This chapter identifies six priority actions for the next phase of Irish rural policy: leveraging FDI to expand rural innovation and SME capacity; integrating housing policy with economic development; co-ordinating service delivery to enhance rural liveability and competitiveness; investing in green skills training for the rural workforce including new entrants with attention to inclusion; strengthening the approach to measuring rural well-being; and integrating foresight practices into long-term planning. Implemented together, these actions would translate national objectives into balanced prosperity, further aligning Ireland's rural future with the OECD Principles on Rural Policy and Well-being Framework.
Rural Policy Review of Ireland 2026
Abstract
Ireland’s foreign direct investment (FDI)-led success risks a two-speed economy, especially if FDI-derived opportunities do not sufficiently diffuse beyond larger cities. Thin and misaligned local labour markets, particularly in rural areas, waste skills and stall productivity, while environmental pressures threaten rural incomes and natural capital. Avoiding this risk can be accomplished by diversifying the economy into activities related to bio-innovation clusters and the circular economy and improving rural attractiveness through key public services such as wastewater treatment and electricity transmission capacity.
National averages conceal significant rural disparities. Developing tailored well-being indicators that track outcomes at the territorial level could be used as evidence to prioritise investment, guide delivery and measure progress.
Housing shortages and inadequate infrastructure have become important bottlenecks for rural competitiveness. Solutions that can help include linking housing delivery to places with unmet labour demand and prioritising investments in high-potential towns where there are available serviced sites.
Fragmented childcare, transport, digital and water services quietly erode rural viability, limiting where families can settle and firms can invest. Planning and funding for these services should be done as one interconnected system, aligned with local economic and social goals, with inclusion embedded as a delivery rule.
Gender, migrant and cost-of-living gaps continue to suppress workforce participation and enterprise creation. Without targeted rural upskilling, implementing the green transition may widen spatial inequalities, excluding workers and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) through distance, higher costs and limited access to training.
Rural development policy Our Rural Future (ORF) set out to create rural places that thrive. Achieving this ambition requires harnessing investment opportunities and innovation beyond cities and across rural regions, enabling rural value chains to upgrade and ensuring that productivity and wage gains are broadly shared. Younger workers leave and local enterprise density thins when housing near jobs is unavailable. Rural businesses struggle to hire locally or attract staff. Service gaps in childcare, transport, water and digital connectivity further constrain participation and firm growth. Climate shocks, as seen during recent storms, cascade through rural systems, disrupting work, learning, care and investment confidence. Moreover, focusing on aggregate growth rather than rural well-being can mask stagnation and feed disengagement.
The OECD report Reinforcing Rural Resilience (2025[1]), the OECD Principles on Rural Policy and Well‑being Framework all emphasise the importance of building resilience in rural communities. These frameworks underpin Ireland’s ORF strategy and remain central as the Department of Rural and Community Development and the Gaeltacht (DRCDG) prepares the next phase, ORF II.
Building on the previous chapters, this chapter explores five areas where Ireland’s strong overall performance may be masking vulnerabilities that could, over time, weaken rural resilience and the effectiveness of existing strategies. The analysis focuses on the following six interrelated areas:
Strengthening the economic foundations for the rural economy
Rebalancing Ireland’s agri-food model and developing the bioeconomy for sustainable rural futures.
Housing as part of rural economic development.
Preparing the rural workforce for the green transition.
Addressing social inequalities and inclusion
Improving access to services in rural Ireland
Strengthening rural well-being measurement
Embedding foresight into long-term rural policy development processes
Each of these areas represents a domain where current policy efforts risk being under-prioritised, despite their centrality to long-term resilience. To explore these issues in depth, this chapter proceeds as follows. The first section assesses Ireland’s FDI-led growth model and the capacity of local labour markets and SMEs to drive balanced development. The second examines agriculture and environmental transition, focusing on diversification, innovation, bioeconomy and circular-economy opportunities to sustain farm and household livelihoods. The third section explores how housing interacts with economic development, and the fourth focuses on social inclusion, skills and equality. The final section brings these threads together, proposing ways to embed outcome-based well-being evidence and foresight-based planning into Ireland’s rural policy framework.
Together, these themes argue that reinforcing resilience in rural Ireland does not require new programmes, but more substantial alignment of existing ones, connecting economic, social and environmental policy levers under a coherent framework led by the DRCDG and reflected in ORF II.
Ireland’s strong macro-economic performance masks a growing spatial imbalance that threatens long-term national resilience. Rural regions have not benefitted from Ireland’s global competitiveness and record FDI inflows as much as metropolitan areas have. The concentration of investment, infrastructure and skills in metropolitan corridors risks creating a two-speed economy: dynamic cities on the one hand and stagnant rural regions on the other.
The challenge is not simply to increase economic strength but also to foster diffusion to translate and broaden the benefits of national competitiveness into rural prosperity. Strengthening rural economic foundations requires complementing the policy focus of increasing rural attractiveness to also include efforts for diffusion. These include tightening value-chain linkages, upgrading domestic SMEs and aligning skills, housing, transport and land use with functional rural-urban labour markets. Without such measures, Ireland’s national advantages will remain geographically narrow, leaving large parts of the country under‑used and vulnerable to future shocks.
Foreign direct investment and spatial concentration
FDI has driven Ireland’s international competitiveness but remains geographically concentrated. It underpins growth in high-value sectors such as information and communication technology (ICT), pharmaceuticals and financial services. These high-productivity employment clusters are mainly located in Cork, Dublin and the Galway-Limerick corridor. Rural counties host relatively few multinational enterprise (MNE) sites, and those that exist often function as operational enclaves rather than embedded nodes in local value chains (Landman et al., 2022[2]).
Spillovers to rural SMEs remain limited and uneven. Technology, management and market diffusion from MNEs to domestic firms depend on supplier readiness, absorptive capacity and deliberate linkage policies (supplier development programmes, cluster governance, targeted procurement). Many rural SMEs face capability and scale constraints that prevent them from capturing these spillovers, reinforcing productivity gaps.
The national economy is highly exposed to a narrow set of MNEs. At the macro level, Ireland’s growth is both tax- and sector-dependent on a small number of firms. However, for most rural areas, the risk is not over-dependence but under-participation and thereby missing opportunities for value-chain integration, skill pipelines and innovation diffusion. The task for ORF II is therefore not to attract more FDI per se, but to integrate and diffuse future investment more effectively across territories.
This will require thinking about FDI in a different way. For example, investment promotion agency IDA Ireland has been urged to develop “small-scale/niche FDI” strategies to target rural towns (CEDRA, 2014[3]). IDA Ireland’s current five-year strategy (2025-2029) includes a focus on securing more investments in regional locations, developing “next-generation strategic sites” in regions and working in partnership with local stakeholders to improve placemaking and infrastructure that attract investments beyond just large urban centres (IDA Ireland, 2025[4]). This shows a broader ambition to spread FDI benefits regionally, although the emphasis largely remains on strategic sectors and larger-scale site developments.
Spreading growth: Sector mix, productivity and small and medium-sized enterprise structure
Spatial concentration of FDI amplifies Ireland’s two-speed economy. Knowledge-intensive tradeable services (ICT, finance, professional services) cluster in city-regions, while rural economies rely more on non-tradeables (construction, retail, local services) and resource-based sectors (agrifood, forestry, tourism) (DJEI, 2025[5]). This sector mix, along with the lack of economies of agglomeration drives the lower average productivity and wages in rural areas, as depicted in Chapter 1, and greater sensitivity to domestic cycles.
Manufacturing footprints are also unevenly located. Advanced manufacturing (pharmaceuticals, medical technology, ICT hardware) clusters near research and development (R&D) assets and ports, while medium‑technology (mid‑tech) and light manufacturing (timber, food processing, fabricated metals) are more dispersed and anchorable in rural counties if supported by automation, digitalisation and patient finance to lift productivity and wages. Government agency Enterprise Ireland and IDA Ireland, through the Industry 4.0 Strategy 2020-2025, have introduced programmes such as Future Manufacturing Ireland to help regional manufacturers adopt digital, data-driven processes and automation (DBEI, 2019[6]). These initiatives are critical because rural manufacturers typically lag in technology adoption, training and productivity performance compared to urban regions.
The domestic-SME productivity gap remains wide. Productivity data show that Ireland’s high national labour productivity (over EUR 125/hour in mid-2025) is largely driven by MNEs, masking persistent lagging productivity and wage levels in domestic rural sectors (CSO, 2025[7]). While lagging domestic SMEs, common in rural enterprise structures, face management-capability gaps, limited finance for second-stage growth and export barriers (standards, certification, market intelligence). These dynamics constrain convergence despite tight labour markets. The OECD and Ireland’s Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) have both underlined that unless these regional and sectoral disparities are addressed, social inclusion and balanced growth will be increasingly constrained (OECD, 2025[8]).
Rural services also matter. Care, repair, logistics, visitor-economy and digital-enabled micro enterprises employ large numbers but are often low-margin and low-wage. Targeted upgrading in digital tools, shared back-office systems, quality standards and aggregated procurement can raise productivity and stabilise incomes without displacing local ownership.
Evidence from OECD sources supports the view that rural economic growth now depends on moving from generic enterprise supports to more targeted, place-specific upgrading strategies, particularly in manufacturing, services and SME export readiness (OECD, 2025[8]; DBEI, 2019[6]). The 2025 Action Plan for Competitiveness and Productivity and the Enterprise 2025 report both highlight that Ireland must focus on place-based productivity strategies to close the rural‑urban gap and strengthen supply linkages between rural SMEs and major MNEs (Portefaix, 2025[9]; DJEI, 2025[5]). In short, Ireland’s rural economy must evolve from general enterprise support to place-specific upgrading paths that include supplier readiness programmes tied to MNE demand, plant modernisation and Industry 4.0 measures for rural manufacturers, professionalisation of rural services and export-readiness initiatives for domestically oriented SMEs. Without these, rural productivity and wage gaps will widen further, constraining inclusive growth.
Local labour markets: The missing economic gear
Functional labour markets form the hinge between opportunity and place. The report Impact Evaluation of Ireland’s Active Labour Market Policies (OECD/DSP/EC-JRC, 2024[10]) shows that effective labour market activation not only raises employment outcomes, but also anchors local economies by helping people move from social programmes to employment without relocating (OECD/DSP/EC-JRC, 2024[10]). Rural workers often commute into cities, while rural employers face persistent vacancies due to skills mismatch, housing constraints and transport gaps. National indicators that mask these local dynamics can often lead to one-size-fits-all policies that overlook the rural realities.
Improving labour market outcomes is therefore central to rural well-being. While Ireland’s overall unemployment is low, many rural areas experience under-reported forms of joblessness, such as underemployment, discouraged workers and low labour-force participation among specific groups (CSO, 2025[11]; OECD, 2025[8]). Beyond formal unemployment, lower participation, underemployment and skills underutilisation remain significant, particularly where people work fewer hours than desired, operate in the informal economy, or accept lower-paid social enterprise roles in the absence of formal opportunities. In Ireland, as in other OECD countries, many rural or peripheral areas face forms of “concealed joblessness” where people are working fewer hours than they want, involuntarily part-time or outside the formal economy through casual, seasonal or social enterprise work rather than fully waged employment (Houston et al., 2024[12]). These conditions, combined with the shortage of both social and market-rate housing, reduce disposable income and mobility, further depressing well-being.
More granular evidence is required. Differentiated analysis by rural typology (see Chapter 1 and the Central Statistics Office [CSO] six-way split), commuting zones, travel-to-work areas and sectoral demand should inform local skills pipelines, further education offerings, childcare and eldercare capacity and transport scheduling. Addressing these barriers means shortening the distance between people and jobs – both physically through improved mobility and housing – and increasing skills, through targeted upskilling aligned to local demand. It is important to treat labour markets as core economic infrastructure. There is a need to develop stronger mechanisms to align training, housing, transport and land use with local demand profiles, by mobilising the Regional Skills Fora, Education and Training Boards (ETBs), local enterprise offices (LEOs) and Enterprise Ireland as a co‑ordinated engine supported by the DRCDG’s emerging rural intelligence capacity.
