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inclusion of travel is also guided by the prominence of commuting in
discussions of time-pressures and quality of life in public debate in Ireland.
Uncommitted time includes leisure, personal care, eating and sleeping. An
alternative definition of ‘free’ time excludes personal care, eating and sleeping,
and is closest to the idea of leisure time. This is the ‘free’ time used in the
European comparisons presented below. It should be noted that leisure time
includes active and more passive leisure (resting, watching TV) and there are
likely to be considerable differences in the quality of leisure time by income,
health status and other factors.13
A second issue is whether to use a continuous measure or a threshold
measure of time poverty. Again we use a range of measures to investigate
whether some groups are experiencing time poverty. We begin by looking at
the mean levels of committed time among different groups, and then consider
a threshold measure of ‘time poverty’, examining which groups are most likely
to be ‘time poor’.
3.1 Are People in Ireland Time Poor Compared to Other Countries?
Much of the debate about work and leisure has centred on the question of
whether leisure has declined in recent decades as a result of economic
progress. As this is the first time-use survey in Ireland we cannot investigate
how paid and unpaid work and leisure have changed as a result of the boom,
however, we can compare Irish time-use to time-use in other European
countries. For this we take comparable estimates of time-use from Eurostat’s
How Men and Women Spend their Time. A range of countries are presented in
Tables 4 and 5 - from the UK to Central Europe (France and Germany), one
East European country (Hungary) and one Scandinavian (Sweden). As
Eurostat reports of time-use are for an ‘average day’ we combine our weekday
and weekend time-use estimates, giving a weight of 5 to weekdays and 2 to
weekend days, dividing by 7 to give an ‘average Irish day’. Note that these
figures are averages for the whole populations and do not account for
compositional differences, which strongly influence time use (e.g. age
structure, education, labour market participation, presence of dependant
children). The Irish estimates also prioritise caring, paid work and unpaid
work, which will tend to overestimate these and underestimate leisure, the
implications of this are discussed below.
12 This will lead to misclassification of a small amount of travel-time which is associated with
leisure activities. Tests on the models in Section 3.4 show that the exclusion of travel time does
not change the results. At a descriptive level excluding travel increases the gap between women
and men and reduces the gap between employed and non-employed.
13 Bittman and Wajcman (2004) argue that women’s leisure is more often combined with other
activities for example caring and, therefore, may be ‘less leisurely’.