A “large proportion” of deaths among children and young people are “potentially avoidable”, a new report on paediatric mortality has found.
On Tuesday, the National Office of Clinical Audit (Noca) published the 2025 National Paediatric Mortality Register which found there was a total of 612 deaths of children between 2022 and 2023.
Of these, there were 363 deaths among infants under one-year-old, 145 in children aged 1 to 14 and 104 in young people aged 15 to 18 years registered in Ireland.
According to the report, the number of children dying is declining globally but there has been no significant decline in the mortality rate of older children – those aged between 10 and 18 – in Ireland since 2013.
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It also found the infant mortality rate has “plateaued” and is higher than that of some other European countries.
Twenty per cent of deaths in children aged between 1 and 14 years old and 51 per cent of deaths in young people aged 15 to 18 years were due to trauma.
Over one quarter (27 per cent) of all trauma deaths in children aged 1-14 years and 14 per cent of trauma deaths in older children 15-18 years were due to road traffic collisions (RTC).
Although the rate of RTC fatalities among Irish children has declined substantially, the rates of these deaths remain higher than high-performing countries such as the United Kingdom, Norway and Sweden, the report added.
The report found almost half of all deaths between 15 to 18-year-olds were due to suspected self-harm.
However, the researchers highlight that due to an “absence of better data” this figure is an estimate of the true number of self-harm deaths and may differ from suicide figures provided by the Central Statistics Office (CSO).
Cancer accounted for one quarter of deaths in children aged between 1 and 14 and is the second leading cause of death among 15–18-year-olds, accounting for 16 per cent of deaths in this age group between 2019 and 2023.
Three quarter of infant deaths occurred when the baby was aged less than 28 days, and was primarily due to conditions arising during pregnancy and the first week of life (56 per cent) and genetic disorders (38 per cent).
The provisional infant mortality rate for 2022 to 2023 was 3.2 per 1,000 live births, higher than the previous rate of 3.1 per 1,000 and no longer below the EU average rate.
Provisional data for sudden infant death syndrome for 2022 and 2023 also show the number of deaths attributed to sudden infant death syndrome (SIDs) increase from 0.24 per 1,000 live births in 2019 to 2021 to 0.35 per 1,000 in the latest report.
Prof Michael Barrett, chair of the National Paediatric Mortality Register Governance Committee, said each young life “holds immense potential”.
“This report reminds us of the urgent work needed to protect this potential. Among older children, trauma, including road traffic collisions and suspected self-harm, remains a leading cause of death, alongside slight increases in SIDS and infant mortality rates,” he said.
“These figures represent children whose futures were cut short and families forever changed by loss.”
Prof Barrett said the report is a “call to action” for policymakers, healthcare providers and communities to “invest in systems that save lives”.
The report made a number of recommendations including the implementation of a centralised electronic data collection system and enhancing suicide prevention efforts.
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