Irish people are living an average of 15 years longer today when compared with people in the 1950s, new research has found.

However, it also reveals a growing gap in life expectancy between social classes, with manual workers dying at a younger age than professionals.

The research was carried out by the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI), Trinity College Dublin (TCD) and NUI Maynooth. It found that between 1950 and 2012, life expectancy increased by an average of 15 years, from 66 to 81 years.

"This increase reflects real improvements in living standards and the adoption of healthier lifestyles. Reductions in smoking since the 1970s are particularly important," the ESRI said.

The research also found that life expectancy improved significantly in the early noughties. It noted that in the preceding years - 1996 to 1999 - death rates fell by 5%, however between 2000 and 2004, they fell by 26%. It appears that improvements in the control of cardiovascular and respiratory conditions in the late 1990s among those aged 65 and older had a major role to play in this.

However, while all social groups have recorded improvements in life expectancy since the 1980s, there is a ‘growing gap in life expectancy across social groups', the ESRI said.

"Whereas death rates for male manual workers were 100% higher than among professional groups in the 1980s, this disparity increased to 140% during the 2000s. The growing gap across social groups largely reflects an increasing gap between non-manual and manual groups for deaths from external causes, digestive disease and cancers (in the case of women)," it pointed out.

Furthermore, where deaths rates among male professionals, managers and the self-employed fell by 27% between the 1990s and 2000s, death rates among male working class groups only fell by 12%.

And while mortality rates among male manual workers from external causes, such as accidents and suicide, were 2.3 times higher than professional workers in the 1980s, in the 2000s, they were almost four times higher.

"This is the first analysis of the way that differentials in mortality changed during the last three decades in Ireland. The good news is that life expectancy for all groups in Ireland is at an all time high. The bad news is that the gap between groups has increased," commented Prof Richard Layte of the ESRI and TCD.

The findings were presented at an ESRI conference entitled ‘Socio-Economic Inequalities in Mortality in Ireland Over Time and Place' in Dublin.