Ireland made history in 2015 as the first country to legalise same-sex marriage by popular referendum, and legal protections are strong. On the ILGA Rainbow Europe index it sits mid-table rather than at the top, with remaining gaps around legal gender recognition for under-18s, intersex rights and asylum — which is why the score lands below the strongest Western European performers.

Ireland is rated a 'full democracy' by the EIU and ranks among the very top countries globally on this dimension, with strong electoral integrity, political culture and civil liberties. Press freedom is high, though media ownership concentration is a recognised concern.

Ireland scores strongly on the WEF Global Gender Gap Index. Abortion was legalised following the 2018 referendum, a significant shift in reproductive rights. As elsewhere, gaps remain in pay and political representation.

Ireland has an independent judiciary and strong civil liberties, performing well on the WJP Rule of Law Index relative to most peers.

Not every country is measured on every value. Where the public data doesn't exist, we'd rather tell you than fill the gap with a guess — and Ireland is one of those cases.

The figure on our other country pages comes from the US Department of Labor's yearly review of what governments are doing about the worst forms of child labour, and that review covers the 131 countries which hold trade preferences with the United States. Ireland is not one of them, so it is never assessed. The obvious alternative doesn't help either: the ILO and UNICEF's global estimates, published in June 2025, are built on household surveys in 107 countries and leave out Europe and Northern America entirely — in their own words, "because of data limitations".

That absence is not the same as zero. The ILO's regional estimate puts around 2.3 million children aged 5 to 17 in child labour across Europe and Northern America, against under 1 per cent of children in high-income countries as a group. No national figure is published inside that. So the honest summary is that the record here is probably good and definitely unmeasured.