Why we need to understand what’s driving instability in and beyond Northern Ireland

“When it comes to complex social dilemmas and multiple representations of the problem, those involved must communicate and tell each other about it, in such a way that personal knowledge becomes common knowledge.” — Arturo Lara

When a generation comes of working age and the economy doesn’t produce the jobs to absorb it, the consequences run wider than rising unemployment figures — higher crime rates and political instability tend to follow, as the opportunity squandered becomes its own kind of threat.

We’ve seen youth bulges in the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa, and South Asia where large cohorts of young people find no economic path forward, and then become available to insurgencies, criminal networks, and political violence. It has not been applied with any serious attention to the post-industrial cities of Western Europe and the United Kingdom.

From pyramid to a diamond shaped labour market

What the diamond is really standing in for here, is a qualitative shift: entry-level work increasingly fails to provide progression, security or a stake in the system, whatever the raw headcount says. R

For most of our lives, the labour market in industrialised economies has been described as a pyramid. At the base, a large number of entry-level and low-skilled jobs: factory floor work, manual trades, retail, hospitality, basic clerical work. Hardly glamorous and often poorly paid and physically demanding. But plenty of them, and accessible without qualifications.

They functioned as an on-ramp so that a young person leaving school with no or low level qualifications could get a job, learn the habit of going to work every day: showing up, learning skills, perseverance, and building relationships with colleagues and/or the public. Over time they might move up and into something better suited to their skills and temperament.

This pyramid absorbed successive generations of school leavers before they had any particular reason to feel that the system had no room for them. It gave young men (in the past it was disproportionately young men) a stake in society — enough of one such that the costs of destabilising the system outweighed the potential gains.

As the Sunday Independent‘s editorial put it:

Those who are given a stake in society have a vested interest in maintaining stability and getting along. Put simply, people with jobs and homes and prospects do not riot or burn down their neighbours’ homes.

The weakening of the social contract leaves many feeling that they have nothing to lose when working hard, and playing by the rules is no longer sufficient to provide them with the decent place to live and comfortable quality of life they deserve.

Uncontrolled immigration is a problem for both parts of the island, but it’s also an economic boon. Some 19% of the workforce of the NHS, for example, were born outside the UK. If, as the Sindo tells us, 80% of the people coming to Dublin do so via Northern Ireland, then they are doing so because there is still work for them to do.

In the UK between 2022 and 2024, the number of UK-born care sector employees dropped by 70,000, and even with over 100,000 immigrants filling care worker roles, the sector’s vacancy rate of 8.3 per cent remains nearly three times higher than the wider economy.

Jonathan Hopkin, in his book Anti-System Politics: The Crisis of Market Liberalism in Rich Democracies, traces the rise of anti-system politics to the long-term abandonment of post-war egalitarian capitalism in the 1970s, rather than a cultural backlash, nativism, or even social media — all of which he largely sees as secondary factors.

It isn’t that entry-level jobs have vanished in some literal headcount sense, but that the ones which remain have been hollowed out in everything except name. Yes, unemployed young people get angry, but it’s the fact that unemployment removes the economic stake that makes stability preferable to disruption.

None of this requires the diamond to be a precise description of wage distribution, just that entry-level work has stopped doing the job it used to do — and on that narrower, more defensible claim, the evidence is much harder to dispute.

Gerry Lynch’s detailed account of Kinnaird Avenue for the UnHerd site describes a street built in the 2010s on the Girdwood site where there had been real hope for desegregated housing, reduced to sixty units through political obstruction rooted in sectarian demography. It means this is not just generic story about labour market failure, but the specific failures of Belfast.

Yet research by Sipma, Lubbers and Spierings shows that the working class most likely to drift toward the radical right are those whose insecurity is primarily perceived rather than material: those whose position is not yet desperate but who feel that the trajectory is downward and that no one in mainstream politics acknowledges it.

This is the constituency that is politically radicalising across Northern European countries: the secure-but-anxious, those with enough to lose that they are frightened, but with too confidence in the trajectory to feel safe. It is this group that the Brexit referendum activated in big enough numbers to swing the exit vote by the narrowest of margins.

Our dark infrastructure…

In Belfast, we have something with no direct equivalent elsewhere in Western Europe: a paramilitary infrastructure with fifty years of experience in converting economic frustration into organised violence, and a Stormont executive that has been structurally unable or unwilling to dismantle it. That’s not to say the organisations themselves were behind this.

