Consumer sentiment finished 2025 on a subdued note as concerns over living costs continued to dampen confidence, despite the economy’s strong growth, a survey has found today.<\/p>\n
The Credit Union Consumer Sentiment Survey rose only slightly to 61.2 in December, from 61 in November.<\/p>\n
Consumer confidence has barely moved from April’s two-year low of 58.7 at the height of US tariff concerns, and is far lower than both the reading of 73.9 a year ago and the long-term survey average of 83.6.<\/p>\n
By contrast, consumers’ mood across the euro zone and in neighbouring Britain has improved since also plunging in April on trade-related concerns.<\/p>\n
“The past year has seen a broadly based downgrade of Irish consumer thinking in relation to economic conditions and their own financial circumstances,” the survey’s authors wrote.<\/p>\n
“Given the importance of the US to the Irish economy, it might be expected that trade concerns would weigh heavily on the thinking of Irish consumers,” they said.<\/p>\n
The economy as measured by modified domestic demand (MDD) – officials’ preferred metric – has defied cautious sentiment and recent worries over the impact of tariffs, growing by 4.1% year-on-year in the first nine months of 2025.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Consumer sentiment finished 2025 on a subdued note as concerns over living costs continued to dampen confidence, despite…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":236110,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[72,113,61,60],"class_list":["post-236109","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-economy","tag-business","tag-economy","tag-ie","tag-ireland"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/236109","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=236109"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/236109\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/236110"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=236109"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=236109"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=236109"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}