Brexit exposure and rural SME resilience
While Ireland avoided the most severe disruptions anticipated in the immediate post-Brexit period, the withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the European Union remains a live stress test for rural resilience. Its consequences continue to challenge rural regions despite financial buffers such as the Brexit Adjustment Reserve. SMEs in border counties and agrifood chains face persistent customs frictions, logistics costs, standards compliance pressures and exchange-rate volatility. Impacts have been geographically uneven, with the Border region on the front line due to economic and logistical exposure. The West/North-West and South-West experienced significant but secondary effects, particularly across agrifood and fisheries industries. The Gaeltacht and offshore island regions remain vulnerable as they depend on traditional sectors (e.g. fishing, craft exports, agriculture) that have been acutely affected by market volatility and regulatory uncertainty. Box 5.1 illustrates how these regional effects have unfolded across Ireland’s rural economy, highlighting sectoral and spatial differences in exposure.
The counties that experienced the largest farm income declines after Brexit were those most dependent on beef, sheep and dairy exports to the United Kingdom. The worst-affected counties were predominantly Cavan, Donegal, Leitrim, Monaghan and Roscommon, with secondary impacts in Clare, Kerry and Mayo. The South-West, home to Ireland’s largest dairy processing plants, experienced heavy impacts linked to export costs and regulatory divergence for dairy products, particularly cheddar cheese shipments to the United Kingdom. Cork and Kerry, despite stronger infrastructure, saw reduced margins for small food producers and tourism operators due to weaker sterling and a fall in British tourist arrivals.
The West and North-West, with substantial employment in food processing, fishing and small-scale manufacturing, also faced notable Brexit-related shocks. These areas are dominated by indigenous enterprises highly reliant on United Kingdom (UK) trade links, making them sensitive to customs friction and exchange-rate fluctuations.
The Gaeltacht and offshore island regions, characterised by smaller and more isolated rural economies, were similarly affected because their traditional export sectors – fishing, craft production and agriculture – experienced heightened uncertainty and market contraction after Brexit.
Sources: Copenhagen Economics (2025[13]), Ireland and the Impacts of Brexit Strategic Implications for Ireland Arising from Changing EU‑UK Trading Relations, https://enterprise.gov.ie/en/publications/publication-files/ireland-and-the-impacts-of-brexit.pdf; European Parliament (2023[14]), Impact of Brexit on the Development of Irish Regions and their Cross-Border Cooperation, https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/STUD/2023/733127/IPOL_STU(2023)733127_EN.pdf.
Strengthening rural economies post-Brexit
The 2025 government report on the impacts of Brexit identifies agrifood, agriculture and wholesale-retail as the sectors experiencing the deepest structural effects, largely due to tariff risks, regulatory divergence and higher logistics costs (Copenhagen Economics, 2025[13]). With the presence and persistence of diversification and digitalisation gaps, many rural SMEs lack the working-capital depth and market-development capacity needed to pivot towards EU or overseas markets. E-commerce, digital marketing and certification adoption remain inconsistent, limiting their access to new supply chains.
Future rural policy must therefore embed post-Brexit resilience within ORF II’s enterprise pillar, combining diversification advisory, tailored finance, shared logistics or fulfilment hubs, mentored certification pathways and digital-sales enablement, targeted especially at border regions and export-exposed sectors. Building such adaptive capacity would not only strengthen SME resilience but also advance Ireland’s goal of balanced territorial development.
Rural recovery efforts are increasingly framed around diversification, local value chains and resilience policies. A 2023 Economic Resilience Scorecard study identifies Ireland as a priority case for testing “rural recovery through local interdependencies”, showing how post-Brexit support schemes can foster diversified local supply chains and SMEs (Sensier, Rafferty and Devine, 2023[15]). At the same time, evidence from the OECD shows that filling the post-Brexit gap in small rural places could involve several complementary actions. These include: strengthening place-based economic models and rural SMEs; investing in digital and green transition capacities; leveraging community entrepreneurship and rural hubs; and improving policy coherence between the local and national levels.
The last OECD flagship report on rural development Reinforcing Rural Resilience emphasises four drivers for renewing rural economies:
specific assets (place-based strengths like food, craft, landscape)
tradeable specialisation (niche exports, creative sectors)
access to markets (including urban-rural linkages rather than dependence on one export partner)
resources (natural and human capital).
It argues that rural regions formerly dependent on EU-UK trade can rebound through small-scale manufacturing, renewable energy and digital entrepreneurship, provided investment in skills, broadband and connectivity improves (OECD, 2025[1]).
Rebalancing Ireland’s FDI model and building rural competitiveness after Brexit
Ireland’s FDI-led growth model has delivered prosperity but produced uneven territorial outcomes. Several rural economies are still grappling with the structural effects of Brexit. ORF II can play a strategic enabling role by converting national competitiveness into local capability. Table 5.1 summarises key challenges and feasible actions to transform FDI from a concentrated growth source into a more balanced engine of regional resilience. These measures focus on tightening supply-chain linkages, strengthening SME upgrading and embedding labour-market and spatial planning within rural policy co‑ordination frameworks.
Policy priorities to strengthen the rural economic foundations
Ireland’s approach to attracting and leveraging FDI has evolved significantly over the past decade. The initiatives already in place, spanning regional prosperity programmes, cluster support and regional enterprise strategies, demonstrate a clear national commitment to balanced growth. However, as Table 5.1 illustrates, these activities are not yet fully spatially integrated, nor systematically connected to rural economic ecosystems. The challenge is less about inventing new instruments and more about ensuring that existing ones better reflect rural realities. These include targeting smaller firms, thinner labour markets and distance from main transport and innovation corridors. Based on the initiatives and activities already underway, and the areas identified where further depth is possible, several policy priorities emerge.
ORF II should focus on converting national economic strength into local resilience, including making FDI diffusion, SME upgrading and labour market alignment the foundation of a truly inclusive, place-based economy. By treating rural economic capacity as part of the national competitiveness system rather than its residual, Ireland can support a more balanced growth model across all regions and, with it, mobilise the growth potential of rural assets. The evidence above suggests five practical levers for doing so:
Diffuse FDI impacts through stronger local linkages. Ireland’s success in attracting global investment must now be matched by deliberate mechanisms to spread its benefits spatially, through supplier readiness programmes, rural brokerage platforms and co‑ordinated regional promotion.
Back second-stage growth for rural SMEs. Close the “missing-middle” gap by providing finance, mentoring and export-readiness support that help established rural firms scale up and compete in international value chains.
Professionalise rural services as part of a productivity agenda. Use shared digital platforms, targeted training and quality-certification schemes that are expressly designed to operate in a rural milieu to raise incomes, attract younger workers and formalise informal activity.
Treat labour market alignment as a structural policy lever. Integrate housing, transport, childcare and training strategies to match local labour supply and demand within functional rural‑urban labour markets.
Fully adopt typology-based targeting and institutionalise rural intelligence to better serve diverse rural Ireland. Acknowledge the differing needs of adjacent, intermediate and remote areas by equipping the DRCDG to translate granular local data into cross-government policy signals and funding priorities.
Together, these levers provide a coherent roadmap for ORF II, linking the “scope to go further” actions in Table 5.1 directly to the strategic priorities that can help activate rural assets and increase rural resilience. International experience reinforces these findings. As Box 5.2 shows, other OECD countries facing similar spatial concentration risks have successfully used supplier development programmes, foresight intelligence and local partnerships to diffuse FDI benefits into rural regions.
Other OECD countries show that supplier development, foresight intelligence and local partnerships are crucial to spreading the benefits of FDI beyond major cities. Each example illustrates how governments embed regional innovation, supplier upgrading and foresight systems into rural and industrial strategies, connecting regional innovation ecosystems with inclusive FDI and rural competitiveness.
Czechia and Portugal demonstrate how European Union (EU) co-financing can scale supplier upgrading and SME diversification; Denmark and Finland highlight the integration of foresight, labour intelligence and diffusion networks; while Costa Rica and Czechia show how territorial governance and multi-agency co‑ordination deepen value-chain spillovers. Together, they form an emerging set of international best practices for balanced FDI diffusion and regional resilience.
Portugal: Compete 2030 and regional supplier upgrading
Portugal’s Compete 2030 Innovation and Digital Transition programme (budget EUR 3.9 billion) provides a model for linking regional SMEs, especially in agriculture and manufacturing, to global investor networks while raising technological capability. Administered by the Agency for Competitiveness and Innovation under Portugal 2030 and co-funded by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) and the European Social Fund Plus (ESF+), the programme supports SME internationalisation, digitalisation and integration into MNE supply chains. It co-finances supplier certification, R&D collaboration and technology adoption, particularly in food processing, automotive and green industries. The OECD report The Green Transition of SMEs and Entrepreneurship in Portugal (2025[16]) notes that this supplier-upgrading component enables rural and peripheral SMEs to join complex value chains, though uptake varies regionally.
Finland: Foresight in smart specialisation strategies
Finland demonstrates how integrating foresight and labour intelligence tools into regional planning aligns foreign investment priorities with education and R&D systems. Each region embeds foresight within its smart specialisation strategy, combining data on skills, investment trends and technology diffusion to guide priorities such as bioeconomy, digitalisation, well-being and tourism. Cross-regional foresight systems in Central and Northern Finland link universities, regional councils and enterprises. Finland’s Anticipatory Innovation Governance Model (OECD, 2022[17]) institutionalises foresight across government, ensuring that research, development and innovation investment, FDI attraction and workforce development evolve in tandem.
Czechia: Supplier Development Programme
Czechia’s Supplier Development Programme, implemented by CzechInvest with the World Bank Foreign Investment Advisory Service, shows how direct FDI-SME linkage schemes can strengthen rural and regional business ecosystems when funding and technical assistance target verified supplier potential. Piloted between 2000 and 2002 in automotive and electronics, it paired MNEs with local SMEs for joint process certification, mentoring and quality audits (using European Foundation for Quality Management benchmarking). Forty-five suppliers completed tailored business reviews, securing an estimated USD 46 million in new contracts within three years. The framework later expanded through EU Phare and ERDF funds to regional suppliers, laying the foundation for CzechTrade’s competitive-cluster system.
Denmark: Regional business hubs and FDI knowledge diffusion
Denmark connects foreign investment, innovation and rural enterprise policy through a network of regional business hubs and innovation partnerships. These hubs link municipalities, universities and firms to accelerate knowledge diffusion from global investors to local SMEs. Supported by the Green Development and Demonstration Programme and the OECD FDI-SME Ecosystems Initiative (2025), Denmark prioritises knowledge upgrading and sustainable productivity over isolated project grants. It provides a governance model where FDI agencies, LAs and higher education institutions jointly deliver regional innovation and diffusion strategies.
Costa Rica and CzechInvest: Multi-ministerial supplier development
The Costa Rican Investment Promotion Agency (CINDE) and Czechia’s CzechInvest both highlight the importance of inter-ministerial collaboration in turning investment promotion agencies into enablers of territorial knowledge diffusion rather than narrow FDI brokers. CINDE co‑ordinates supplier development frameworks across electronics, medical devices and advanced manufacturing, linking with the ministries of economy, science and education. Its participation in microelectronics and semiconductor industry event Semicon West 2025 exemplifies a focus on ecosystem maturity – certification, traceability, talent partnerships and infrastructure – that extends value-chain integration beyond metropolitan areas. Similarly, CzechInvest has evolved from a traditional investment promotion body into a multi-ministerial co‑ordination platform linking the Ministries of Industry, Labour and Regional Development to drive supplier diffusion into peripheral regions.
Sources: Compete 2030 (n.d.[18]), “Structure and Objectives”, https://www.compete2030.gov.pt/en/structure-and-objectives-2/; OECD (2025[16]), The Green Transition of SMEs and Entrepreneurship in Portugal, https://doi.org/10.1787/36e668f2-en; Keski-Suomen liitto (n.d.[19]), “Smart Specialisation Strategy for Central Finland”, https://keskisuomenliitto.fi/en/strategic-choices-and-success-stories/smart-specialisation-strategy-for-central-finland/; Lapin liitto (n.d.[20]), Shared Smart Specialisation Strategy for East and North Finland as from January 2024, https://www.lapinliitto.fi/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/IP-Suomi-A%CC%88ES-taitto-210x210mm_ENG_verkkojulkaisu.pdf; WEF (n.d.[21]), “Case 13: Pilot Czech Supplier Development Programme in Electronics and Automotive”, https://www3.weforum.org/docs/Manufacturing_Our_Future_2016/Case_Study_13.pdf; OECD (n.d.[22]), “FDI-SME Ecosystems to boost productivity and innovation”, https://www.oecd.org/en/about/projects/fdi-sme-ecosystems-to-boost-productivity-and-innovation.html; CINDE (2025[23]), “Costa Rica Showcases Its Vision of Resilience and High Technology at SEMICON West 2025”, https://www.cinde.org/en/essential-news/costa-rica-showcases-its-vision-of-resilience-and-high-technology-at-semicon-west-2025; CzechInvest (n.d.[24]), “Homepage”, https://czechinvest.gov.cz/; OECD (2025[16]), The Green Transition of SMEs and Entrepreneurship in Portugal, https://doi.org/10.1787/36e668f2-en; OECD (2022[17]), Anticipatory Innovation Governance Model in Finland: Towards a New Way of Governing, https://doi.org/10.1787/a31e7a9a-en.
