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 worsening in infant mortality shows.
“It’s an abject failure, really.”
