In his lifetime, public health specialist Gabriel Scally has observed life expectancy rates on either side of the Border flip.
People in the Republic are now living longer than those in Northern Ireland.
“It used to be the other way round,” Scally says.
“The switch has been amazing. It came together about 20 years ago, but since around 2012 or so, the Republic’s just shot away.”
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Today, a child born in 2021 in the South can expect to live for 82.4 years compared to 80.4 years in Northern Ireland.
The finding is contained in research published by the Economic and Social Research Institute on Tuesday reporting a “worrying” quality of life gaps between North and South.
For Belfast-born Scally, the study’s “vital statistic” relates to the North’s rising infant mortality rates.
“Infant mortality is the most important indicator of the health of a population, because it’s really about the health of children in their first year of life,” he says.
“It is very much socially determined and extraordinarily sensitive to bad conditions: bad housing conditions, poverty, neglect and poor health service provision.
“If infant mortality is doing anything other than going down, it’s an indicator that your society is going down.”
The research found the rate at which infants are dying before their first birthday in Northern Ireland per 1,000 births now stands at 4.8, compared with 2.8 in the Republic.
Rates in both jurisdictions were equal in 2009, and the report’s authors describe the emergence of the “substantial” gap as an “extremely worrying development”.
Scally argues that the stark differences in outcomes make a compelling case for an all-island approach to health.
“I’m not making health a political issue here. I’m making health the issue … We need to be learning from the other and discussing how all the people on the island can be healthy together.
The link between poor health outcomes and low educational achievement rates is clear and borne out by the report’s data, he adds.
Almost a third of all Northern Ireland’s young people aged between 15 and 19 are not enrolled in education. This is a finding that the report, funded by the Irish Government’s Shared Island Unit, found to be “alarming”.
The analysis also shows that the number of children leaving school early in the North is “two to three times” the number in the Republic.
School principal Chris Donnelly has worked in schools in north and west Belfast for more than 25 years and says there is a “really simple” explanation for the spike in teenagers dropping out: management of post-primary education.
“We have a model of post-primary education that provides a golden ticket to those who gain access to the grammar sector, which represents just over 40 per cent of all children,” he says.
The fact that almost 60 per cent of the North’s children are taught in non-grammar schools creates conditions that “are much more difficult”, says Donnelly.
These schools are the “heavy lifters” that have to try to meet the needs of the “overwhelming number” of children with academic difficulties, with behavioural challenges, newcomer children who cannot speak the language and children in the care system, he says.
Academic selection continues to operate in Northern Ireland’s education system for 11-year-olds. An optional “transfer test” replaced the state-run “11-plus” exam after 60 years in 2008. It decides if a primary school child gains entry to a grammar school.
The consequence of designing an education system around the interests of the grammar sector is that you end up with a “a long tail of underachievement”, warns Donnelly.
“The majority of these children are from working-class communities, Catholic and Protestant,” he says. This can become “generational”, with children going on to have children with no educational or employment aspirations, he adds.
The widening gulf revealed between the two education systems can also be attributed to the success of a programme introduced in the South aimed at tackling educational disadvantage, according to Tony Gallagher, professor of education at Queen’s University Belfast.
The Delivering Equality of Opportunity in Schools (Deis) initiative identifies young people at risk and builds connections with them.
“One of the things Deis seems to do is provide a really strong early warning system, which reduces the level of early school leaving,” says Gallagher.
“We’ve got nothing like that in Northern Ireland … Post-Covid, we’ve got a big problem around absenteeism still.”
“Huge developments” in the Republic’s post-secondary education sector has created “more routes for people to follow”, compared to the North where “we still have the structure we’ve had for years” with its focus on high exam results, according to Gallagher.
“We have a very narrow sense of what success counts for in the system in the North … It’s not actually worked out for the benefit of wider society,” he adds.
Scally agrees the North-South gap in the health and education sectors are a “worrying development” and “relative to the other”.
“If you don’t educate your young people well and provide them with a decent future, their children are going to be reflecting a worsening of the health of a population, and that’s what a decline in infant mortality shows.
“It’s an abject failure, really.”
by UnnaturalStride
28 comments
Partition and devolution doesn’t work.
When we need more funding we go to the UK government cap in hand like Oliver Twist
In NI if you don’t get into a grammar school or your parents don’t push you and give you broad horizons, you are fucked. The state high schools and Catholic maintained high schools are shit.
The morality rates are being overblown but the infant mortality rates are absolutely terrifying. Young people will never have a good go here either as long as there’s segregated education. It’s 2025 folks
Lack of funding
Thats a very simple question to answer:
– decades of underinvestment
– a coalition government that is absent most of the time
– a society that wont go to school with ‘them uns’ and refuse one education system for all
– a society that wants a hospital within 20 minutes drive of their location and successive governments that wont invest in primary care
The north is poor the south is rich. Simple
We are poor
Do you remember all that money a previous health secretary spent on legal cases trying to to stop gay people from giving blood…while also shipping on blood from places that allowed it?