Ireland’s agriculture and food system remains the backbone of rural life, yet its future resilience will depend less on productivity gains and more on how well it adapts to changing environmental, labour and market dynamics. Agriculture still accounts for around 5% of national employment, but its importance is magnified in rural regions, where farm households anchor local economies, cultural identity and environmental stewardship. However, structural ageing, weak diversification and environmental pressures are converging to challenge the sustainability of Ireland’s rural agri-economy.
From productivity to innovation: Reframing the growth model
The next wave of agricultural productivity must come from innovation within and beyond farming. Productivity gains at the national level mask widespread income fragility. The latest Agriculture and Food Development Authority of Ireland (Teagasc) analysis affirms that less than half of Irish farms are economically viable, confirming the persistence of structural income imbalance within an otherwise efficient agrifood system (Sharewatch, 2025[25]). Ireland’s agrifood system has achieved high levels of efficiency and export competitiveness, yet its productivity model that is based primarily on scale expansion and input intensity is under pressure from environmental limits and changing consumer demand. Future gains must come from innovation that links farm activity to value addition, bioeconomy applications and climate-smart production. OECD work on agricultural transitions shows that innovation-led growth helps reduce emissions intensity while enhancing income diversity (OECD, 2024[26]).
Ireland’s Food Vision 2030 strategy already identifies innovation as a core driver, but the alignment with rural development objectives remains partial. Rural SMEs in agri-processing, circular bioeconomy or ecotourism could be key nodes in the transition. The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) Network Ireland National Conference 2025 and Bioeconomy Ireland Week 2025 confirm that SMEs are at the heart of Ireland’s transition to a sustainable, circular and low‑carbon economy, particularly in the West and Border regions (CAP Network Ireland, 2025[27]; DCEE, 2025[28]). Yet they often lack access to tailored finance, research partnerships or enabling infrastructure. This underscores the need for ORF II to act as a bridge between agrifood innovation and rural enterprise development, ensuring that rural communities are part of the bioeconomy transition rather than simply its landscape.
Diversification, adding value and functional integration
Farm diversification remains uneven across Ireland. Data from Teagasc and the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine (DAFM) reveal that while diversification is expanding, especially in rural tourism, renewable energy and horticulture, uptake varies across regions, farm types and scales of operation (Teagasc, 2025[29]). Yet diversification is one of the most effective levers for both income stability and environmental transition. While niche enterprises that include horticulture, organics, agritourism and renewable energy are expanding, they remain marginal in most regions. Barriers include regulatory complexity, limited advisory reach and fragmented market access. Greater emphasis on local and regional food systems such as processing, branding, logistics and tourism linkages, can help capture more value locally.
Functional integration between agriculture and other rural sectors is equally limited. Ireland’s rural economy still operates through segmented sectoral systems rather than an integrated rural enterprise model (OECD, 2025[8]). Rural enterprises connected to agrifood value chains through logistics, renewable energy, digital services and tourism can amplify rural incomes. The OECD Regional Outlook 2023 finds that countries leveraging such cross-sectoral linkages – between farming, SMEs and local services – generate more stable employment and innovation spillovers (OECD, 2023[30]). In Ireland, regional clusters around dairy, meat and seafood already provide examples, but broader replication and investment in support infrastructure (cold chains, testing facilities, rural incubators) remain limited.
Enhancing rural employment and farm household livelihoods
Farm households anchor the social and economic life of rural Ireland but face mounting pressures. The 2024 Teagasc National Farm Survey showed that only 43% of the roughly 88 000 farms in the survey population were economically viable, defined as having a farm income sufficient to pay family labour and earn a 5% return on non-land assets (Teagasc, 2025[31]). While the survey covers 96% of the livestock population and 85% of Irish farmland, its sampling frame excludes farms with annual sales below EUR 8 000, about 47 000 farms, or 35% of all holdings. With such low sales, virtually all of these farms would be considered non-viable. This suggests that, in 2024, only 28% of Irish farms or around 37 800 holdings were economically viable. Figure 5.1 below shows the distribution of farm family income from the farm survey. Fewer than 40% of farm households earned more than EUR 30 000 in farm income, while just over 30% generated less than EUR 10 000.
Source: Teagasc National Farm Survey
This pattern indicates that most Irish farm households depend heavily on agricultural transfer payments, off-farm earnings and other transfer income for much of their livelihood. Even where farms are efficient and receive CAP subsidies, those subsidies are often small because the farms themselves are small. In Ireland, around 65% of farm households reported off-farm earnings, lower than in many OECD countries, where most farm households earn more off farm than on farm (Pastusiak et al., 2017[32]).
Low farm incomes create a dual challenge: they constrain productivity and succession, while limiting agriculture’s wider contribution to the rural economy. When incomes are insufficient, farmers cannot invest in modernisation, expansion or maintenance, which dampens productivity growth (Shin, 2022[33]). Persistent low incomes also delay succession, since a farm that can barely support one household cannot support two. The average age of new farmers has risen from 39 (1971-1976) to 56 (2016-2°22) (Food Vision 2030, 2025[34]; DAFM, 2022[35]). Older successors tend to invest less in increasing output and are less likely to take or seek off-farm work.
For rural regions, this means agriculture contributes less to local growth while continuing to rely on public expenditure. Yet younger entrants could strengthen both the agricultural and non-agricultural rural economy: farm operators typically have mechanical skills and equipment that can fill gaps in rural labour markets. Many seek part-time or seasonal employment to balance farm and off-farm work, supported by their own transport and community networks. Farm spouses are also key participants in local economies, often with their own skillsets that add value to rural labour markets. Importantly, farmers rarely migrate out of their communities for work, so they help anchor population stability.
A weak local labour market, in turn, discourages generational renewal. When rural job prospects are thin, younger people delay taking over small farms, opting for urban employment until they can afford to semi‑retire. This rational individual choice has cumulative costs for rural communities, locking in demographic decline and economic stagnation. Increasing the viability of farm households requires linking rural employment and enterprise development to agricultural policy, so that off-farm work, skills and diversification are seen as mutually reinforcing, not separate domains.
Implications for ORF II – From productivity to resilience
ORF II should position agriculture as part of a wider rural resilience agenda linking diversification, innovation and employment policy across multiple sectors under a shared vision of “productive sustainability”. Ireland’s agricultural model remains a cornerstone of rural identity and employment, but its long-term vitality depends on diversification, generational renewal and stronger integration with the wider rural economy. Table 5.2 identifies where further depth and co‑ordination could be advanced through ORF II.
Policy priorities to rebalance Ireland’s agrifood model
While the actions in Table 5.2 highlight where existing instruments can go further, the priorities below identify the structural levers that ORF II should embed to sustain and scale these improvements:
Reframe agricultural transition as an integral part of rural development. Position diversification and innovation as the twin pillars of rural economic resilience, ensuring DRCDG and DAFM strategies are mutually reinforcing.
Build regional bio-innovation clusters. Develop pilot bio-innovation campuses, linking farmers, SMEs and TUs to translate agri-innovation into regional value creation.
Enable dual livelihoods and household entrepreneurship. Integrate off-farm employment schemes, enterprise support and training so farm households can build balanced income portfolios.
Develop rural labour intelligence and foresight systems. Use the DRCDG’s data capacity to monitor skills transitions and anticipate new green- and digital-job opportunities.
Embed cross-sector planning within ORF II. Ensure agriculture, enterprise, housing and environmental policies are co‑ordinated through a shared rural resilience framework.
Ireland already possesses many of the institutional pieces that include Teagasc, LEOs, Regional Skills Fora and the regional assemblies. The task is to align them under a shared vision of rural innovation, for example through a cross-departmental rural innovation platform, embedding foresight analysis within policy design and supporting demonstration projects that link farm transition to local job creation.
International experience shows how regional innovation hubs, diversification funds and foresight platforms can transform traditional farming systems into diversified, resilient rural economies. These examples demonstrate that diversification and resilience emerge where national policies empower regional clusters to lead innovation and connect farmers with research, markets and communities.
Finland: Regional bio-innovation hubs
The Bioeconomy Campus in Tarvaala, Saarijärvi (Central Finland) illustrates how a co‑ordinated regional R&D model can convert natural resource endowments (forests and agriculture) into sustainable, circular business systems. Anchored by Jamk University of Applied Sciences, the Institute of Bioeconomy of the University of Jyväskylä and regional development bodies, the campus links farmers, SMEs and researchers through applied R&D and pilot production. It hosts a Smart Farm and Smart Bioeconomy Testbed developing renewable materials, precision-farming tools and circular-biomass systems. The hub has become a launchpad for bio-based start-ups and demonstrates how integrated governance can mobilise public agencies, universities and entrepreneurs around regional green growth.
Austria: Farm diversification funds
Austria’s Rural Development Programme 2014‑2020 (LE 14‑20), co-financed by the European Union and Austrian federal provinces, created a robust model for expanding rural income streams while maintaining primary agriculture. Through Measure 6: Farm Business and Farm-Diversification Support, around EUR 80 million financed rural tourism, agrifood processing and small-scale manufacturing. By 2020, approximately 8 400 agricultural holdings offered accommodation, experiential tourism or small craft production – about 6% of all Austrian farms – generating EUR 1-1.2 billion in turnover. The programme strengthened rural employment and landscape stewardship, showing how diversification funding can align economic, cultural and ecological goals.
Denmark: Smart-land networks
Denmark’s Smart Farming Network, co-ordinated by Landbrug and Fødevarer (the Danish Agriculture and Food Council) with Aarhus University, demonstrates how farmer co‑operatives can integrate land use efficiency and renewable energy generation through shared digital infrastructure. Supported by the Green Development and Demonstration Programme, it combines precision-agriculture technologies, Global Positioning System (GPS) nutrient accounting and co‑operative biogas or district heating projects to enhance productivity and reduce emissions. The Mark Online system now covers roughly 85% of Danish farmland, enabling circular resource use across manure management, green-protein production and local energy co‑operatives.
Canada: Agricultural foresight platforms
Canada has institutionalised anticipatory governance for agriculture through two linked initiatives: the Agri-Foresight initiative within Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada and external partnerships with the Canadian Agri-Food Policy Institute and the Canadian Agri-Food Foresight Institute. These platforms convene governments, producers, academics and private actors to conduct scenario planning, vulnerability mapping and “crisis-management toolbox” modelling for food system resilience. Tools include foresight visualisation for identifying trade, climate or biosecurity disruptions and system-level modelling to inform adaptive resource allocation. Together they provide a structured model of foresight governance applicable to other rural sectors seeking long-term resilience planning.
These cases confirm that effective rural diversification depends on embedding innovation capacity where production occurs, through regional hubs, co-operative digital networks, targeted diversification funds and foresight platforms linking local knowledge to national strategy. Each demonstrates how rural economies can transition from dependence on single sectors or export partners towards integrated, knowledge-driven resilience
Sources: Jamk (n.d.[36]), “Smart Farm for Bioeconomy Campus”, https://www.jamk.fi/en/research-and-development/rdi-projects/smart-farm-for-bioeconomy-campus; Quendler, E., et al. (2024[37]), “Austria under the auspices of global agritourism values: a narrative literature review”, https://doi.org/10.3389/frsut.2024.1513292; Fourlis, L. (2025[38]), “Future Farming Denmark”, https://lwid.dk/future-farming-denmark/; CAPI (2023[39]), Canadian Agri-Food Resilience: A Toolbox for Managing Crises, https://capi-icpa.ca/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/2023-09-13-Canadian-Agri-Food-Resilience-CAPI-EN.pdf.
Housing is not merely a social policy issue: it is core economic infrastructure. Adequate, affordable and well-located housing determines where people can live, work and invest. It underpins labour mobility, community vitality and enterprise growth. In rural Ireland, housing policy has become a structural determinant of whether regions can retain or attract people and firms (OECD, 2025[8]). Linking housing and rural economic development is therefore essential for unlocking the potential of rural places. While Ireland has made progress through programmes such as Town Centre First and Croí Cónaithe (Cities), the challenge lies in ensuring that rural housing policy is not treated in isolation but embedded within a wider economic, spatial and labour market framework.
