Up to 65% of Irish people use internet daily from 25% in 2006

Daily internet use among Irish people has increased from 25 per cent in 2006 to 65 per cent in 2014, while the percentage of people who have never used the internet has decreased from 42 per cent in 2006 to 16 per cent in 2014.

Use of cloud services for storing files is also becoming more widespread in Ireland, with 28 per cent of Irish people now using the cloud, with use highest among 16- to 24-year-olds (40 per cent) and the lowest among 55- to 74-year-olds (9 per cent).

Irish people are embracing cloud storage to a larger extent than the EU average (21 per cent), while the numbers of those paying for cloud services in Ireland (12 per cent) are similar to those across the EU (11 per cent).

The share of daily internet users among the EU population ranged in 2014 from 32 per cent in Romania to 85 per cent in Denmark and 87 per cent in Luxembourg.

Considerable increase

Compared with 2006, the share of daily internet users has considerably increased in 2014, rising by at least 20 percentage points in all EU member states.

Cloud services were particularly popular for file-saving in Denmark (42 per cent of individuals), the UK (38 per cent), Luxembourg and Sweden (both 35 per cent) and the Netherlands (34 per cent), while this share was less than 10 per cent in Lithuania, Poland and Romania (all 8 per cent).

The possibilities of using files from several devices or locations and the ease of sharing files with other persons (both 59 per cent) were the most common reasons reported by individuals for using cloud services in the EU28 in 2014.

Protection against data loss (55 per cent) was also mentioned by more than half of cloud users, while the use of a larger memory space (44 per cent) and access to large libraries of music, films or TV programmes (22 per cent) ranked fourth and fifth among main reasons for using cloud services in the EU28 in 2014.