Within years of the GFA being signed, global foreign direct investment had its eyes firmly on the prize – the Six Counties were ripe with opportunity and big business could be assured that whatever ‘investment’ they pumped in, they would pump sizeable amounts more right back out again.
Mark O’Connell, chair of OCO Global, a trade and investment advisory firm set up in Belfast shortly after the GFA was signed, said that when he set up business in Belfast in the years after the signing of the Agreement, there was “a palpable sense of business confidence” that as a region the Six Counties “was about to take off economically”.
And that it did. Marks business recently published an economic analysis indicating that the Six Counties ‘Gross Domestic Product’, a measure of value of goods and services within the state, has more than doubled from £19.8bn in 1998 to £43.7bn in 2020.
Also doubling, was the amount of tourists flowing into the now burgeoning economy. Passengers through airports in the Six Counties stood at 4.4 million in 1998, doubling to 8.8 million by 2019, with overseas visitors increasing from 1.3 to 3 million, whereas cruise ship visitors swelled to 280,000 in 2019 compared to just 1,050 in 1998.
One of the other most notable changes has been the growth of the private sector and a reduction in the region’s traditional support for public sector jobs. Stormont political parties, as part of the 2014 ‘Stormont House Agreement’, have gone as far as setting aside £700 million in order to make over 20,000 public sector workers redundant.
25 years of the Good Friday Agreement, littered with political instability, and yet, business and foreign direct investment is doing quite well. Strange then, as OCO Global’s Mark O’Connell himself says, “Clearly, not everyone has felt these benefits…and we have far too many communities still living in deprivation.” The communities that Mark is referring to are the vast majority of those resident in the state.
The Six Counties, Belfast in particular, is now a popular getaway destination; its city centre is teeming with packed restaurants, busy bars and fancy hotels. But scratch just a little beneath the surface and all is not what it seems. This “veneer of prosperity” as it was called by PriceWaterhouseCoopers, one of the ‘big four accounting firms’, is a facade, behind which lies 330,000 people, almost one fifth of the population in the state, now living in poverty.
66% of homes in the Six Counties are in receipt of ‘state benefits’, a figure that stands in stark contrast to the £43.7 billion moving through the economy in 2020. Someone is doing very well it would seem, but it isn’t the more than 100,000 children now living in poverty.
Those children are subject to the daily horrors of deprivation, with the most deprived areas in the Six Counties having a suicide rate almost twice that of the least deprived areas. Indeed, more have died from suicide since the signing of the Good Friday Agreement than those who died as a direct result of the conflict in the preceding three decades.
Neoliberal capitalist economics, wholly adopted as the ideological bedrock of the Six Counties economy by the five main political parties, has devastated communities. The evidence is overwhelming, in that a significant correlation exists between social and environmental conditions and the prevalence of mental disorders. Mental illness is now recognised as one of the biggest causes of individual distress and misery in our societies and cities, comparable to poverty and unemployment.
This, combined with the complete failure to deal with the trauma and horrors of war means that when it comes to the Six Counties, mental health problems are the single largest cause of ill health and disability. Experiences of inequality, social isolation, feelings of alienation and dissociation, and even the basic assumptions and ideology of neoliberalism and materialism are significant drivers of this.
Not content with the cost of poverty on the public purse, multiple British governments have sought to twist the knife while it was in, and have for 13 years now implemented various ‘austerity’ measures against the popular will of the people. This has affected some more than others, with women bearing the biggest cost. It is estimated that austerity since 2010 will have cost women a total of £79bn, against £13bn for men. By 2020, men will have borne just 14% of the total burden of welfare cuts across Britain and occupied Ireland, compared with 86% for women. These austerity measures were adopted almost wholesale by Six Counties political parties and implemented by Stormont MLA’s.
Things get worse, given that the Six Counties is, per capita, the most dangerous place in Europe for women, with more domestic violence killings than anywhere else.
25 years after the signing of the Good Friday Agreement, one thing is abundantly clear, that historic document was designed to end violence directed at the state, but it did not aim to end the violence of poverty and capitalism directed at the rest of us.