National and rural housing context
Ireland’s housing stock has grown substantially since 2016, yet not fast enough to keep pace with population growth or demographic change. Although the stock is relatively recent and not excessively skewed towards home ownership, acute affordability issues and regional disparities persist.
Between 2016 and 2022, the population increased by over 8% while the housing stock grew by only 6%, resulting in an estimated shortfall of over 50 000 dwellings (CSO, 2023[40]). Rural counties face a double burden, new housing supply lags behind national trends, while older housing stock, much of which is substandard, dominates much of the periphery.
Source: OECD (2025[8]), OECD Economic Surveys: Ireland 2025, https://doi.org/10.1787/9a368560-en.
Housing affordability pressures are most severe near urban centres and along the eastern seaboard, but many rural counties experience stagnant or declining construction activity, limited rental markets and declining availability of public housing. The GeoDirectory Second Quarter 2025 Report shows that Cork, Dublin, Galway, Kildare, Meath and Wicklow drive nearly 60% of annual completions, while counties like Leitrim, Longford and Roscommon report the lowest new starts and smallest rental base (CSO, 2025[41]). Similarly, the Arcadis Construction Market Review (Arcadis, 2025[42]) reports that while Ireland saw rising national construction investment, “activity remains spatially concentrated”, with weak developer incentives outside urban growth zones.
According to the Chambers Ireland submission to the National Housing Plan 2025-2030, this divergence reflects not only land use patterns but also planning constraints, infrastructure deficits and fragmented delivery capacity, especially where small LAs lack planning resources or viable landbanks (Chambers Ireland, 2025[43]). A 2025 Housing Commission review notes that Ireland’s housing system remains structurally undersupplied and geographically imbalanced with stagnant housing construction across many rural counties (Housing Commission, 2024[44]). A 2025 report from property and financial services advisors Sherry FitzGerald found a particular shortage of second-hand homes in regional and rural Ireland. It states how essential it is to prioritise new housing delivery outside of major urban centres to ensure sustainable growth and economic balance (Buckley, Crowe and Cotterill, 2025[45]). Although housing plan Housing for All and related measures have boosted national output, the pace of delivery and its spatial distribution continue to favour high-demand markets. The result is that peripheral areas experience little spillover from national housing gains, undermining the goal of balanced regional development.
Notes:
1. Changes relative to previous census.
2. The measurement refers to the end of period (for example, 1996 for the 1991-96 period).
Source: OECD (2025[8]), OECD Economic Surveys: Ireland 2025, https://doi.org/10.1787/9a368560-en.
Tensions shaping housing delivery
Ireland’s housing system reflects decades of centralised decision making and fragmented delivery responsibilities. LAs continue to have limited autonomy over budget allocation, project selection and data analysis, which reduces responsiveness to local housing-labour dynamics. Historically, the focus on urban housing needs created an implicit policy bias that treated rural housing as residual rather than integral to national competitiveness.
National housing policy, though well-intentioned, still lacks mechanisms to tailor delivery to Ireland’s diverse settlement types, from remote villages to peri-urban clusters. Policies such as Town Centre First, Croí Cónaithe (Cities) and Housing for All aim to regenerate towns and reuse existing stock (e.g. by increasing conversions of second floor space above village shops to apartments); yet, the absence of systematic co‑ordination between these schemes and economic development instruments limits their effectiveness. In particular, compact-growth principles, while environmentally sound, can unintentionally constrain smaller settlements that already have labour demand but insufficient serviced sites.
Rural housing policy in Ireland therefore embodies a series of unresolved tensions: between compact growth and local autonomy; between housing demand near cities and the needs of remote areas; and between environmental goals and economic viability. These contradictions are evident in the most recent revision of the NPF (2025), and ongoing debates around rural housing guidelines, The NPF promotes compact, low-carbon development and aims to locate 50% of housing growth within or adjacent to existing urban settlements. However, rural planners and LAs have argued that this national densification approach limits local autonomy to meet genuine housing needs outside major population clusters (Hogge, 2025[46]).
Stakeholders interviewed for this report echoed these sentiments, noting the “double constraint” faced by many rural counties: limited new construction in villages and declining viability of scattered housing due to stricter environmental and mobility requirements. These dynamics risk hollowing out smaller settlements even as suburban fringes expand. The tension between climate policy and rural viability is also an active planning challenge. The recent Irish High Court ruling explicitly acknowledged that rural housing refusals now require balancing EU climate legislation with sustainable rural development objectives (Planning Permission Ireland, 2025[47]).
LAs face continual planning trade-off pressure to limit one-off housing while lacking the tools and market conditions to deliver infill or clustered developments at scale. Many rural planning units lack in-house spatial analysts or economists capable of linking housing, labour markets and service delivery, creating information and capacity gaps with cross-departmental implications.
The OECD Rural Policy 3.0 framework underscores that housing cannot be treated as an isolated policy domain: it interacts with mobility, employment, services and sustainability (OECD, 2018[48]). Without co‑ordinated spatial and economic planning, even well-designed housing programmes risk reinforcing existing inequalities and inefficiencies instead of resolving them.
Specific housing challenges in rural Ireland
Rural housing faces distinctive demographic, infrastructural and environmental constraints. Population ageing, youth outmigration and weak rental markets combine to reduce dynamism. Meanwhile, dispersed settlement patterns elevate per-unit servicing costs and complicate planning approvals. Planning and infrastructure limitations further constrain progress. The Environmental Protection Agency explicitly warns that Ireland’s wastewater network remains “a key constraint on both environmental protection and planned housing delivery in numerous small settlements” (EPA, 2024[49]). A 2022 baseline survey by the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage identified 547 villages and settlements without public wastewater infrastructure (DHLGH, 2022[50]).
The government allocated EUR50 million under the Rural Villages Waste Water Scheme to tackle this deficit, with further funding commitments made in subsequent budgets (DHLGH, 2022[50]). This is a step forward, yet delivery timelines remain uncertain. Without such foundational infrastructure, many rural communities remain effectively “zoned out” of future growth. Planning can also discourage new housing outside designated settlement boundaries, even when such development could sustain local schools or services. Conversely, legacy one-off housing has generated environmental and mobility issues, with rural households frequently dependent on private vehicles for access to work and services (O’Neill, Finn and Varley, 2025[51]).
Energy efficiency presents another major vulnerability. Older rural homes are typically energy-inefficient and costly to retrofit. High upfront costs and limited contractor availability have slowed participation in national retrofit schemes, while older houses (e.g. pre 1940s) have just recently been allocated funding support in a new SEAI retrofit scheme, the Traditional Homes Pilot. The absence of district heating or public transport alternatives compounds household vulnerability to energy-price shocks, undermining the green transition in rural areas. The 2024 ESRI Rural Housing Review emphasises that many existing schemes treat rural housing needs as residual rather than strategic, focusing on urban demand spillovers rather than endogenous growth. The review calls for a “rural housing pathway” that explicitly links housing targets to rural labour market and enterprise strategies (ERSI, 2024[52]).
Housing and labour market outcomes
Housing shortages and mismatches have become an invisible barrier to rural economic vitality. Employers in many rural towns struggle to attract or retain workers because suitable accommodation is unavailable. Even where jobs exist, it is difficult to relocate if affordable, energy-efficient housing is lacking. This disconnect contributes to underemployment, and commuting inefficiencies that weaken rural productivity. Functional labour market analysis reveals that housing and employment are mutually reinforcing. In regions where housing availability aligns with job density, unemployment is lower, wages are higher and commuting times shorter. In areas where housing is scarce or poorly located, employers struggle to fill vacancies, leading to unrealised output. A 2024 Indecon study found that housing constraints were among the top three deterrents to enterprise expansion across Ireland’s western and rural regions, alongside infrastructure deficits (transport and broadband) and labour‑force recruitment challenges (Indecon, 2024[53]).
Evidence from Indecon’s study (2024[53]), the OECD Economic Survey of Ireland (2025[8]) and the National Housing Plan consultation submissions shows that rural housing shortages have become a direct constraint on firm expansion and labour attraction. Aligning housing provision with labour market needs would make regional economies more functional. Addressing these constraints requires an integrated approach: matching housing delivery with regional employment patterns and ensuring that land use zoning, transport investment and labour market policies reinforce each other. For instance, linking housing delivery targets with Regional Skills Fora data and enterprise-zone planning could ensure that new housing corresponds to actual workforce demand.
Similarly, vacancy‑reuse programmes such as Croí Cónaithe could be more deliberately targeted towards settlements experiencing labour shortages, creating a clearer link between regeneration and economic activation, particularly in towns and small urban centresAlso, the Rural Employer‑Linked Housing Partnership model could be further explored. This would allow employers or enterprise agencies to co‑invest with approved housing bodies in workforce housing through tax‑offset or low‑interest loan schemes. There are similar schemes in Austria and Finland, that allow municipalities to designate plots for “employer housing cooperatives”, ensuring workers can live within commuting range of jobs.
The success of the Government of Ireland’s new housing action plan Delivering Homes, Building Communities depends on its ability to meet the unique challenges faced by rural regions. This box provides a brief overview of some of the most significant provisions in the action plan for rural Ireland, assessing their strengths and where their scope could be broadened.
Local authority delivery and the Land Development Agency
The action plan commits to collaborating with LAs for more timely and efficient delivery. Actions include streamlining the approval process and transferring a greater control over costs to LAs. The current four‑stage process by the department is a barrier to direct procurement; streamlining it will help LAs fast-track new housing projects.
The action plan sets out a welcomed larger role for the Land Development Agency. However, as civil society stakeholders have mentioned, without increasing the total housing output targets, the agency is constrained in its ability to grant new planning permissions in LA areas (Keena, 2025[54]).
Shops and derelict spaces
The action plan aims to bring 20 000 derelict homes, or about one-fifth to one-eighth of the estimated total, back into use through property grants (Social Justice Ireland, 2025[55]). The barriers to bringing derelict homes back into use are not just financial; streamlining permitting processes and tackling the infrastructural bottleneck, particularly as it pertains to water and electricity connectivity, is key to the success of this in rural areas. This is acknowledged in the action plan, and recent and planned investments are promising. For instance, the plan commits to investing EUR12.2 billion in water and wastewater services, which follows the EUR74 million investment in rural water services made in July 2025.
Town Centre First and the hinterlands
The new action plan strengthens settlement‑centric regeneration, brownfield/infill use and serviced land as the main spatial instruments for rural housing. It builds on the NPF and Town Centre First model, rather than changing the underlying spatial approach; rural housing is to be supported, but within a plan‑led, compact pattern that prioritises existing settlements. Rural areas are supported primarily through small towns, villages and regeneration tools rather than through a focus on the hinterlands.
Sources: Keena, C. (2025[54]), “Will the Government’s latest plan to fix the housing crisis work? Experts have their say”, https://www.irishtimes.com/ireland/housing-planning/2025/11/15/will-the-governments-latest-plan-to-fix-the-housing-crisis-work-experts-have-their-say/; Social Justice Ireland (2025[55]), “Does the New Housing Plan Match the Scale of the Challenge?”, https://www.socialjustice.ie/article/does-new-housing-plan-match-scale-challenge.
Implications for ORF II: Building rural housing and economic coherence
The key challenge is not simply to build more homes, but to connect housing strategy to functional economic realities. Table 5.3 illustrates this relationship. On the left, Ireland’s main housing policies and initiatives, such as Town Centre First, Croí Cónaithe (Cities) and the NPF, represent ongoing efforts to increase supply and revitalise rural settlements. The connective element is the rural lens that can help understand labour markets and employment as spatial dynamics that shape housing need. The proposed actions are not necessarily new: they simple demonstrate how these missing elements can enhance their effectiveness. Moreover, the elements can be systematically integrated, through data, interdepartmental co‑ordination and capacity building, to align housing provision with rural economic resilience.
In November 2025, the Irish government launched Delivering Homes, Building Communities: An Action Plan on Housing Supply and Targeting Homelessness. This new housing plan follows the previous strategy, Housing for All, and aims to accelerate new housing delivery through regulatory reforms, tax incentives, envisioning larger roles for both the state and private sector and investing EUR 275 billion over ten years through the National Development Plan, making it the largest infrastructure investment in state history (DHLGH, 2025[56]).