But the fact of paramilitary presence in working-class areas often short circuits official forms of redress in ways that can add costs to businesses that prefer to locate elsewhere. So Invest NI’s support flows to where investors already feel comfortable, which means south Belfast rather than west Belfast, at roughly a five-to-one ratio in terms of investment value.

The Housing Executive has, at least in the past, been informally managing the consequences of territorial control, shifting intimidated families between areas, rather than addressing the issue of territorial control itself. Seventy per cent of recorded homelessness-by-intimidation cases between 2012 and 2015 were linked to paramilitaries.

Sam McBride’s account in the Sindo of the PSNI’s systematic underfunding (a 29 per cent real-terms cut since 2010) shows how a Stormont Executive that has failed to create the economic conditions has simultaneously failed to fund the institution whose job it is to contain the consequences when that failure produces violence.

Why this is everyone’s problem

It is tempting to treat what happened in Belfast as a Northern Irish problem: specific, historical, exceptional, not quite applicable to the broader conversation about labour markets and social cohesion. But that would be to set the problems outside the agency of the democratic institutions, and the political interests we elect to tackle these issues.

Stormont’s anti racism strategy has been stuck in the works for most of the last eleven years. Northern Ireland has had a legal obligation to produce an anti-poverty strategy since 2006, written into the Northern Ireland Act following the St Andrews Agreement. It still does not have one in force, eighteen years later.

Research on voting behaviour is clear that the conditions most conducive to radical politics — of both left and right — are precisely those in which relative deprivation is visible, political distrust is high, and mainstream parties are perceived as serving the interests of those already inside the system.

The University of Liverpool survey of Northern Irish voters, conducted last month, found that healthcare and the economy ranked as voters’ top priorities, constitutional issues ninth, and legacy issues last. The issues that dominate political and media commentary are almost entirely disconnected from what people actually care about.

And before people jump back into their tribal trenches — this is not a Northern Irish phenomenon. It is happening in mainstream democratic politics across the Western world. Creating the job opportunities to absorb a rising working-age population is a test, and it’s one we’re currently failing.

Creating a sense of progressive possibility that makes stability preferable to disruption is what’s needed. That means visible investment in the areas and communities most exposed to the contraction of the base. And honest political engagement with the trade-offs of the labour market transition, rather than headline figures that obscure the structural deterioration underneath.

And it means funding the institutions (policing, health, housing, and even, at a national level, security and defence) whose underfunding signals to people that the state has no particular interest in their safety or wellbeing. It also requires a rebuilding of what Erik Hersman of Ushahidi calls Trust Bridges, and which relates to Demos’ new Everyday Democracy Project..

And it means recognising that the constituencies radicalising toward Farage, Le Pen and others and their various European equivalents are not a problem to be contained but a signal which says: the base of the pyramid has withered, and nobody in mainstream politics is acknowledging it.

Putting a lid on that is not a policy, but a postponement. And as Lynch said of Belfast last week, it reveals, in compressed and violent form, what structural economic failure and political abdication may eventually produce on a far wider scale.

What could we do to help?

Earning the upside of a working-age population means investment in education, health, institutional quality, and above all job creation matched to the shape of the emerging workforce — something the south has made progress on. A diamond labour market transition might look like this:

First, rebuild employment entry points and new pathways that provide progression and a stake in the system: apprenticeships in growing sectors, community wealth-building (as opposed to reconciliation) models, with public investment in the areas private capital avoids. In Belfast that also means addressing the paramilitary gatekeeping.

Second, fund the institutions that make stable civic life possible. Sam McBride’s indictment of Stormont is not just about policing but a political class that has been making real choices while pretending its hands are tied. Such choices have real consequences, and they were visible on the streets last week.

Third, find a language for the labour market transition that doesn’t begin by dismissing people’s concerns as illegitimate. Eilis O’Hanlon’s question remains unanswered: if rioting is wrong, what is the legitimate outlet? Silence, denunciation, and blaming social media (alone) are complaints, not answers. Honest, politically costly engagement is.

Belfast, with its paramilitary infrastructure, underfunded police and dysfunctional executive, is simply the place where the fuse is shortest. What is happening there is not a warning from another world. It is an insight into the one we’re already living in.

As readers of Slugger will have seen over the past few days, there is no consensus on what these disturbances mean. They feel oddly familiar, yet they press on something we have no ready answer for. There is, as yet, no roped path beyond this troubling present.

The optimal point of departure is when we embrace our own unique individual doubt, in a way that includes the other, that invites ourselves and others into a place of mutuality.

— John Kellden