Professor Seamus McGuinness:

We are doing some work on the North-South differences and inactivity as part of our research programme with IBEC. A lot of these differences and traumatic effects really impact not necessarily on higher levels of sickness and inactivity in the North but on the composition of it. When we compare inactivity rates between the North and the South, which comprises people who are not actively seeking work and excluding students, we have found that the levels of inactivity are only a little bit higher in the North compared with the Republic but the composition is very different. In the Republic, inactivity is more due to people looking after the home, which is really the constraint that females are experiencing because of the high costs of childcare. In the North, the inactivity is much more predominantly around people who are sick and disabled, and mental health issues are part of that. Again, as economists it is difficult for us but certainly that is somewhere where we see gaps and a clear reason for that is the legacy of the North.

On generational impacts, when there are factors that lead to joblessness in a household, there tends to be an intergenerational impact. If a child is in a jobless household, he or she is much more likely to subsequently be welfare dependent later in life and will tend to have a lower educational outcome.

That is what we know from the research. It is certainly there. We would like to do more work on it. Dr. Bergin and I, and our colleague Anne Devlin, have made proposals on potentially getting this work funded through the shared island unit. It is something we are interested in but we have not had a good grasp on it yet.