Domesticky

A sickness has spread through the North of Ireland. And it’s not a virus.

It’s the rotting legacy of British rule, the bitter aftertaste of decades of systemic neglect and manufactured inequality.

The North of Ireland isn’t just ill. It’s at breaking point, and the fault lies squarely at the feet of Westminster. They’ve squeezed the life out of the region, and now that the bill’s due, they’re nowhere to be found.

The Cost of a Broken System

The healthcare system in the North has the highest cost per head of any region in the UK. And yet, it produces the worst outcomes.

If it’s not bad enough to conclude that it’s almost as if it was designed that way, it’s worse to wonder how it’s allowed to persist.

A Frankenstein’s monster of fragmented services, inconsistent funding, and relentless austerity cuts – stitched together with the same old colonial indifference.

Government figures don’t lie: despite the astronomical spend, people are waiting years for routine surgeries, mental health services are stretched to breaking point.

And A&E waiting rooms are permanent fixtures of despair.

A Legacy of Oppression

This is not just a story about healthcare.

It’s a story about how the British set up the North to fail. The apartheid-like state that was built to maintain Protestant supremacy and marginalise Catholics didn’t just divide people. It fractured every institution it touched.

The legacy of the Troubles, with its unimaginable violence and trauma, left entire communities scarred.

PTSD isn’t an isolated condition here. It’s an intergenerational reality.

Yet, while the North was bleeding, Westminster found a way to save money: by ignoring the wounds.

Austerity didn’t just arrive with the Tories in the 2010s. It’s been a quiet but highly effective cog in the British machine here for decades.

The Troubles themselves were a bloody distraction from the dismantling of community services, the gutting of welfare and the slow suffocation of public health systems.

The Colonial Boomerang

The British system – built on exploitation, inequality, and control – has always had a way of coming back to haunt its architects.

The North of Ireland is a microcosm of this colonial boomerang: impose an unequal system, force the people to suffer through it, and when the inevitable collapse arrives, shrug and say, ‘Not our problem.’

They don’t even want to pay for healthcare in England. How can we expect them to fund a region they never wanted to begin with?

And if the UK itself has been called the ‘sick man of Europe’ – struggling under the weight of its own economic mismanagement and NHS crisis – what does that make Northern Ireland? A hospital wing that’s been forgotten, left to fester and rot. If Britain can’t take care of itself, how could it ever look after the people it colonised and controlled?

This isn’t just political. It’s deeply personal. It’s about our families – our mothers and fathers waiting in corridors, our children being let down by an underfunded mental health system, and our elderly left in limbo.

The British government created this mess, and now they’re hoping we’ll clean it up ourselves.

Reckoning and Rebuilding

Northern Ireland deserves more than a political shrug. It deserves accountability.

It deserves investment that matches the level of need – a health system that heals rather than harms.

The British government may have lit the fire, but it’s up to us to put it out.

We need to confront the hard truth: if Westminster continues to see us as a financial inconvenience rather than human beings, it’s time to demand more.

More than empty promises, more than budget cuts disguised as ‘reforms’ – more than the constant, exhausting fight to survive.

If Britain truly wants to wash its hands of the North, then fine – but they’ll pay what’s owed before they leave. Because we’re not just sick of their neglect. We’re done with it.