Ireland moves up 2 places to 9th in EU’s digital index

24 Feb 2015

The latest European Union (EU) Digital Economy and Society Index (DESI) is out and shows improvement for Ireland having risen two places to ninth out of the 28 EU member states.

The findings released today compiles data from each country to determine its level of connectivity, its internet skills and how intertwined digital technologies – particularly services including cloud, e-commerce and e-invoices – are developed and was sourced using data obtained between 2013 and 2014.

According to these new figures, Ireland has scored 0.52 out of a score of 1 on the digital performance index putting it at slightly above the average of the cluster of medium performance countries at 0.51, and ahead of the EU Average of 0.47.

This marked a minor improvement on last year’s figure which saw Ireland ranked eleventh with an overall score of 0.49 – just above the cluster countries (0.47) and above the EU average (0.44).

EU-Ireland

Graph via European Commission

From their findings, during the past year, take-up of high-speed broadband in Ireland has increased considerably with subscription numbers increasing from 30pc to 40pc, while use of internet services has also increased with 71pc of Irish people using video on-demand, 63pc using social networking, 62pc using online shopping, 60pc using online banking and 56pc of internet users using eGovernment actively.

The report goes on however, to say that more progress is needed in Ireland on increasing digital skills with only 53pc of the population having digital skills at a level to operate effectively online, down from 56pc in 2012.

The best-perfoming country in the EU was found to be Denmark who scored an index of 0.68, while the worst performing country overall is Romania with an index score of just 0.31.

European Union flag image via Shutterstock

Colm Gorey was a senior journalist with Silicon Republic

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