Two pillars, eight priorities
Pilar 1: Activating Supply
The government looks to activate the supply of 300 000 homes by 2030 through an all-of-government approach by:
Ensuring a strong pipeline of zoned and serviced land is available.
Creating the conditions to attract the required investment.
Increasing skills and supporting the adoption of modern methods of construction in the residential construction sector.
Working towards ending dereliction and vacancy.
Pillar 2: Supporting People
To end homelessness, support affordability and address diverse housing needs, the government looks to partner with local authoring, the Land Development Agency, and approved housing bodies to:
Focus on ending homelessness, deliver homes for older people, support social inclusion.
Deliver an average of 12 000 new social homes every year over the lifetime of the plan.
Promote affordable homeownership, protect renters and make buying and renting homes more affordable.
Invest in the built environment of towns, villages and cities across the country to enhance community well-being (DHLGH, 2025[56]).
Assessing targets and strategy evolution
Since launching in 2021, housing plan Housing for All has built 137 000 homes, exceeding yearly targets in 2022 and 2023 but under-delivering by around 10 000 homes in 2024 (Murphy, 2025[57]). Over the next five years, Delivering Homes, Building Communities seeks to increase the housing supply by 300 000 homes, with a provision for 72 000 social homes and 90 000 affordable housing supports. The total target surpasses the deficit estimated by the Housing Commission in 2022 of between 212 500 to 256 000 homes. This calculation was based off the unmet need reported in the 2022 Census and did not account for future population growth and other demographic trends likely to increase demand. Similarly, the provision for social homes and affordable housing support offers a significant boost in supply, but one that does not match the scale of demand: the Parliamentary Budget Office estimated that at least 115 425 households required social housing support in 2023, which some civil society organisations argue is an underestimate (Social Justice Ireland, 2025[55]).
Delivering Homes, Building Communities is the 4th national housing policy in 12 years. It departs from the last two strategies (Housing for All in 2021 and Rebuilding Ireland in 2016) by omitting annual targets. While this approach offers some flexibility to adapt to changing circumstances, uncertain timelines complicate stakeholders’ ability to measure progress. It is worth assessing what other tools might help assess whether the action plan is on track to meet its targets, and its ability to deliver long‑term and to completion.
Sources: DHLGH (2025[56]), Delivering Homes, Building Communities 2025-2030, https://www.gov.ie/en/department-of-housing-local-government-and-heritage/campaigns/delivering-homes-building-communities-2025-2030-an-action-plan-on-housing-supply-and-targeting-homelessness/; Social Justice Ireland (2025[55]), “Does the New Housing Plan Match the Scale of the Challenge?”, https://www.socialjustice.ie/article/does-new-housing-plan-match-scale-challenge.
Policy priorities to improve housing and rural economic development
The DRCDG’s rural policy mandate provides a unique vantage point to connect existing housing initiatives with rural labour market intelligence and effectively bridge housing, labour and spatial data and to promote stronger coherence across departments. While the actions in Table 5.4 show where existing instruments can go further, the priorities below identify the structural levers that ORF II should embed to sustain and scale these improvements:
Recasting rural housing as part of economic infrastructure. Survey evidence in the Indecon 2024 Western Development Commission report shows that housing access is now a top‑three deterrent for enterprise growth due to difficulties retaining workers (Indecon, 2024[53]). Firms in manufacturing, renewable energy and logistics cite lack of affordable housing in their local labour market as a constraint on expansion and filling workforce vacancies.
Recognising housing as integral to regional competitiveness and labour mobility. Enabling staff relocation and SME clustering by linking housing delivery to regional employment hubs. Identifying rural growth zones where housing targets, wastewater investment and enterprise supports are aligned under Regional Spatial and Economic Strategies and ORF II.
Integrating housing and labour market data. Using CSO six-way typology and regional assemblies’ planning frameworks to link housing targets with functional commuting zones and job demand.
Closing infrastructure bottlenecks. Prioritising wastewater and transport investment in small towns and villages where development potential is constrained.
Recognising that conventional urban public transit solutions are not viable in rural areas. This is due to longer distances between small settlements, diverse travel patterns that do not follow a hub and spoke structure, and relatively few people spread over a large geographic area.
Strengthening analytical capacity. Supporting LAs in developing housing-economic planning expertise and rural intelligence tools.
Promoting ompact, viable growth. Prioritizing clustered housing models near service and job nodes while respecting environmental and social goals.
Several OECD countries have developed cross-sectoral approaches that explicitly link rural housing, labour markets and economic development. These models show how aligning housing provision with employment, transport and demographic trends can strengthen rural competitiveness and well-being.
Finland: Regional Housing Observatories
Finland’s Regional Housing Observatories ensure that housing planning complements regional labour‑market strategies, preventing housing undersupply from becoming a brake with regard to rural growth. Developed under the Ministry of the Environment and Statistics Finland, and supported by regional councils, the observatories form part of Finland’s data-driven territorial governance reforms.
They forecast rural and semi-rural housing demand through multi-agency data platforms integrating commuting flows, labour market projections and regional business and population scenarios. The observatories operate within the framework Housing Production Needs 2025-2045, which aligns housing production with regional employment centres and public transport access.
This system allows county-level planners to anticipate where housing shortages could constrain labour mobility or enterprise expansion. OECD and Finnish research highlight the observatories as a model of foresight-based rural‑housing governance, balancing decentralisation with data coherence and evidence-led decision making.
Sweden: Rural settlement strategies integrated with regional plans
Sweden’s national rural policy, anchored in the Coherent Rural Policy Bill 2018, mandates that county administrative boards and municipalities incorporate housing targets directly into regional development and transport plans. This approach links housing provision to labour mobility, environmental sustainability and regional economic goals. The key features include:
Labour mobility alignment: Municipalities are legally required to prepare strategic housing provision programmes (Paragraph 2 of the Planning and Building Act), ensuring new or renovated housing supports local labour supply and commuting patterns.
Environmental integration: Housing expansion must comply with national carbon-neutral and biodiversity objectives. Compact settlement is promoted where public transport or digital infrastructure already exists.
Cross-sector planning: Housing, economic development and environmental sustainability are deliberated jointly within regional plans co‑ordinated by Tillväxtverket, the Swedish Agency for Economic and Regional Growth.
Together, these mechanisms create a coherent, place-based housing strategy that strengthens both rural labour market functioning and environmental stewardship.
Sources: PTT (n.d.[58]), “Housing”, https://www.ptt.fi/en/housing/; OECD (2020[59]), “Rural Well-being: Geography of opportunities: Sweden”, https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/reports/2024/12/rural-well-being-country-notes_d66ebd53/sweden_787a5b02/979a044a-en.pdf.
Finally, integrating housing and labour markets takes on even greater importance in the context of Ireland’s future skills transformation. As technological change, automation and the green transition reshape where and how people work, the spatial relationship between jobs and housing will shift. Rural areas with adaptable housing, accessible transport and digital infrastructure will be better positioned to attract and retain workers in emerging green and digital industries. This transition underscores the need for forward-looking, skills-sensitive housing strategies, linking the physical environment to Ireland’s evolving workforce, a theme developed in the following section.
Ireland’s ability to achieve a just and inclusive green transition will depend on the development and retention of a skilled rural workforce. While national unemployment is low, many rural areas face limited access to education and training opportunities, persistent underemployment and skills mismatches that threaten both economic resilience and social cohesion. Skillnet Ireland’s Talent Landscape 2025 warns that a deficit in basic digital and management skills among rural SMEs is a major bottleneck for competitiveness, especially in services and export-facing sectors (Skillnet Ireland, 2025[60]).
Without a targeted rural skills approach, the green and digital transitions risk widening existing territorial inequalities rather than reducing them. The green transition will alter labour demand across multiple sectors including energy, construction, agriculture, and transport, creating new opportunities, but also exposing existing gaps. Rural Ireland, with its concentration of resource-based industries, is particularly exposed to these shifts. To remain competitive and inclusive, rural regions must be equipped to anticipate, prepare for and benefit from these structural changes. Figure 5.4 illustrates how skill needs in agriculture and related industries are shifting towards green, digital and technical domains.
Note: The figure shows the projected change in the demand for each of the six main skills categories between 2019 and 2030 under the Fit for 55 and baseline scenarios across European Union countries when considering relative employment growth in different sectors and occupations identified in the section above “Projected employment changes resulting from the implementation of the Fit for 55 policy targets”. A detailed description of the underlying analyses is provided in Borgonovi et al. (Borgonovi et al., 2023[61])).
Sources: Calculations based on OECD ENV-Linkages model, Lightcast (2023[62]), “Homepage”, https://lightcast.io/ (accessed 15 April 2023); EU (2019[63]), European Labour Force Survey, ad hoc data extraction (for the year 2019), https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/microdata/european-union-labour-force-survey, in Borgonovi, F., et al. (2023[61]), “The effects of the EU Fit for 55 package on labour markets and the demand for skills”, https://doi.org/10.1787/6c16baac-en.
Skills mismatch evidence and territorial gap data show that Ireland’s labour market, though dynamic, faces substantial skills mismatches and under-qualification challenges, especially in rural areas. In 2023, approximately one-third of workers (31%) were employed in roles for which they were under-qualified, while many rural counties reported lower tertiary attainment rates and limited participation in lifelong learning (OECD/DSP/EC-JRC, 2024[10]). These disparities have direct implications for green and digital readiness. Rural enterprises often lack the specialised skills required for retrofitting, renewable energy, circular economy projects and sustainable farming.
At the same time, regional labour markets remain thin, with few mechanisms to retrain workers or attract specialised talent to smaller towns. The evidence suggests that Ireland’s challenge is not a lack of training institutions but an absence of spatially differentiated planning and delivery. National-level systems generate high-quality labour market intelligence, yet rural skills needs are not systematically disaggregated or addressed. Addressing this spatial blindness is essential to make national systems work for all territories.
Skills intelligence and foresight systems
A stronger rural skills-intelligence function is needed to anticipate future labour market needs and target interventions more effectively. Ireland already possesses a solid data infrastructure through state agency SOLAS, the Expert Group on Future Skills Needs (EGFSN) and the CSO. However, these systems operate mainly at aggregate levels and do not capture the distinct variations between rural and urban areas, or across different types of rural territories.
Developing a spatially disaggregated skills intelligence framework would enable earlier identification of local training needs and more efficient targeting of public investment. Such a framework could integrate data from the CSO’s six-way typology, regional enterprise strategies and sectoral transition plans to produce a more accurate picture of territorial demand.
This intelligence function should be embedded within an interdepartmental framework linking the Department of Education and Youth, the Department of Enterprise, Tourism and Employment (DETE) and the DRCDG, rather than operating as a standalone system. By connecting foresight analysis and policy design, Ireland can ensure that national training programmes align with the employment transitions most relevant to rural economies, such as green construction, sustainable farming and renewable energy maintenance. Similar approaches are emerging internationally. Box 5.7 illustrates how regions in Italy and the Nordic countries have developed spatially disaggregated skills intelligence systems to link training, labour market demand and regional development.
Several OECD countries, especially in the Nordic region and parts of Italy, are developing spatially granular skills intelligence frameworks to better match local labour and training needs, and to guide public investment in workforce development.
Trentino, Italy: Integrated monitoring and the For Talent initiative
The Autonomous Province of Trento (Trentino) has established an integrated monitoring system combining national labour-force surveys, local business data and real-time workforce tracking. The platform produces regionally and locally disaggregated data on skills shortages, employment shifts and training needs. This enables policymakers to intervene quickly and target training and talent-attraction schemes. The For Talent initiative uses these insights to address sectoral and local skills gaps, link training with employer demand and design strategies for teleworking and hybrid workforces.
Nordic regions: Localised skills and learning networks
The Nordic Thematic Group for Innovative and Resilient Regions has piloted spatially detailed skills policy projects across rural and urban regions. Examples include North Karelia (Finland) and Hedmark/Oppland (Norway), where locally co‑ordinated networks – so-called “education factories” and regional dialogue platforms – map skills supply and demand at a micro-regional level. These networks rapidly adapt training curricula to emerging employer needs and support small businesses in recruiting and upskilling locally. The approach explicitly links skills policy with spatial planning, tailoring learning systems to urban, rural and remote contexts.
