Monitoring peace progress in Northern Ireland: a wellbeing framework

While much of the media coverage of the launch of the Northern Ireland Executive’s latest Programme for Government (PfG) rightly focused on the specific, quantifiable targets (or lack thereof), a complementary “wellbeing framework”, with dozens of regularly updated metrics, has received little comment. The PfG Wellbeing Framework has the potential for journalists and others to regularly monitor and scrutinise the executive’s progress on ten named “strategic domains” across three “missions”. First Minister Michelle O’Neill explained to fellow MLAs at the tabling of …

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Slight rise in road deaths in 2013

One of the grimmer statistics which is complied at the end of a year is the number of road deaths each year. In 2013 it was 56, which is an increase of 8 as compared to 2012. In 2011 it was 59 and 2010 55. These results still represent an approximately 7 fold decrease in road deaths over the last 40 years. The BBC are reporting Mark Durkin stating: “It only takes one bad choice to ruin a life. We …

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