IRISH PEOPLE HAVE become less literate in the past decade, with even graduates’ reading skills getting worse.

Just 9% of Irish adults assessed in a large OECD survey had sufficient literacy skills to understand and evaluate long, dense texts over several pages and to grasp complex or hidden meanings. 

While Ireland prides itself on its literary reputation, we’re well behind several other developed countries when it comes to high-level reading ability – including Finland, where 36% of adults were found to be highly literate, Japan (24%), Netherlands (19%) and England (14%).

The 9% of Irish people with high literacy is three points below the OECD average.

The proportion of the Irish population with the highest literacy skills has remained more or less steady over the past decade, but across the entire population, literacy declined between the last OECD survey in 2011-2012 and the most recent in 2023. The proportion of people with very low literacy skills increased over the period.

Ireland is in step with most OECD countries in experiencing overall stagnation or decline in literacy, including among graduates, says OECD analyst Marco Paccagnella.

He adds that the overall reduction in literacy recorded in Ireland over the decade was “small”.

Are our phones rotting our brains?

Has the proliferation of smartphones in the years since the last OECD survey contributed to our declining reading ability?

While many adults now spend upwards of three hours a day on their phones, this would probably not have been the case back for most in the early 2010s, while the rise of short-form video has also changed how we consume information.

“It’s a plausible explanation,” Paccagnella says.

“There are many more countries where [literacy] scores have declined than where they have remained stable or increased. We see that less for numeracy. This reinforces the idea that it’s something about reading habits – and our reading habits have changed. 

It’s very hard to deny that the way we consume information now is very different from what we used to do 10 years ago, and certainly phones and social media and the kind of text we engage with on a daily basis is definitely shorter than it used to be.”

While further research is needed on what is causing declining literacy, Paccagnella says it is already possible to rule out some potential factors.

It’s “very clear in the data” that demographic changes, in particular the ageing population and increased immigration, have a “very, very minor impact”.

“You see the declines pretty much all the different groups – it’s a shift, it’s not that you now have more low-skilled people that you didn’t have 10 years ago,” Paccagnella says.

Polarisation

If more people are finding it harder to understand and evaluate complicated information, what does that mean for society? 

“I think it’s plausible to say that people who struggle with understanding complex argument, complex information, are probably more likely to get convinced by simplistic arguments in one direction or in the other,” says Paccagnella.

That is, I think, what is behind the increased polarisation that we see pretty much everywhere.”

He adds that when it comes to being at risk of falling prey to simplistic arguments, it’s less important to look at the average and more important to look at the number of people with the lowest level of literacy.

In Ireland, 21% of adults have low literacy skills. They can at best understand short texts and lists, and find specific information, although within that group there is 5.3% of the adult population who can only read short, simple sentences.

The proportion of the Irish population with such low literacy has increased from 18% a decade ago, widening the gap between the highest and lowest performing adults.

Some countries are bucking the downward trend. Finland and Denmark have seen significant improvements in adult literacy in a decade.

Irish graduates have on average poorer literacy than Finnish people with just secondary school education.