Source: OECD
Regional skills ecosystems: Regional technological universities, Education and Training Boards and employers
Regional technological universities (TUs) and ETBs can become pivotal engines for rural upskilling. OECD analysis (2023[64]) points to the potential of Ireland’s new TUs and ETBs to anchor place-based skill ecosystems that respond to regional economic needs. However, persistent rural-urban imbalances in student access, transport and employer engagement further constrain their reach (OECD, 2023[64]). If fully empowered, these institutions could co‑ordinate applied research collaborations, green-apprenticeship schemes and micro-credential programmes in partnership with SMEs and community actors. To realise this potential, Ireland should increase the funding and autonomy of RTUs to expand applied research partnerships and strengthen links with local enterprises.
Bridging local labour markets and the green transition will also require more flexible training and apprenticeship pathways. In many rural regions, skills bottlenecks persist not because workers lack capacity but because existing programmes remain inaccessible, misaligned or overly rigid. Green economy transitions, such as retrofitting, renewable energy installation, waste reduction and sustainable tourism, depend on practical, place-based training. Flexible modules, digital learning hubs and mobile ETB units can reach workers who cannot easily relocate or leave the farm. Expanding modular upskilling and community-based training delivery would enable rural residents and small firms to participate more fully in emerging green sectors.
Implications for ORF II: Strengthening the territorial dimension of skills policy
Ireland has made significant progress in building a comprehensive national skills architecture, yet its territorial application remains limited. Table 5.4 illustrates that many of the foundations for a successful green skills transition such as national co‑ordination mechanisms, data systems and regional training structures are already in place. However, most of these measures still function primarily at the national or sectoral levels, with insufficient spatial differentiation.
Table 5.4 also acknowledges ongoing efforts and highlights practical ways to strengthen them showing where modest, spatially targeted steps could further embed rural specificity, enhance functional integration and improve outcomes for rural workers and enterprises.
Policy priorities for green skills and workforce transition
The opportunity for ORF II is therefore to connect and deepen existing initiatives rather than to create new ones. By embedding a stronger territorial lens, the strategy can make current programmes more responsive to the realities of rural labour markets, commuting zones and SME structures. This approach would translate national ambition into local outcomes by linking spatial intelligence, institutional co‑ordination and targeted access measures. Collectively, the refinements in Table 5.4 would not require new national institutions but rather a rewiring of existing delivery systems through a rural lens.
Based on the identified scope to go further, ORF II should focus on embedding the following system-level priorities to advance a coherent rural green skills transition:
Embed spatial skills intelligence within ORF II’s rural intelligence framework. Integrate CSO functional area and typology data with SOLAS and Expert Group on Future Skills Needs forecasts to generate regionally differentiated skills dashboards that inform transport, housing and enterprise planning.
Operationalise regional skills ecosystems linking RTUs, ETBs and employers. Support applied‑learning networks where training supply, SME innovation and job creation are designed as a single ecosystem, anchored in rural labour markets and supported through RTU-led field labs.
Ensure equitable rural access to lifelong learning and micro credentials. Institutionalise rural access criteria (delivery via digital hubs, flexible scheduling and travel bursaries) within Springboard+ and other short-cycle learning schemes.
Link green skills planning to rural mobility and housing investment. Use labour demand evidence to guide public transport frequency upgrades, serviced-site zoning and housing renovation in areas with strong employment potential.
Accelerate recognition of prior learning and migrant inclusion in green sectors. Develop Green‑RPL toolkits and fast-track bridging courses in construction, energy and nature-based services to strengthen rural labour supply and social integration.
Pair SME decarbonisation and upskilling measures. Embed mandatory staff-training modules within energy efficiency grants and audits to retain knowledge and productivity gains locally.
Together, these actions would enable ORF II to consolidate Ireland’s national strengths into a territorially balanced, forward-looking skills system, one capable of sustaining inclusive growth through the green transition.
While Ireland’s rural development narrative often emphasises opportunity, persistent social inequalities reveal who remains excluded from those opportunities. Rural women, migrants and low-income households continue to face structural barriers that limit participation in economic and civic life. These divides are not marginal social issues; they are central to the success of rural economic development and to the inclusiveness of growth. Despite progress on gender balance and inclusion, the capacity of rural communities to retain and empower all residents remains constrained by uneven childcare, limited transport and the cost of living.
As shown in the previous section on service access, the effects of underdeveloped infrastructure fall disproportionately on women, carers and low-income earners. In parallel, the experience of new migrants and minority groups in smaller communities demonstrates how the absence of inclusive planning can create social fragmentation and labour underutilisation. Addressing these inequalities is therefore not a separate policy agenda. It is a prerequisite for rural resilience and well-being.
Women’s labour market participation and entrepreneurship
Women’s participation in the rural labour market remains significantly lower than men’s, despite rising educational attainment. As of 2023, women represented only 13.2% of farm holders and 34% of total farm workers in Ireland, with substantial under-representation in primary agricultural roles (DAFM, 2023[65]). Limited childcare, scarce transport options and local employment structures with few part-time or flexible roles constrain their ability to engage in paid work. Many rural women take up self-employment to balance household and caring duties, but their enterprises tend to remain small-scale, under-capitalised and concentrated in lower-value sectors.
Programmes under ORF and Enterprise Ireland have sought to improve female entrepreneurship. These include the National Women’s Enterprise Day, the Going for Growth mentoring initiative and LEO training supports. However, the reach of these initiatives in remote and peripheral rural areas remains uneven, with participation skewed toward towns and better-connected regions. Over 20 000 female entrepreneurs have accessed supports since 2020 through LEOs, but most events and mentoring clusters are concentrated in urban and larger town settings (DETE, 2020[66]). More targeted outreach, peer networks and access to finance for rural micro entrepreneurs could help close these spatial gaps and unlock latent female labour capacity.
Representation and leadership in rural governance
Women continue to be under-represented in decision-making structures in rural Ireland, from local development boards to farming organisations. As of 2023, only 13.2% of farm holders in Ireland are women, with little change since the early 1990s. Female representation on dairy co-operative boards remains below 3%, far lower than in similar organisations in other countries (DAFM, 2023[65]). Only a minority of municipal councillors, LEADER group chairs and agricultural co‑operative board members are women (NWC, 2023[67]). This imbalance limits the diversity of perspectives shaping local policy and rural priorities. Evidence suggests that where women participate in governance, there is greater attention to community well-being, childcare and local services, areas critical to rural vitality. Studies in Ireland and internationally consistently find that women’s presence on LAs and boards leads to greater prioritisation of social infrastructure, health, childcare and community development initiatives (NWC, 2021[68]).
Ireland’s Women in Agriculture Stakeholder Group Consultative Committee and Rural Women’s Assembly have advanced awareness and policy dialogue, but there is scope to embed gender balance targets more systematically within rural governance frameworks, including LA committees and development partnerships. Leadership training and networking for rural women could also be strengthened by expanding existing community capacity programmes and giving them a clearer focus on supporting women.
Migrant inclusion and local integration strain
Rural migration has increased modestly over the past decade, contributing to local labour supply and demographic renewal. However, migrant integration in smaller communities remains uneven, often shaped by access to housing, education, language supports and employment pathways. In many localities, migrant families face limited childcare options, language barriers and weak community infrastructure for intercultural engagement (SICAP, 2022[69]).
Some counties have begun establishing Local Authority Integration Teams and community-based projects funded through the Asylum, Migration and Integration Fund. Yet coverage is patchy, and rural areas hosting new arrivals often lack the institutional capacity to co-ordinate services across education, health‑ and social inclusion (NWC, 2021[68]). Strengthening local partnerships between the DRCDG, the Department of Children, Disability and Equality and local development companies would enable more consistent and tailored integration support outside urban centres.
Cost-of-living pressures and economic participation
The national cost-of-living crisis has amplified spatial inequalities. Rural households face higher energy, transport and home-heating costs, combined with lower wage levels and fewer local services (Teagasc, 2024[70]). These pressures disproportionately affect single parents, pensioners, carers and part-time workers, groups in which women are overrepresented. Fuel and transport poverty are particularly acute in isolated rural settlements, where alternatives such as public transport or shared mobility are scarce. Government initiatives such as the Fuel Allowance, Electric Vehicle Grants and Community Energy Grants provide partial relief, but few are calibrated to the realities of rural living costs. Without more granular spatial targeting, these measures risk reinforcing rather than narrowing disparities. Data on rural cost-of-living differentials, combined with local well-being indicators, could help inform a more responsive social support model.
Implications for ORF II
Ireland has developed a comprehensive suite of social and equality programmes, yet their impact in rural areas remains uneven. Table 5.5 summarises where existing initiatives can be deepened or better aligned with rural-specific needs highlighting modest, targeted steps that could enhance participation, service access and representation without creating new institutions.
Policy priorities to address social inequalities and inclusion in rural Ireland
For ORF II, the challenge is not only to promote inclusion as a value but to operationalise it through concrete delivery systems. Embedding inclusion within rural governance, labour market activation and social support design will translate equality goals into tangible outcomes for households and communities. Based on the areas where there is scope to go further, several policy priorities emerge:
Integrate inclusion metrics within ORF II monitoring, linking rural gender, migrant and cost-of-living data with local well-being indicators.
Embed gender balance targets across local governance and programme delivery structures.
Support integrated childcare and flexible work solutions as rural enterprise enablers, not separate welfare measures.
Encourage co-designed migrant integration pilots through the DRCDG’s convening role and partnerships with local development companies.
Apply a spatial lens to social support, ensuring that cost-of-living and fuel poverty schemes account for rural travel and energy realities.
Rural Ireland’s inclusive potential remains constrained not by lack of policy attention but by uneven delivery, insufficient territorial differentiation and weak institutional co‑ordination. ORF II should convert social inclusion goals into spatially targeted actions that improve access, participation and representation–embedding equality as a foundation of rural well-being and resilience.
Rural services remain one of the most visible markers of uneven living conditions across Ireland. While national growth and modernisation have raised overall standards, rural communities continue to face persistent gaps in essential services from power and water to communications and healthcare. Storm Éowyn in early 2025 laid these weaknesses bare, demonstrating how fragile and interdependent service systems remain in rural areas (James, 2025[71]). The storm became an unexpected national stress test. When it struck the North-West, power outages rapidly cascaded into water supply failures, communication breakdowns and disrupted healthcare access. Emergency responders struggled to reach isolated households and some rural areas waited days longer than urban centres for basic restoration. The event revealed not only technical vulnerability but also the limits of co‑ordination across agencies. Box 5.8 below summarises the sequence of failures triggered by the storm and how local communities coped in its aftermath.
On 24 January 2025, Storm Éowyn brought record-breaking winds and widespread disruption to Ireland and the United Kingdom. At the storm’s peak, 750 000 premises lost power, cutting households off from heat, food, water, communication and medical equipment. In rural areas, the outages lasted far longer: 5 days after the storm, almost 200 000 farms and households were still without electricity, and nearly a fortnight later, 18 000 rural homes remained unpowered. Many also lacked fresh water, as pumps depend on the grid. In early April, some elderly residents in the North-West still had no functioning telephone line.
Two fatalities occurred, both in the rural North-West: one from a fallen tree, another when essential medical technology ceased functioning. Rural health centres and water-pumping stations lacked backup generators. The event demonstrated how quickly a power outage cascades into failures of water, health and communications systems.
Political and public reaction
In the aftermath, media coverage and parliamentary debate highlighted the unequal impact on rural communities. During a Dáil Éireann session on 5 February 2025, several TDs argued that “had Dublin been as severely affected as the West and North-West, the national response would have been swifter”. The Dáil did not sit until 12 days after the crisis, when thousands of rural homes were still without power, feeding perceptions that centralised institutions overlook rural needs. Members of parliament also noted that LAs lacked the mandate and resources to co‑ordinate place-tailored emergency responses, and that the government’s approach remained reactive rather than preventive.
Infrastructure vulnerabilities
Ireland provides 21% of its electricity to data centres, largely located in Dublin, where underground cabling offers greater protection. In contrast, 84% of the national electricity network runs overhead, compared with about 40% in Finland and Sweden, countries with lower population densities. The grid’s 160 000 kilometres of overhead lines and 2.4 million poles are vulnerable to damage; thousands need replacement.
In many rural areas, lines run beside narrow roads bordered by diseased or damaged trees on private land. Despite repeated calls for a co‑ordinated tree-management policy, responsibility still rests with landowners. Eir Telecom has warned that without funding or policy for vegetation control, the risk to energy and communications networks will persist. Visiting contractors from continental Europe expressed surprise at the proximity of trees to power lines and the absence of clear safety corridors. The prevalence of one-off rural housing further slowed reconnection, as dispersed dwellings required multiple site visits.
