Poultry and pork dominate Irish meat consumption

Despite the Irish population increasing by 667,000 in the 10 years to 2023, the volume of beef consumed in the home market has only increased slightly while lamb consumption is at best static.

As Table 1 illustrates, the biggest increase over the past decade has been for chicken or poultry meat followed by pig meat.

Poultry meat consumption has increased from 140,000 tonnes in 2012 to 246,000 tonnes last year, while pigmeat consumption increased from 126,000 tonnes to 169, 000 tonnes in the same period.

The volume of beef consumed has increased marginally from 89,000 tonnes in 2012 to 94,000 tonnes last year, which is actually 1,000 tonnes less than the previous two years. Sheepmeat consumption has hovered between 15,000 tonnes and 16,000 tonnes over the period.

The latest CSO data shows just how dominant poultry now is as the meat of choice for Irish consumers.

Overall meat consumption of meat increased to 99kg per person in 2023, up 5kg or 6% on the previous year. This increase was almost entirely due to increasing per capita poultry meat consumption, which grew by 5kg to 47kg per person which means that almost half of all meat consumed (47%) by Irish consumers is poultry meat.

Interestingly, poultry meat is the only category of meat in which Ireland isn’t self-sufficient.

Provisional figures for last year show that domestic production accounted for only 71% of all poultry meat consumed which was down from 78% the previous year and 89% in 2022.

For sheepmeat, Ireland produced 61,000 tonnes meaning that we produced four times as much as we consumed.

For pigmeat, it was almost twice as much produced as was consumed and the biggest gap of all is with beef where we produced 680,000 tonnes in 2023 but consumed just 94,000 tonnes of this.