Look Beyond

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Look beyond the Troubles and address social breakdown, urges new report

It has been 12 years since the Northern Ireland Assembly was formed to provide stability for the Province. It is now time to look beyond the Troubles of the past 40 years and address its crippling levels of social breakdown, warns a major new report from an influential centre-right think-tank.

The Centre for Social Justice, supported by local adviser Ian Parsley, freely acknowledges that the sectarian strife that has plagued the Province until recently has exacerbated the five drivers of poverty identified by its previous seminal research – welfare dependency, family breakdown, educational failure, drug and alcohol addiction, and debt.

But it argues that the time has come for the people and the politicians of the country to move on from the past and make a concerted attempt to create a healthier society.

The CSJ report, Breakthrough Northern Ireland to be launched in Belfast on September 2nd, paints a grim picture of social breakdown in the Province, marked by high levels of worklessness, family breakdown, mental illness and addiction.

The study also found many instances of outstanding work by volunteers and communities in Northern Ireland from which the rest of the UK can learn, and which place Northern Ireland in a better position to tackle some of the most difficult issues.

“The political system in Northern Ireland, primarily concerned with the necessity of delivering political stability, must begin to provide answers to the severe social problems outlined here, with the aim of reversing intergenerational social breakdown.

“Although the hallmarks of conflict remain important factors in social breakdown in Northern Ireland, many people face issues entirely in common with social problems across the UK as a whole,” the report says.

Key findings highlighting the extent of social breakdown in Ulster include:

• The highest level of economic inactivity in the UK

• Unemployment has more than doubled in the last two years

• Over half of those claiming income support have done so for more than five years

• One in five households is a single parent family

• Three in four single parent families live in poverty – 63,000 children.

• Widespread mental illness with nearly 50,000 men and women in Northern Ireland out of work because of mental and behavioural disorders

• More than one in 10 35-64-year-olds on antidepressants

• 30,000 people using cannabis every month

• Rate of cannabis use up 50 per cent from 2002 to 2006

• Drug-related deaths up 100-fold in the last 40 years

• Among 18-29-year-olds, 72 per cent of men and 57 per cent of women binge drink at least once a week

• Divorce rate is more than five times the level of 40 years ago

But some parts of Northern Ireland suffer far worse levels of breakdown than the national picture.

For instance, in the Water Works ward in North Belfast nearly four in five births are to unmarried mothers, nearly half the adult population has never married and two thirds of people had no or low qualifications.

The CSJ argues that the social ills of Northern Ireland are not irreversible.

By promoting stronger families, through for instance reform of the tax and benefits system and by bringing in programmes such as early intervention to help troubled families, by tackling educational failure and by placing recovery at the heart of addiction treatment, the cycle of social decay can be broken.

Gavin Poole, CSJ Executive Director, said: “Our work that identifies five pathways to poverty also provides effective solutions. Family breakdown needs family stability. Failure of education needs to be transformed into success. Reforming welfare will tackle intergenerational dependency and lack of aspiration by making work pay and releasing its wider benefits. Effective recovery programmes set people free from addiction.

“Although social breakdown may be more pronounced in a society marred by a legacy of social division and conflict, the urgent need to tackle the causes of poverty remains the same.”

For media inquiries, please contact Nick Wood of Media Intelligence Partners Ltd on 07889 617003 or 0203 008 8146

NOTES TO EDITORS

The Centre for Social Justice is an independent think tank established, by Rt Hon Iain Duncan Smith MP in 2004, to seek effective solutions to the poverty that blights parts of Britain.

In July 2007 the group published Breakthrough Britain. Ending the Costs of Social Breakdown. The paper presented over 190 policy proposals aimed at ending the growing social divide in Britain.

Subsequent reports have put forward proposals for reform of the police, prisons, social housing, the asylum system and family law. Other reports have dealt with street gangs and early intervention to help families with young children.

The Rt Hon Iain Duncan Smith MP stood down as Chairman of the Centre on his appointment as Secretary of State for Work and Pensions in May 2010 and is now the Founder and Patron.

Nick Wood of Media Intelligence Partners Ltd on 07889 617003 or 0203 008 8146

What a searing indictment of the carve-up of Northern Ireland between a bizarre fundamentalist sect and a Marxist guerrilla organisation, the archetype of the "centre ground" politics of which we are all supposed to approve, but which is in fact a carve-up between that sect's old allies on the 1980s Radical Right and those guerrillas' old allies on the 1970s sectarian Left.

A key point in that carve-up was the removal, conducted almost entirely on television, of the Leader who had taken the Conservative Party to parity and beyond in the polls, and made it the largest party in local government, on a programme of social justice and national sovereignty, a programme which threatened to turn the 2005 Election into the proper contest that, with his removal, it was prevented from becoming.