1 in 6 have never used the internet

One in six Irish people "has never used the internet", according to a new wide-ranging study by the European Commission.

The figures put Ireland firmly behind Britain (6pc) in the European league of internet virgins but ahead of countries such as Italy (32pc), Poland (28pc) and Greece (33pc) when it comes to the number of citizens using the web.

Meanwhile, the European Commission says that 65pc of Ireland's population now uses the internet every single day, while 28pc of us now regularly use "cloud" services such as Dropbox or Google Drive.

The new figures come after a survey from Ipsos MRBI revealed that 60pc of Irish adults now have Facebook accounts, with three-quarters logging in to the service every day. Almost 28pc of us have Twitter accounts, while 24pc of Irish people now use the job networking service LinkedIn.

And most of us are now starting to use the internet to replace activities such as mobile phone texting, which is down nearly 20pc over the last year. The Ipsos/MRBI figures show that 38pc of Irish people have a Viber account, while 35pc of us now use Whatsapp.

Younger people are driving the change in communications here, with just one in five adults now using the picture messaging service Snapchat.

However, whereas just half of Whatsapp users use it every day, almost two-thirds of Snapchat account holders use that service daily.

And 150,000 of us now use the online dating service Tinder.

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

The Government has promised to invest up to €500m of taxpayers' money into subsidised fibre broadband for rural parts of the country in a bid to improve internet access here.

Irish Independent