When I speak with people in Dublin I’m shocked by the lack of knowledge of the scale of crisis in Northern Ireland’s health service. “But you have a free service in the North, so much better than the HSE.” A free service with inadequate capacity can be no service at all.
Long waits – often for several years – are standard for health treatment in Northern Ireland. Recently published analysis by the Economic and Social Research Institute concluded that while 12 per 1,000 people on waiting lists in Ireland were there for 18 months or longer, in the North the comparable figure was 86 per 1,000.
Sadly, the crisis in healthcare in Northern Ireland is not a unique failure in political delivery. Indeed, health waiting lists cause other problems. Health incapacity is the most common cause of economic inactivity – thousands who want to work are unable to do so because of long waits for surgery and other treatment.
Water infrastructure is another crunch point. Lack of sewage and water supply capacity is constraining housing construction and industrial development. Around £300m (€350m) a year is being invested in water infrastructure, compared to the minimum of £500m that NI Water says it needs and the £640m a year that the construction industry argues for.
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The North’s infrastructure crisis – and yes, it is a crisis – is further illustrated by last week’s court judgment blocking the upgrade of the A5, the most dangerous road on the island which connects Donegal as well as Derry to Dublin. The court found that NI’s Department for Infrastructure did not explain how the scheme meets the obligations of Stormont’s own climate change legislation.
Another serious failing in Northern Ireland is the education and skills system. The North has too few graduates, with around a third of undergraduates studying away because of lack of capacity within the local universities. Nor are there enough adults with high-level vocational skills. This, in turn, reflects a schools system based around academic selection – with many children from lower-income families not making the grade into the best-performing grammar schools.
A consequence is that Northern Ireland has lots of teenagers who switch off in school and leave the education system at an early age. Rates of early school leaving are three times higher in the North than in Ireland. One in ten school pupils in the North becomes disengaged as a teenager. These children are more likely to become economically inactive as adults, less likely to gain well-paid employment, more likely to suffer ill health and more likely to gain criminal records, becoming prisoners at high cost to the state.
All these problems (and many more) can be argued to be results of a political system that is unable to make difficult choices and allocate resources objectively. The Belfast Agreement achieved peace, but failed to provide an effective system of government. Indeed, Stormont has not even been sitting or operational for 40 per cent of the time since the agreement was signed. The Belfast Agreement never evolved beyond “conflict by peaceful means”.
This context raises the question: can Stormont be reformed? After working within the Stormont system as a political adviser, I left convinced that it cannot be made to work effectively. I was astonished at the continued sectarianism I perceived from some politicians, 27 years after the Belfast Agreement and the declaration of peace.
For many politicians in the North, governing is a zero-sum game – our community loses if your community gains anything. The result is that both communities are held back by the failure to govern for the good of all. And, equally important, Northern Ireland is no longer a society of just two communities. While Catholics today outnumber Protestants, these religious groupings contain a wide range of differences and neither forms a majority. The third section – from other and no religions and arriving from elsewhere – is large and in a sense, underrepresented politically.
It is difficult to see how the existing structures of mutual veto by the senior representatives of unionism and republicanism can be remoulded to create a functional system. One wag suggested it is like giving joint government to Jeremy Corbyn and Nigel Farage and expecting it to work. (Or, it might be said, to Conor McGregor and Paul Murphy.)
The permanent impasse at Stormont and its inbuilt dysfunctionality causes many to find Irish unity the attractive alternative. But unity is not an easy option. For one thing, there is the cost. Unaffordable says Professor John FitzGerald, given the scale of the subvention (subsidy) from the UK government. Affordable argues Professor John Doyle, not least given the potentially transformative impact of unification.
Then there is the timeline, process, destination and lack of preparation. It is perhaps wrong to consider Irish reunification as a potential “big bang” event. As Professors Seamus McGuinness and Adele Bergin have pointed out, the handover of Hong Kong to China took 13 years. The transition of East Germany is an ongoing process that has so far taken 35 years.
What concerns me most is the suggestion that Irish unity should lead to a federalised arrangement in which Stormont continues. When I argued to an Oireachtas committee a couple of years ago that the Northern Ireland Assembly is so dysfunctional that it cannot be retained within a new Irish State, the reaction from some senators seemed like suppressed horror.
Why an institution that does not work and apparently cannot work should be retained within a new island-wide constitution is completely beyond me. For many close observers, abolition of Stormont is the single most attractive element of Irish unity.
For all their faults, the Irish Government and the Irish State work and are effective. Difficult decisions are taken, with mostly good outcomes. If the Irish Government comprises adults, their equivalents in the North often seem like rowdy teenagers – more focused on arguing and scoring points than on reaching compromise, consensus and the best solutions.
It would be understandable if people in Ireland read this and think, “why do we want them?” Despite the challenges, the emotional desire for Irish unity remains stable across the South’s population. The work of the Shared Island Unit has illustrated the challenges involved – it is the practical path to be navigated that remains to be agreed.
Paul Gosling is author of A New Ireland – A Five Year Review of Progress, published by Colmcille Press
