PSNI arrest and charge almost twice as many Catholics as Protestants…

Rory Winters over at The Detail has a report on the arrest profile of the PSNI. From the story: Close to double the number of Catholics than Protestants were arrested and charged over a five-year-period in Northern Ireland, according to PSNI statistics released to The Detail. From the start of 2016 until the end of 2020, over 57,000 Catholics were recorded as being arrested with almost 27,000 charged. By contrast, nearly 31,000 Protestants were recorded as being arrested with under …

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Let’s put our values into practice in how we govern, argues Naomi Long

If we are to make progress in Northern Ireland’s society, we need to reflect carefully on our core values and ensure that these are reflected in the way government works. This is the message put forward by Naomi Long – leader of the Alliance Party and justice minister – in the second of the Holywell Trust’s Forward Together podcast interviews of Northern Ireland’s political leaders.  Among the points stressed by Naomi is that violence is not acceptable as a means …

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The Stagnation of Urban Renewal

Late last year the Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency (NISRA) released the updated Northern Ireland Multiple Deprivation Measures. There were no surprises here: half of the most deprived Super Output Areas (SOAs) are in Belfast, a fifth are in the North West, and the rest are scattered in mostly rural communities. There is very little movement in and out of the top 100. The absence of a steady flow of continuous and dynamic data has contributed to stagnation and …

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Future Ireland / Economic Inequality: An emerging challenge for a New Ireland

In October last year, I attended a keynote speech delivered by President of Ireland Michael D Higgins to a packed auditorium at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. The speech was anchored around Michael Davitt’s 1896 visit to New Zealand, a visit where Davitt was impressed by the then Crown Colony’s progressive policies on land, tax, pensions and the economy. Subsequently, the founder of the Irish National Land League brought a number of these innovative ideas back to Ireland, to …

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Economic deprivation, unemployment, and the sectarian divide

There has been much discussion in recent days, both in Stormont and here on Slugger, on Disability Living Allowance. Specifically, following the Minister for Social Development Mervyn Storey’s disclosure in the Assembly that West Belfast is the area with the highest levels of DLA claimants, there has been debate about whether DLA claimant levels are higher in predominantly Catholic areas. Instead of tiptoeing gently around the issue, I thought it would be interesting to see if there was indeed a …

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Taking years off your life – NI life expectancy deprivation gaps show increase over last decade

bus route life expectancy - CRC's NI Peace Monitoring Report

When I asked Billy Hutchinson on Wednesday about the lack of publicity around any PUP campaigning on health and life expectancy, I was thinking about the kind of life expectancy figures that have been released yesterday by the Department of Health in their Inequalities Monitoring System/Life Expectancy Decomposition comparative report: Chapter 4 deals with the deprivation gap: The male life expectancy deprivation gap was 4.5 years in 2008-10 which represents a 10% increase from 2001-03. The female life expectancy gap …

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