Policies to tackle poverty and economic inequality on the island of Ireland have been informed by decades of research to understand the drivers of such exclusion in our society.
Prof Vani Borooah of Ulster University, who died earlier this month, was one of the researchers who provided vital evidence for policymakers on how to address these challenges, with his work on poverty in Northern Ireland.
Investment in education in the Republic has been one of the key factors in providing economic opportunity for children born into poor families, and narrowing income inequalities. Over the 60 years since the introduction of free second-level education, our system has progressed from one where many working class children left school with only a primary school education, to one where virtually all young people complete a Leaving Certificate and a majority progress to third level.
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While far from perfect, our education system has been a major contributor to Ireland’s economic success.
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While free second-level education came earlier to Northern Ireland, the education system there prevents working class children, both Protestant and Catholic, from achieving their full potential.
Borooah’s research showed how the structure of education in Northern Ireland fails children from disadvantaged backgrounds. His most recent paper, with his Ulster University colleague Colin Knox, shows that in the North 45 per cent of pupils are selected into “high-performing” grammar schools at age 11 – where, on average, more than 95 per cent obtain good exam results – while 55 per cent of pupils, who were rejected by grammar schools, attend “low-performing” secondary schools, in which, on average, fewer than two-thirds get good exam results.
This early streaming means that generally it is only the minority of students who attend grammar schools that have the opportunity to progress to university, while those who attend the “secondary” school are more likely to finish their education early.
The research showed that both Catholic and Protestant grammar schools excluded most children from disadvantaged backgrounds, as well as those with special educational needs.
In secondary schools, the educational outcomes for children in Catholic schools are better than in Protestant ones, with lower school dropout rates.
Reflecting on these results, Borooah and his co-author said that policymakers, “whose children attend or hope to enter grammar schools, will be reluctant to dismantle a system of education which provides the equivalent of a private education in England, but funded by the state”.
While for much of the North’s history, discrimination in the labour market on religious grounds had been endemic, research by Vani and colleagues showed that by the 1990s the differences in pay in Northern Ireland between Catholics and Protestants were due to characteristics such as differing education levels, rather than religious identity.
In the 1970s, Borooah’s father, Dev Kant Borooah, was president of the ruling Congress Party in India, as well as being a minister in Indira Gandhi’s government.
When his father retired, Borooah chose not to follow his father into Indian politics, but instead to make a major contribution to economics. Reflecting his heritage, as well as his adopted home, Borooah’s research looked at key issues affecting poverty and inequality in India, as well what drove this in Northern Ireland.
He studied the challenges in the Indian educational system, including the role of castes. He wrote on health issues in India, and the links between sanitation, hygiene and health outcomes. His research threw a spotlight on domestic violence in India and, following a stint in Australia, on spousal violence in that country.
In 2012, he published research on violence against Muslim immigrants from Bangladesh in his father’s home state in India, Assam. He showed that the fears about the scale of immigration, which drove the violence, were unfounded.
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