Bundoran strand in Donegal - Ireland is a nation at home in the clouds, and we're not talking about the weather
With 85pc of homes now connected to the internet and 90pc of under-30s online daily, Ireland is a fully-fledged digital nation whose citizens rely on the internet for shopping, banking and keeping in touch, new CSO figures reveal.
The latest Information Society statistics from the Central Statistics Office estimate that 85pc of households have access to the internet, up 3pc on 2014. The households that don’t have internet access say they don’t need it or in 44pc of cases just don’t have the skills to use the internet.
Email (84pc) was the most common activity carried out on the internet by individuals. The next most common activities selected from the options were social networking (66pc) and internet banking (64pc).
Irish people are also becoming more and more reliant on e-commerce to satisfy their needs. The most common types of goods or services being purchased by internet users were clothes or sports goods (31pc), travel arrangements (29pc), tickets for events (29pc) and holiday accommodation (27pc).
Ireland is becoming a cloud nation – and we’re not talking about the weather
The CSO figures also reveal that Irish internet users have embraced the cloud as the mainstay for their data storage needs.
44pc of internet users stated they used storage space on the internet to store files electronically (documents, pictures, music, video or other files). This was an increase of 9pc when compared to 2014 results.
Fixed broadband is the most common type of internet access in the household, with 77pc of homes using fixed broadband and 38pc use mobile broadband.
Of the 16-29 age category, 90pc accessed the internet every day, compared with just 29pc of the 60-74 age category.
76pc of individuals in the Dublin region accessed the internet every day, compared with 59pc of individuals in the west region.
Cloudy Bundoran image via Shutterstock
