What the Irish data actually shows

Workplace wellbeing attracts a great deal of soft language, so it is worth doing something unfashionable and simply walking through the numbers. The Irish evidence base is smaller than the British one, but it is solid, most of it publicly funded, and it tells one story from three directions.

Start with the direction of travel. In 2018 the ESRI, in research funded by the Health and Safety Authority, reported that job stress among Irish employees had doubled in five years, from 8% in 2010 to 17% in 2015. That was one of the steepest rises recorded anywhere in Europe over the period. Whatever has happened since, and the years since included a pandemic, nobody suggests the pressure has eased.

Next, what it costs when the pressure converts into absence. ESRI analysis from 2016 found that an absence for work-related stress, anxiety or depression in Ireland averages 17 days, the longest of any category of work-related illness. Not a long weekend to recharge. Three and a half working weeks, per episode, for the condition most workplaces still treat as invisible.

Then, the share of the problem. In May 2024, research by CIPD Ireland and the University of Limerick found that mental health accounted for 22% of Irish workplace absence in 2023, up from 17% the year before, drawing level with acute medical conditions for the first time. In the same research, 55% of those absent cited workload and 47% cited a lack of management support. Read those last two figures again, because they describe causes that sit inside the organisation's own gift.

What the numbers mean when you put them together

Taken together the Irish data says something quite specific. The pressure is rising steeply. When it lands, it lands for longer than any other work-related illness. It has grown from a side category into roughly a fifth of all absence. And in around half of cases, the people affected point at workload and management support, which are operational matters a leadership team can actually change.

The wider evidence adds a financial footnote. Deloitte's 2024 UK analysis put the cost of poor mental health to UK employers at £51bn a year, with an average return of £4.70 for every £1 invested in workplace mental health, and its 2022 analysis found proactive, organisation-wide investment returned about £5.60 per £1 against £3.40 for reactive support. Ireland has no reason to believe its arithmetic is kinder.

The one number the research cannot give you

Here is the limit of all of it. Every national statistic is an aggregate. That 22% is thousands of individual workplaces averaged together, some of them calm and well run, some of them quietly losing their best people. A national average tells a leader what the weather is like across the country. It cannot say whether it is raining on your own roof.

So the only question in this whole field that genuinely matters to a leadership team is a small one. What is my number? What share of my absence is really pressure related, which departments are carrying the most, and is it climbing or settling this quarter?

No survey of other companies can answer that, and it cannot be answered by guesswork either. It takes measurement. In our programme that measurement happens gently, through monthly confidential sessions between every member of staff and a clinician they trust, with individual sessions kept fully private and only anonymised themes reaching leadership through The Listening Post each month. The national data tells you the tide is rising. A hand on the pulse of your own organisation tells you where the water actually is.

The research has done its job. It has established that the problem is large, long and growing. The remaining work is local, and it starts with your own numbers.