Overall, Storm Éowyn exposed years of under-investment in rural electricity, water and communications infrastructure, and demonstrated how institutional centralisation magnifies vulnerability when shocks occur.
Source: DHLGH (2025[72]), “Review of Storm Éowyn response published”, https://www.gov.ie/en/department-of-housing-local-government-and-heritage/press-releases/review-of-storm-%C3%A9owyn-response-published/.
The experience underscored three systemic weaknesses in Ireland’s rural service framework.
First, many services depend on physically fragile infrastructure, such as overhead electricity lines, unprotected substations and ageing water networks.
Second, a high degree of institutional centralisation limits LAs’ capacity to respond quickly or invest in small-scale resilience measures.
Third, governance remains reactive rather than preventive, with investments concentrated after crises rather than anticipating them.
These weaknesses compound one another. When energy fails, water treatment halts, mobile networks collapse and essential health services stall. Rural areas, because of their dispersed geography and limited backup systems, are the last to recover.
Storm Éowyn therefore exposed more than just the consequences of extreme weather: it highlighted how decades of fragmented investment and narrow sectoral planning have left rural systems interdependent but brittle. To build resilience, Ireland needs to move beyond single-sector responses towards place-tailored strategies that integrate power, water, communications, transport and health planning within the same resilience framework. The following sections examine these service challenges in more detail, first across general service domains such as childcare, education, transport, digital connectivity and water, and then through a deeper focus on health the most visible and consequential frontier of rural service inequality.
Public service access: Everyday systems under strain
Beyond the immediate lessons from Storm Éowyn, broader service access in rural Ireland continues to reveal longstanding structural weaknesses. Despite targeted programmes, on average, rural residents still face higher costs, longer travel times and reduced reliability in essential services such as childcare, education, transport, digital connectivity and water. These gaps not only constrain well-being but also limit the capacity of rural economies to retain and attract people.
Childcare and education: Access to affordable, flexible childcare remains uneven across rural areas, particularly for families outside larger towns. Limited hours and scarce spaces restrict women’s labour-force participation and reduce options for dual-earner households. Longer travel times to secondary schools and further education colleges compound these pressures, especially where public transport is infrequent. Aligning childcare hours, school transport and post-secondary programmes with local labour demand would help families remain in rural areas and encourage new residents to settle.
Transport and digital connectivity: Despite improvements under Connecting Ireland and Transport for Ireland Local Link, rural transport services remain infrequent and poorly timed. Limited evening and weekend routes restrict access to employment, education and healthcare. While broadband coverage has expanded, gaps in digital skills and affordability persist, particularly among older and lower-income groups. Without localised digital skills support and reliable physical mobility, rural residents will continue to face barriers to participation even where infrastructure exists.
Water and wastewater: Infrastructure constraints and quality issues still prevent development in many rural towns and villages. Boil water notices, leakage and capacity limits in wastewater systems delay new housing and enterprise projects, eroding trust in local services. Integrating water and wastewater upgrades with spatial planning especially in towns prioritised for housing and enterprise would accelerate both development and resilience.
Implications for ORF II
These service deficits are cumulative rather than isolated. Weak childcare, transport and digital access reinforce one another, discouraging young families and small enterprises from locating to rural areas. The challenge is not only to fill gaps in individual sectors but to co‑ordinate investment across them as suggested in the OECD Recommendation on Effective Public Investment across levels of government (OECD, 2025[73]), ensuring that service provision supports wider goals for housing, employment and inclusion. Table 5.6 below summarises existing programmes addressing these issues and identifies areas where there is scope to go further.
Policy priorities to improve access to services in rural Ireland
The cumulative nature of rural service deficits means that progress in one area often depends on improvements in another. ORF II should therefore focus on strengthening the connective tissue among local service systems ensuring that childcare, transport, digital access and infrastructure investments work together to sustain viable communities and local economies. Based on the areas where there is scope to go further, the following priorities emerge from Table 5.6:
Develop integrated childcare, education and transport planning so that rural childcare hours, school timetables and transport routes reinforce one another.
Create local digital skills and access hubs (e.g. in Connected Hubs, libraries or community centres) to ensure broadband investments translate into actual use.
Link water and wastewater upgrades to spatial and housing plans, prioritising small towns where capacity constraints block development.
Expand evening and weekend rural transport routes to improve access to jobs, education and healthcare.
Investigate options for providing “quasi-public” transport alternatives based on private firms or community developed entities that offer low-cost flexible timing and car-based or mini-bus services.
Adopt joint funding frameworks across departments so that service investment is planned as interconnected infrastructure rather than in silos.
Focus on health access and resilience
Among all public services, health remains the sharpest expression of rural inequality. Rural residents face longer travel times, ageing facilities and shortages of healthcare professionals, even as demand rises with an older population. Workforce pressures, housing constraints, and weak system co‑ordination have combined to create territorial divides in both access and quality of care.
Primary care: Rural general practitioners (GPs) are ageing, and more than 15% of practices rely on rotating locums. Patients often travel 30-60 kilometres for routine appointments or out-of-hours cover, while local practices struggle to recruit successors. Without incentives for long-term placements and adequate key-worker housing, service continuity will continue to decline. Integrating housing provision for health staff into local development plans would help stabilise rural practices.
Health infrastructure: Many primary care centres and small hospitals remain poorly equipped for power outages or connectivity loss. The storm demonstrated that when electricity or communications fail, medical records, teleconsultations and emergency co‑ordination halt immediately. Minimum backup standards for rural health facilities, covering power, water and communications, should be established and enforced nationally.
Workforce and training: Rural placements for nurses and medical students are limited and often short-term. Expanding rotation programmes and linking them to regional housing supports would improve recruitment and retention. Training pathways through TUs could also widen entry routes for rural students into health professions.
Digital and telehealth: While telehealth capacity expanded during the pandemic, use in rural areas remains modest. Connected Hubs and libraries could serve as assisted consultation points for older residents or those lacking reliable home Internet. Strengthening digital infrastructure alone is insufficient; assisted access and digital literacy are essential to ensure uptake.
Implications for ORF II
Health therefore encapsulates the broader challenge of rural service delivery. Gaps in workforce, housing and infrastructure are mutually reinforcing and require co‑ordinated solutions. Progress will depend on aligning health policy with spatial planning, housing and digital strategies treating health access as a shared resilience objective rather than a standalone sectoral concern. Table 5.7 below outlines current measures and indicates where there is scope to go further in building resilient rural health systems.
Policy priorities to improve access to core public services
Based on the gaps and opportunities identified in Table 5.7, there is clear scope to deepen Ireland’s inclusion agenda by embedding a stronger rural lens across social, economic and governance systems. While many of the national initiatives already address gender equality, childcare, migrant integration and social supports, most operate without explicit spatial targeting or sustained attention to rural contexts. ORF II can help close these gaps by promoting tailored actions that translate national inclusion goals into locally relevant outcomes. The following policy priorities highlight where further progress could be made to ensure that inclusion, equality and social participation are integral to rural development and community resilience.
Integrate inclusion and equality metrics within ORF II monitoring, including rural-disaggregated gender and migrant data linked to the OECD Rural Well-being Framework.
Embed gender balance and parity commitments across local rural governance and decision-making structures (LEADER, local community development committees [LCDCs], public participation networks [PPNs]).
Support rural enterprise and childcare ecosystems by developing sustainable, flexible-hours childcare models and women’s enterprise pipelines co-located with local hubs.
Encourage co-designed rural integration pilots linking language and employment training to SMEs.
Apply a rural spatial lens to social supports by creating a rural cost-of-living index and using it to target fuel poverty, mobility and energy programmes.
Connecting non-health and health service priorities
Rural service systems function as an interconnected whole. Deficits in childcare, transport, digital access and water services are closely linked to those in health provision, often compounding one another and limiting rural quality of life. For example, health workforce shortages are intensified by limited housing and childcare options, while weak transport and digital connectivity restrict both service delivery and patient access.
ORF II should therefore approach rural services as a single ecosystem, aligning sectoral investments, local-delivery capacity and spatial planning to reinforce one another. Table 5.6 summarises cross-cutting (non-health) measures and opportunities for deeper co‑ordination, while Table 5.7 focuses on health-specific priorities that require similar place-based integration. Together, these interventions can build a coherent and resilient foundation for rural well-being.
The persistence of these social inequalities underlines why measuring well-being solely through programme completion is insufficient. Even where infrastructure improves or new initiatives are launched, uneven participation and exclusion dilute impact. The next section therefore explores how a local approach to measuring well-being can make these invisible disparities visible and help ensure that ORF II translates into tangible quality-of-life gains across Ireland’s diverse rural communities.
OECD frameworks for measuring rural well-being
The 2020 OECD report Rural Well-Being: Geography of Opportunities introduced a new approach for rural development, explicitly placing well-being at the centre of rural policy (OECD, 2020[74]). The framework goes beyond economic growth to include factors such as health, education, digital access, environment, civic engagement and housing. It stresses that rural policy must respond to demographic transitions, digitalisation and local asset development.
The OECD Regional Well-Being Database (and user guide) allows countries and regions to measure and compare well-being across 446 OECD regions using 11 dimensions including income, jobs, housing, health, education, environment and subjective life satisfaction (OECD, 2025[75]). This is complemented by discussion and workshops like the 2024 “The Rural Principles Series: Measuring Well-Being in Rural Areas - Bridging Gaps in Data and Perception” webinar, which focus on how to best collect rural well-being data, engage rural populations and use these data to shape services and development projects (OECD, 2024[76]).
Measuring rural well-being in Ireland: Gaps and opportunities
Ireland’s well-being agenda has made substantial national progress, yet rural well-being remains only partially captured within current frameworks. While the national Measuring What Matters framework reflects a whole-of-government commitment to people-centred policy, its data are predominantly national or regional in scale. Local variations, particularly across Ireland’s six-way urban-rural typology, remain largely invisible in national reporting. As a result, the lived experiences of rural residents, and the differentiated outcomes of policies such as ORF, are not systematically reflected in the country’s well-being evidence base.
At present, three complementary efforts provide partial coverage: the CSO Well-being Information Hub, ORF’s monitoring of action delivery and the PPN Community Well-being Statements at the county level. Each of these initiatives strengthens understanding of how people are faring, but none yet offers a coherent, rural-sensitive dashboard that connects policy delivery to well-being outcomes. The PPN statements, while rich in qualitative local insights, are not harmonised into a comparative dataset; and ORF’s monitoring remains focused on the completion of actions, not their territorial impact on people’s lives.
Potential indicators to strengthen local well-being measurement
A rural well-being measurement framework should bridge the national and local levels of analysis, using indicators sensitive to rural realities. To be meaningful measurement must combine objective and subjective data that link household income and service access to more qualitative measures such as, belonging, participation and trust. Such an approach would help Ireland move from counting actions delivered to understanding the quality of outcomes achieved in rural territories.
To capture the full spectrum of well-being in rural areas, Ireland could progressively integrate indicators that reflect both the material and social dimensions of rural life. Table 5.8 provides an example of such indicators, grouped by their analytical purpose what each could reveal about local well-being conditions. Local indicators will necessarily vary, but these examples demonstrate the types of information that could be drawn from existing data sources (the CSO, state-sponsored organisation Pobal, the HSE, the DRCDG and LAs) to produce more nuanced insights into rural well-being.
Collecting these indicators at the municipal-district or settlement scale would make it possible to construct a territorial well-being dashboard, one that not only tracks progress on ORF actions but also helps identify where policy success is (or is not) translating into improved quality of life. This localised evidence would also support the DRCDG’s role as a cross-government facilitator, equipping it to highlight spatial disparities and advocate for stronger rural proofing within national well-being policy.
Implications for ORF II
Table 5.9 identifies initiatives already supporting well-being measurement where targeted improvements could enhance their rural relevance. The table highlights practical steps to strengthen linkages and support actions ensuring that data collection, reporting and policy design systematically reflect rural realities and help translate evidence into more balanced outcomes across territories.
Policy priorities to strengthen rural well-being measurement
To move from scattered activity to an integrated rural well-being system, ORF II should embed well-being as both a metric and a method for decision making. Measurement should be used not only to describe conditions but to steer investment, planning and programme delivery toward better outcomes for rural people. The following priorities build directly on the opportunities identified in Table 5.9. To move from scattered activity to an integrated rural well-being system, ORF II could:
Track socio-economic outcomes alongside delivery metrics, ensuring that rural well-being is measured by tangible improvements in people’s lives, not only by programme completion.
