Here’s to our health! We live longest in EU

THEY say it’s better to have a life well-lived than a long life... well, in Ireland it seems you can do both as we have the highest life expectancy in the European Union, according to new research.

The latest EU Eurostat data shows that in 2020, the life expectancy for people in Ireland stood at 82.6, surpassing all other nations in the union.

This was a slight decrease from 82.8 in 2019, with Covid-19 having an impact on life expectancy across the entire EU.

Commenting on the ranking, Taoiseach Micheál Martin wrote on Twitter: ‘Latest @EU_Eurostat analysis shows Irish people had the highest life expectancy in the EU in 2020... In 2000, we were in 16th place. Strong evidence of the great strides in improving public health in recent decades.’

Health expert Professor Antony Staines, of Dublin City University, told the Irish Daily Mail that this improvement was due to the country becoming wealthier. ‘We have got richer. Life expectancy increases every year in most countries, but in several countries after the big recession in 2008, 2009, life expectancy stopped increasing or levelled off,’ he said.

‘It’s very much about how the economy works, how people live their lives. ‘We’re not perfect, but we’re not disastrous either. We’ve had a fair level of success in reducing smoking, we’ve had some level of success in reducing drinking.’

He added that the Government’s Healthy Ireland framework, launched in 2013, has been a ‘serious attempt to put health promotion front and centre’.

However, Prof. Staines said there are areas that still need to be worked on, such as obesity, mental health and health inequality. He remarked: ‘We still have a significant problem with being overweight – it’s not getting better, but it’s not getting worse fast, which is good.’ However, he added: ‘There are groups which are standing still or going backwards. Irish Travellers have much worse health than the general population and nothing much has been done to improve that. There is a fairly steep difference in health between richer people and poorer people and we should try to narrow that.’

In the EU overall, life expectancy at birth was estimated at 80.4 years in 2020, reaching 83.2 years for women and 77.5 years for men. Between 2002, when life expectancy data became available for all EU member states, and 2020, life expectancy in the EU increased by 2.8 years, from 77.6 to 80.4 years.