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THE ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL REVIEW
Picking up on some of the international debates, in this paper we consider
three questions on time-use and the distribution of work and leisure in Ireland
for the first time. Our first research question is: are people in Ireland time
poor? The literature generates conflicting hypotheses about whether leisure
has declined in the last decades. Because we report results of the first time-
use study carried out in Ireland, we cannot evaluate whether leisure has
declined over time. However, we can compare the balance of work and leisure
in Ireland compared to other European countries to assess whether recent
economic growth has led to Irish adults being ‘overworked’ and time poor,
relative to other countries (Section III).
Our second research question is: who are the time poor in Ireland? Here
we look at the characteristics of those with high levels of paid and unpaid work
- their gender, employment status, caring commitments, age, education etc. -
to identify which individuals and households in Ireland are ‘time poor’. We
examine household employment status to assess whether the growth in dual-
earner households may have contributed to an increased feeling of time-
pressure, as Jacobs and Gerson propose for the US. We also test Gershuny’s
hypothesis that high status individuals are more likely to be time poor by
comparing work and free time among different income groups and educational
levels. Do we detect the same ‘inequality’ in free time, where low-income/low
education groups have the most leisure, as Aguiar and Hurst (2007) find in the
US?3
Our third research question is: to what extent do Irish people feel time-
pressure and who feels under most time-pressure? Here we examine responses
on feeling rushed and stressed. We explicitly examine the link between feeling
rushed and ‘objective’ time poverty (Section IV). Can we find an association
with being time poor and feeling rushed in Ireland, and what is the strength
of the association? Can this help us explain people’s feeling of busyness and
the perception that the pace of life is speeding up?
Before investigating time poverty and its effects in more depth, we discuss
the collection and structure of the data on which this paper is based, the Irish
National Time-Use Survey, 2005 and overall patterns of time-use in Ireland
(Section II).
3 The focus of this paper is on time poverty: we do not consider the ‘intensity of leisure’ by looking
at the number of leisure activities. Gershuny (2005) does this for Britain and finds no increase in
the number of leisure activities from 1961 to 2001, concluding that this is not linked to people
feeling busier.