Northern Ireland is quietly winning — so why do our politicians keep talking like we’re losing?

Two data points landed this week that I think deserve more attention than they’re getting. First, Northern Ireland’s average monthly wage is up 8% on last year — outpacing inflation and signalling genuine improvement in household income.

Second, an IFS report tells us that Northern Ireland has among the lowest child poverty rates in the UK, sitting well below Wales, London, West Midlands, and the UK average.  On the metrics that matter we’re moving in the right direction.

So why does our political culture feel stuck in a doom loop of crisis?

Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson argue in Abundance that Western democracies have become good at preventing bad things but have forgotten how to build good ones. Northern Ireland may be living proof: our institutions are calibrated for managing dysfunction, not stewarding success.

Lonergan and Blyth’s Angrynomics adds another layer — when economic anxiety becomes chronic, it gets weaponised politically, long after the underlying numbers have improved. The anger, they argue, long outlasts the emergency.

And then there’s the filter. Jaron Lanier has long warned that social media’s attention economy rewards outrage over nuance, collapsing complex economic progress into a scroll of grievance that induces a paralysis of will in the real world.

C. Thi Nguyễn goes further — distinguishing between filter bubbles, which limit what we see, and echo chambers, which actively erode our ability to trust outside voices. Northern Ireland’s political tribes may be less a product of genuine disagreement than of epistemic architectures that make consensus feel like surrender.

The result is a public will that’s perpetually pessimistic — even when the data says otherwise. So here are three questions our political class should be asked — and where possible forced to answer:

1. If wages are rising and child poverty is falling, what is your specific plan to lock in these gains rather than simply claim credit for them?

2. Northern Ireland’s poverty profile is improving relative to Great Britain — what structural reforms would you make to sustain that trajectory, rather than revert to dependency arguments?

3. If abundance, not austerity, is now the frame — what would you actually build?

The economics of success require different politics than the economics of failure. It’s time to find out if anyone at Stormont is ready for that conversation?

Mick Fealty

Mick is founding editor of Slugger. He has written papers on the impacts of the Internet on politics and the wider media and is a regular guest and speaking events across Ireland, the UK and Europe. Twitter: @MickFealty