Half of Northern Irish patients wait over a year for treatment

On the other side of the Irish Sea the leaders of the main political parties may be tempted to dismiss these horrors as an outlier. Health care, after all, is a matter for devolved administrations. Before the return of the Northern Irish executive in February, the country had gone two years without a government. Northern Irish politics is still coloured primarily by constitutional questions, which means health care may have comparatively less salience. “There’s a feeling of ‘oh well, we used to kill each other’,” says Deirdre Heenan of Ulster University. Waiting times, though awful in many parts of Britain, are nowhere near as bad as in Northern Ireland: half of patients there wait more than a year for treatment compared with only 4% in England.