus 71%.

There are also similar variations in terms of attitudes to the climate crisis across age demographics, Ms Mahony said, with those aged between 18 and 34 and those over-65 the most likely to see the matter as being of key importance.

Ms Mahony noted that, despite Ireland’s population and economic activity increasing markedly between 2010 and 2022, household emissions nevertheless fell by 28% over the same period.

That drop is attributable to factors including home retrofitting schemes, a transition to electric vehicles, and the move towards energy generated from renewable sources as opposed to fossil-fuel plants.

'Dramatic' shift away from the use of oil

There has been a “dramatic” shift away from the use of oil as the primary source of central heating for residences, with electricity much more commonly used to generate heating in the 2020s, the data shows.

Retrofitting and increasingly energy-efficient builds mean 99% of buildings newly constructed between 2020 and 2024 were given an A-level energy rating (BER) versus just 4% of builds completed between 2004 and 2009.

Similarly, large-scale moves to electric and hybrid vehicles means that, despite there being 400,000 more private cars on the roads in 2022 compared with 2010, direct greenhouse gas emissions from those vehicles were 11% lower than those seen 12 years prior.

CSO data also shows the stark change in both the price and consumption of residential energy over the past four years, Ms Mahony said.

In 2021, the median residential gas bill for an Irish household was just €740. That figure had risen by just under 69% by 2023, as wholesale energy markets reeled from the impact of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

During the same period, however, the consumption of gas in residences fell by 23%, meaning gas bills have nearly doubled at the same time people have cut their usage.

Ms Mahony said the flipside of reduced energy consumption and the consequent drop in greenhouse gas emissions is the rise in fuel poverty, with the CSO’s survey of income and living standards indicating the number of respondents who could not afford to keep their home adequately warm more than doubled, from 3.4% in 2021 to 7.2% in 2023.

She added Irish household expenditure on environmental taxes rose from €135 per tonne of carbon dioxide in 2010 to €171 in 2022, largely due to increases in carbon tax.