North and South and a death-wish

I never cease to be amazed by the number of things I don’t know. I was in a library yesterday, and while I love books, just looking at the rows and rows of volumes which I will never read, and so will remain ignorant of what their authors say in them, I felt, yes, good word – humbled.

I feel the same way sometimes when I’ve read a David McWilliams column. He’s in the Irish Times this morning, and he’s really delivering.  Here are just a few of the things I didn’t know, and I’ll bet you didn’t either.

1. People in NEI are much less healthy than people in the south of Ireland. That pulled me up short. I’d always assumed with our wonderful NHS, we must be years ahead. Uh-uh. The average person in the south can expect to live nearly ten years longer than his northern counterpart.
2. In education it’s a similar tale. Young people (25-34) in the republic who have had third-level education amounts to 55%. In NEI it’s 40.7%. You’re three times more likely to quit school early in NEI than in the south.
3. In work, NEI leads the way, but not in a good sense. Nearly a third of people between 16-64 are neither in education or work. They are, as McWilliams notes, “economically inactive”. In fact, NEI has the highest score for economic inactivity for any region in the UK.

McWilliams goes on to muse if this isn’t a unionist strategy. Maybe they want to have a state where people die too young, spend more years relying on disability benefits, underachieve at school, and bring home smaller pay-packets. That way, people can focus on the union jack  and forget that the south’s economy is nearly nine times bigger than that of NEI.

So why do unionists apparently want this to continue? After all, Rishi Sunak did promise them an unbeatable deal, with unique access to UK and the EU markets. McWilliams hints – and I just love this – that unionism might prefer NEI to be a basket case, and that way no-one (aka the south or the EU) would want to annex it.

 It’s like being threatened by a robber, so you put your wallet in your breast pocket and then shoot it to smithereens. I might be dying but hey, I’ve really frustrated that thieving hood.

You learn a little every day.