Do you remember all that money that was spent on a new hospital building that wasn’t safe and lay empty for years before they finally spent millions more to make it accessible?
Do you remember all the money spent on trying to stop gay people from adopting children, while the number of children needing homes massively outweighed the number of people offering homes?
thats just a few of the reasons.
We constantly spend money in places that do not serve the people …and don’t have enough money left to serve the people
The benefits of a prosperous economy. I also think culturally the leaving cert is so massive in Ireland, it’s gets so much media coverage and the vast majority of people do it. Here we do GCSE and anything after that is a bonus outside of the grammar schools.
Having a 30 year civil war is inevitably a major factor, especially in health but it’s not the only one obviously.
Partition. It’s as simple as that
Gabriel Scally? I thought we’d heard the last of him when he wanted to create camps for the unvaxxed. He was part of the iSAGE crowd. Absolute monster imo
Money and the ability to implement long term strategies, we can’t do that up here due to bare minimum money from Westminster and the budget only done on a yearly basis.
Because‘benefits of the union’
Scale of sample is also a big thing. When you have a lot going wrong with a lot of people, things change quicker.
Our politicians are only interested in lining there pockets, they couldn’t give a fuck unless it impacts them financially.
Forced coalition governments where one of the major parties’ explicit aim is to make Northern Ireland not function to aid their ideological goal.
Both sides are slow to do away with the segregated model. Certain politicians are happy to get rid of government over culture wars.
https://www.irishtimes.com/news/ireland/irish-news/stormont-deal-will-clearly-include-irish-language-act-says-sinn-fein-1.4129881
It’s no wonder the real issues are getting ignored.
The RoI sent terrorists over the border to destroy NI for 30 years and made sure that the bulk of the trauma from that violence was contained to the North. (119 verus 3270 deaths)
As proxy wars go they got off lightly while training, arming and funding terrorists and then giving them sanctuary after they had murdered their required Prods
and scuttled over the border to the big barns full of Libyan weapons.
That might account for some of the disparity
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/dec/03/irish-police-colluded-ira-troubles-book-kieran-conway
https://www.irishtimes.com/news/politics/gardai-and-dublin-elite-colluded-with-ira-says-ex-insider-1.2025505
Money. Ireland has played a blinder in being a low tax jurisdiction which has swollen the coffers.
Maybe it should be contrast of peaceful society compared to post conflict.
Because Northern Ireland was never supposed to actually function well, and considering the UK itself does not function well, it means Northern Ireland doubly does not function well.
The structure of the education system is better in the UK than the ROI, and has better equity in education.
Because we are a failed state formally propped up to a degree by the European union, American investment, and British money towards peace and stability, all of which are a thing of the past. The well is dry. It’s not pc to blame the Catholics for it anymore but the immigrants seem to be fair game as the new scapegoat. Meanwhile the Brits are still at it.
People on this sub are laughable, blaming a single income block from Westminster as the only source of income. The reality is our politicians have failed to attract big business which would lead to generating our own regional income and wealth, benefitting all.
40 years of bombings diverts investment money elsewhere. It costs money to rebuild, although as a result you can see more modern buildings. In the west each one of our 3 hospitals are more modern than anything I have ever seen in the south.
Everyone is distracted by legacy issues and prosecuting the guilty and politicians are so focussed on these issues that they aren’t strategising.
People say you can’t strategise when relying on income from Westminster. If the NI government actually strategised to bring investment into the region then that alone would bring more prosperity within a few years.
Just look at what investment from the likes of allstate has done, the politicians need to use investNI and focus on attracting big ticket jnvestors like these.
Don’t use the Westminster funding as a crutch and only income source, our politicians are responsible for our future and we need to generate our own regional income.
Running 5 secondary education systems and keeping half empty country schools open is ridiculously inefficient.
Combine that with a system that effectively writes people off at 11 while a fairly large minority do very well, scattergun and underfunded lifelong learning, an almost universal culture of blaming amorphous others for issues, deep seated multigenerational aversion to work and learning, and you end up with quite a long tail of people ill equipped for productive employment and who are going to find it difficult to change that, not least because a huge chunk of the education budget is wasted on duplication.
I’ve taught undergrads in both jurisdictions and there’s not that much between them. On average NI students tend to have a deeper knowledge of their main subjects, IE students are generally wider but less deeply read. But there’s a huge difference in the number of people with no or minimal qualifications, the number of adult learners, and the quality and accessibility of lifelong learning for people who want to upskill.
Health is a tricky one. Relatively few people in the republic are happy with their healthcare. For urgent care and short term issues the systems are broadly comparable and NI has the advantage of being free. But for long term issues and especially waiting lists NI is a complete shambles. Devolving healthcare to a polity that can’t agree multi year budgets or have a functioning government (and even when it is sitting the two largest parties are ultimately not really bothered if it functions) is fundamentally unworkable because managing complex modern healthcare systems requires structural and policy interventions that are properly joined up, funded, and strategic.
Another thing we have down here is the TY year where kids go into the workforce my own included. It really is a great opportunity for them.
Segregated education.
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