Pilot harmonised regional and local well-being indicators, drawing on existing tools such as PPN Well-being Statements, CSO typology data and LCDC capacity-building pilots.
Embed rural well-being results in regional and local plans, encouraging regional assemblies and LCDCs to use them as part of investment prioritisation and community planning.
Facilitate data alignment across departments, using the DRCDG’s convening role to ensure rural dimensions are systematically recognised within the national Measuring What Matters framework.
Promote learning through demonstration projects, testing how rural well-being indicators can guide planning and funding decisions in two or three pilot regions before wider rollout.
Each section in this chapter has identified areas for action, or even where existing measures could go further, from aligning housing with labour markets, to targeting green skills, strengthening service resilience and embedding well-being data locally. Translating these opportunities into effective action will require structured and shared exploration to test what is feasible and build a common vision and approach. This matters because rural regions are often at the forefront of change.
The OECD Skills Outlook 2023: Skills for a Resilient Green and Digital Transition report shows that demand for skills such as data analysis, digital literacy and renewable energy technologies will grow significantly (OECD, 2023[77]). Many of the skills most at risk of decline are those concentrated in rural labour markets, where access to upskilling opportunities remains limited. Anticipating future skill needs and aligning training, workforce development and rural economic strategies will be essential to ensure that the green and digital transitions reinforce, rather than exclude, rural regions. Foresight offers a disciplined framework for doing this and it can easily be folded into the existing consultancy approach. The co-design and co‑produce features of foresight means stakeholders would be working together to develop potential solutions. It will also help participants recognise trade-offs early and identify where priorities align.
The OECD encourages governments to integrate foresight into their policy development toolbox. Through the Strategic Foresight Unit within the Office of the Secretary-General, the organisation supports national governments and public administrations in building foresight capacity. The OECD Observatory of Public Sector Innovation also produces regular guidance, tools and case studies on implementing foresight processes, such as scenario planning, horizon scanning and anticipatory innovation governance. The OECD Regional Development Policy Committee and Working Party on Rural Policy encourage the use of foresight at the subnational levels.
Several reports, including Strategic Foresight for Better Policies (OECD, 2019[78]) and Towards a Strategic Foresight System in Ireland (OECD, 2021[79]), outline pathways for embedding foresight within strategy, risk and innovation units, linking it to regular policy review and budget planning. Ireland is already moving to a stronger foresight approach. For example, the Department of Public Expenditure, Infrastructure, Public Service Reform and Digitalisation delivered a pilot programme on strategic foresight in 2023 that is part of a broader effort to transform the delivery of public services to make suitable for an evolving environment. This initial effort was designed to identify an approach that could be broadly adopted across the civil and public service.
Institutional foundations for foresight in Ireland
Ireland already possesses an initial foundation for foresight-based policymaking. The Rural Ireland 2025: Foresight Perspectives report – developed by Teagasc, University College Dublin and Maynooth University and funded by the DAFM, the Council for Forest Research and Development and the Environmental Protection Agency – produced national scenarios and long-term policy perspectives for rural and coastal Ireland. However, this was a one-off exercise rather than a recurring foresight process, and its outputs were never systematically integrated into rural or regional planning frameworks.
Recent initiatives signal growing institutional interest. The Strengthening Policy Development and Foresight in the Irish Public Service project (Teagasc, NUI Maynooth and University College Dublin, 2025[80]) encourages departments – including the DRCDG – to establish foresight units and apply anticipatory methods to strategies extending beyond 2030 (OECD, 2023[81]). The OECD report Towards a Strategic Foresight System in Ireland similarly recommended embedding foresight cycles within departmental policy processes (OECD, 2021[79]). Yet, as the OECD Policy Coherence Scan of Ireland confirms, foresight capacity remains fragmented: it is well developed in innovation, agriculture and climate policy, but still nascent for territorial and cross-government planning (OECD, 2025[82]).
Foresight tools
Arguably, foresight provides government with two complementary tools that can help close the gaps identified in this chapter: targeted data gathering and scenario building in a facilitated, multi-stakeholder environment. The latter enables decision makers to activate co-design and co-production processes that bring together diverse perspectives.
Strategic foresight has a variety of uses in government including:
The Provincial Council of Gipuzkoa, Spain, developed a programme entitled Building the Future (Etorkizuna Eraikiz) to promote and improve open and collaborative governance in the region.
The French Ministry of Defence, through its Agence de l’innovation de défense, created the Red Team. This group of science-fiction writers and illustrators conceive and explore scenarios for the future of armed conflicts. They uncover the blind spots and invisible blockages that stand in the way of imagining situations outside those presently existing in handbook examples.
The European Commission’s Civil Protection and Humanitarian Aid Operations department (DG ECHO) and the European Civil Protection Mechanism use scenarios of critical events to help countries stress test their risk management systems.
In Germany, the Social Foresight Lab allows citizens to experiment with future solutions by, for instance, introducing prototypes of potential social and technological developments on mobility, working and living into their everyday lives.
The government of Finland used strategic foresight in its AuroraAI programme to explore what future life-event-based service provision in the country could look like.
Sources: OECD (2016[83]), “Provincial Council of Gipuzkoa, Spain: Building the Future”, https://oecd-opsi.org/innovations/etorkizuna-eraikiz-building-the-future/; PSL (n.d.[84]), “Découvrir la Red Team”, https://redteamdefense.org/decouvrir-la-red-team; DG ECHO (n.d.[85]), “Homepage”, https://civil-protection-humanitarian-aid.ec.europa.eu/index_en; EC (n.d.[86]), “EU Civil Protection Mechanism”, https://civil-protection-humanitarian-aid.ec.europa.eu/what/civil-protection/eu-civil-protection-mechanism_en#:~:text=In%20October%202001%2C%20the%20European,preparedness%2C%20and%20response%20to%20disasters; Government of Finland, AuroraAI; OECD (2018[87]), “Social Foresight Lab”, https://oecd-opsi.org/innovations/social-foresight-lab/.
Intelligence gathering: Data on macro and micro trends
Targeted data gathering to support rural foresight work involves compiling three interconnected types of data with a spatial lens: i) the state of rural conditions; ii) trends and impacts; and iii) change drivers. The first, state of rural data, was introduced in Chapter 3 and refers to evidence on the overarching conditions shaping rural life, including demographic, housing, employment, and service access patterns (see Figure 5.5).
The second type focuses on global, national and local trends that may influence Ireland’s rural futures. It includes megatrends such as demographic change, digital transformation, climate pressures and geopolitical shifts alongside macro trends affecting national systems and micro trends emerging within specific territories. At the micro level, data capture how these forces play out differently across Ireland’s six rural typologies. They can also reveal local variations: regions experiencing high in-migration versus those losing population; areas with strong volunteer participation versus weaker community capacity; or territories more exposed to external shocks such as Brexit.
While trends data show what is happening, change drivers help explain why change is happening and where future shifts might occur. Change drivers are the forces that cause a trend to move (Gordon, 2010[88]). For example, a changing mix of residents in rural areas will affect attitudes toward planning, land use and public services requiring new approaches and policies to reflect evolving community needs. Drivers can vary across regions and are often highly localised. They may include low stakeholder engagement, weak institutional relationships, limited authority at the regional level compared to municipalities, or changes in local government leadership leading to new strategic directions (e.g. Limerick).
Closely examining the interplay between trends and change drivers across different rural contexts provides a richer understanding of possible futures. Brexit heightened the emphasis on cross-border co‑operation, territorial cohesion and resilience in the regions of rural Ireland most affected. Before Brexit, regional policy and cross-border initiatives benefitted from open borders and EU-supported collaboration; Intelligence should also incorporate a spatial lens to ensure that data reflect the territorial diversity of rural Ireland. This approach builds directly on earlier recommendations to strengthen rural data systems and apply Ireland’s six-way urban-rural classification more consistently. By combining spatial intelligence with trend and driver analysis, foresight provides a structured framework for interpreting how rural realities may evolve under alternative futures.
Scenario building
The second tool, scenario building, can use this intelligence as the foundation to construct evidence sensitive strategies to explore policy choices. Through structured workshops and participatory design sessions, national and local actors can explore how various combinations of trends and policy responses might affect different types of rural areas. Scenario building does not predict the future; it tests pathways – for example, what housing, skills or service delivery models would remain resilient under demographic ageing, automation or climate shocks. Scenario building, grounded in local data and intelligence can push consultation processes to a different level. Instead of asking communities simply for feedback on predetermined plans, it enables them to think through what could or would not work helping them, in effect, to self-test ideas and understand the trade-offs behind policy options. This allows policymakers and communities to co-design and co-produce realistic solutions before investments are made.
This process can also foster transparency and trust. By allowing communities to see how decisions are shaped, to understand why some measures must happen today and others in two or five years, foresight embeds a sense of shared ownership in decision making. It builds mutual understanding between government and citizens about what is possible, what is urgent and what must be sequenced over time.
Implications for ORF II
Building foresight exercises into existing consultation models can be used as a way to deepen, rather than expand, them. This means using foresight methods selectively and purposefully, for example when government is preparing to move from planning to implementation on a major issue such as housing, green skills or service access. Embedding foresight in this way allows one structured moment where actors collectively test the feasibility of proposals and explore their implications.
Policy priorities to embed foresight into long-term rural policy development
Based on the scope to go further identified above, four priorities emerge:
Encourage the systematic use of foresight practices across rural policy areas: ORF II should actively promote the inclusion of foresight-based approaches, such as trend scanning, weak-signal detection and scenario testing, within the DRCDG’s programme design and review cycles. This does not require creating new consultation rounds but rather integrating foresight logic into existing engagement and monitoring processes to anticipate emerging rural challenges before they escalate.
Develop “foresight intelligence” by aligning rural intelligence and trend analysis: The DRCDG should encourage partners to use the existing six-way urban-rural split and forthcoming rural intelligence data to construct a foresight intelligence system that merges national data collection with macro- and micro-trend analysis. This could be supported through partnerships with institutions such as ESRI, the CSO and Ireland’s network of rural researchers, helping to capture differentiated regional signals such as the effects of demographic change, climate pressures or Brexit within a consistent analytical framework.
Use future consultancy activities to host at least one strategic co-design foresight exercise: As Ireland already conducts wide-ranging consultation processes under ORF, LEADER and related programmes, the DRCDG could build foresight into these cycles by incorporating one structured, in-depth foresight session within each major consultation phase. This would provide a deliberate space for communities and local actors to co-design and co-produce policy responses, testing potential actions against different future scenarios.
Build transparency into the foresight process: Each foresight exercise should produce a short public-facing summary such as a one-page fact sheet or brief outlining “what the community wants to do” and “where the community wants to go” across the major policy themes (green skills, housing, services, agriculture, well-being). These concise outputs should be made available online and shared with inter-ministerial working groups, ensuring that the lessons and aspirations identified at the community level directly inform national decision making and strengthen accountability.
Ireland’s rural strengths identified in Chapter 1 are clear, but improving rural resilience will depend on how well policies connect and scale existing capacities. The message across this chapter is straightforward: Ireland does not need more programmes; it needs to make current ones work together. ORF II offers the opportunity to link these efforts under a coherent, place-based framework led by the DRCDG. Five actions stand out.
Maximise Ireland’s strong FDI foundation by enabling rural economies to leverage new opportunities, new firms and new innovation: Build on existing investment networks so that small businesses in rural areas can grow, innovate and integrate into broader value chains, strengthening FDI-SME linkages and expanding local labour market capacity.
Design housing policies with the link to rural economic development in mind: Integrate spatial planning, serviced-site provision and labour demand analysis so that homes are built where jobs and services exist.
Connect service delivery enhancement with strategies to make rural regions more attractive to live and work to firms and families: Recognise that childcare, transport, water and digital infrastructure shape where people and businesses choose to locate. Design and co‑ordinate service delivery to reinforce the liveability and competitiveness of rural communities.
Invest in new entrants in rural places, e.g. migrants, and connect them to new opportunities provided by green skills: Invest in people and inclusion. Expand modular, place-based training and ensure gender and migrant inclusion in the green transition.
Build a well-being framework that measures what matters to rural people and use it to track outcomes, develop more nuanced strategies and guide investment decisions.
Integrate foresight practices such as co-design exercises into existing consultation processes into long-term planning, develop a foresight intelligence system that draws from the six-way urban-rural classification, and produce public-facing summaries that connect community aspirations to national decision-making.
Together, these steps would translate national progress into balanced prosperity anchoring Ireland’s rural future in the OECD Principles on Rural Policy and Well-being Framework.
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