I’m Jude Webber, the FT’s Ireland correspondent, and I’m turning my focus today on to the state of Northern Ireland.
Handily, the Office for National Statistics has just published updated data on the GDP of the UK regions, and there is an unusually upbeat reading there for Northern Ireland.
The region, which has the lowest productivity in the UK, comes in as the only part of the UK where GDP per head is growing. Not by much — a teensy 0.2 per cent — but in the black at least, and above Wales, the West Midlands, East Midlands, the North East and Yorkshire & The Humber. Data published a year ago put it only above Wales and the North East.
All that makes research published last week by Queen’s University in Belfast even starker: researchers there drilled into census data and found that two local authorities in Northern Ireland — Derry City & Strabane and Belfast — have more deprived areas than any of the other 374 local authorities in England, Scotland, Wales or the rest of Northern Ireland.
Put another way, Northern Ireland has the highest level of most deprived areas — 25 per cent, above the North East of England (21 per cent) and the West Midlands (16.5 per cent).
Anyone with a passing familiarity with the years-long wait to see consultants in Northern Ireland and the parlous state of the NHS in the region will not be surprised to learn that health deprivation is particularly high: almost 28 per cent of areas in Northern Ireland ranked among the most deprived in the UK, well above 23 per cent for Scotland and 16 per cent for North East England. That is worlds away from the 1.5 per cent of areas in London ranked as most deprived by poor health.
“The insights are critical for informing public policy,” said Professor Christopher Lloyd, who led the project. “Our study will allow policymakers to make a case for funding or to better direct resources given a knowledge of how their areas compare to other areas within their region, within their nation, or the UK as a whole.”
Would that it were that simple. The Stormont executive recognises there is a problem — according to data from the Department for Communities published last month, 17 per cent of people live in relative income poverty (before housing costs) — that is, their household income is less than 60 per cent of the UK median level, and 15 per cent live in absolute poverty. For children, those figures are 23 per cent and 20 per cent, respectively.
But an official anti-poverty strategy — an almost two decades-old commitment — has yet to be adopted by the executive, which was found last month to be in breach of its legal duty to enact one.
And even though knowledge is power, “making a case for funding,” as Lloyd said, is always fraught and often fruitless in Northern Ireland.
Passing the 2025-26 “Doing what Matters Most” budget earlier this month, finance minister John O’Dowd put £215mn towards cutting what are the longest health service waiting lists in the UK and doubling investment in the executive’s early years and childcare strategy to £50mn. But he accused Westminster of a “continued policy of austerity”.
The UK says the region received a record £18.2bn in last year’s UK Budget, and Hilary Benn, the Northern Ireland secretary, has upbraided Stormont for not getting on with overhauling public services, saying earlier this year that “given the increase in funding that the government has given, a lack of funding is not the impediment to public service transformation”. Ouch.
Before we look at education in the next section, it’s also worth taking a look at Northern Ireland’s wellbeing from another standpoint: comparison with the Republic of Ireland.
In a report published this week, the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) found people in Northern Ireland pay about half as much income tax as in Ireland, on average, and wealth is about 60 per cent higher in the south than the north (as measured by modified gross national income per capita in Ireland and GDP in Northern Ireland).
Distilled down into one key comparable metric, though, there is bleak news for Northern Ireland. Life expectancy of 80.4 is a full two years less than in the Republic, and below the 80.7 years that is the UK average.
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Britain in numbers
Life expectancy is not the only way Northern Ireland trails both Britain and Ireland. Education is another. The Queen’s study highlighted four Northern Ireland local authorities among the top 20 in the UK in terms of education deprivation; two of those — Derry City & Strabane and Belfast — are in the top 10. Comparing the most recently available data (often with a bit of a lag), the ESRI found that in 2022, almost three-quarters of 15 to 19-year-olds in Northern Ireland were enrolled in school — 10 percentage points below the UK average and 21 points behind Ireland.
Northern Ireland’s selective education model — it has retained a transfer test for high-performing grammar schools, which leads to top students getting more of the best grades at A level than in England and Wales while those who do not are less well served — only intensifies division in education.
While early school leaving halved in the Republic between 2018 and 2022, it inched up in Northern Ireland to 10 per cent from 9.4 per cent, and the number of young people not in education, employment or training (NEET) in 2022 was 2.6 percentage points higher, with a growing gap between jurisdictions.
One brighter spot is that NEET rates among men have stabilised, whereas among women they have been trending up. But it is worrying for policymakers in a region that expects to have a declining number of working-age people in the coming years and more pensions to pay. By 2047, an estimated 58.5 per cent in the region will be aged 16 to 64, and 26 per cent will be over 65, compared with 62.2 per cent and 17.6 per cent respectively in 2022.
Researchers know that poverty and a legacy of trauma from the region’s Troubles have a part to play in a region where education remains highly segregated. Northern Ireland this month celebrated the 27th anniversary of its peace accord, the Good Friday Agreement, with imperfect progress in tackling continued division and deprivation, as the chart above highlights.
But to finish on a note of hope, a project by Springboard, an organisation working with marginalised young people, brought together two groups living on different sides of Belfast’s first peace wall segregating Protestant and Catholic areas. Of the 16 participants in the project, funded by the International Fund for Ireland, more than half had suffered trauma, 75 per cent had mental health problems and all came from disadvantaged areas.
The idea was simple: help young people to see that despite the divisions, they have much to share. As Molly, one participant, put it: “I am really proud of the community I come from and I want to see it thrive.”
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