We need your help now
Support from readers like you keeps The Journal open.
You are visiting us because we have something you value. Independent, unbiased news that tells the truth. Advertising revenue goes some way to support our mission, but this year it has not been enough.
If you've seen value in our reporting, please contribute what you can, so we can continue to produce accurate and meaningful journalism. For everyone who needs it.
Sign in. It’s quick, free and it’s up to you.
An account is an optional way to support the work we do. Find out more.
By continuing, you are indicating that you accept our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy.
EARLY IN DECEMBER, we asked if you had any nagging questions remaining from 2016, about claims or facts or statistics you heard again and again over the course of the past 12 months.
We were inundated with excellent suggestions from readers, and picked out the very best ones.
For the first installment, we’re looking at the claim that there were more deaths by suicide during the era of austerity than there were during the 30 years of the Troubles.
Louise Dunne in South Dublin had seen this claim floating about on social media a lot this year, and so emailed us to ask us to check it out.
What was said
A search on Facebook indicates that this was indeed a claim that was circulated quite widely in Ireland throughout the year. It was made by anti-austerity activist Maeve Curtis, when she spoke at TV3′s the People’s Debate in Co Louth, during the general election campaign.
However, it appears to have been made most prominently by the historian Tim Pat Coogan, in comments for a Guardian article in March, and on his own blog last October, in which he wrote:
More people died by suicide during the seven years of austerity than were killed in the thirty years of the troubles.
It’s a claim that has significant rhetorical power, but is it true?
Let’s break this into two parts: the number of deaths in The Troubles, and the number of deaths by suicide during the “austerity era”.
The most authoritative source for this is the Conflict Archive on the Internet (CAIN) at Ulster University.
For 1969-2001, the figures are an updated and revised version of Malcolm Sutton’s 1994 book Bear in Mind These Dead – An Index of Deaths from the Conflict in Ireland 1969-1993.
For 2002 until present, deaths have been recorded and compiled by Dr Martin Melaugh, the director of CAIN, and a research fellow in the school of criminology, politics and social policy at Ulster University.
Although there is no official end-point to The Troubles, the conflict is generally considered to have ended with the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. For this reason, as well as Tim Pat Coogan’s reference to “30 years”, we will be treating the period on question as 1969-1998.
Fortunately, the CAIN database has already been tabulated, by the Guardian in 2010. According to that spreadsheet, the total number of conflict-related deaths between 1969 and 1998 was 3,483.
The “austerity era” is tricky to define. The beginning of austerity in Ireland is generally regarded to have been 2008, specifically the second half of the year, which saw the Budget brought forward from December to October, as well as the bank guarantee in September.
However, Tim Pat Coogan’s claim specifies “seven years” of austerity. FactCheck asked Tim Pat Coogan which seven years he was referring to, but we didn’t receive a response. Let’s assume we’re dealing with 2008-2014.
The best available source of official figures on suicide in Ireland is the CSO, which records “intentional deaths” each year. According to that data, there were a total of 3,594 deaths by suicide.
That’s very slightly above the 3,483 deaths linked to the Troubles between 1969 and 1998.
There are a couple of things to bear in mind here. When it comes to the Troubles, there have been deaths (particularly in the last 15 years) which could not be definitively determined to have been linked to the conflict.
So the figure of 3,483 could be an understatement of the reality.
And when it comes to suicides, CSO figures are limited to deaths that are definitively determined to have been intentional, and campaigners and professionals in related fields have often warned these figures may be understating the true numbers.
However, the CSO does have an additional classification – for deaths where there was an “undetermined intent”.
It’s important to note that these are not necessarily all “hidden” suicides, but rather they are suggestive of a greater number of suicides than is reflected in the official data.
If we include all deaths of “undetermined intent”, along with those officially deemed “intentional”, the toll rises to 4,073.
When it comes to the years 2007-2014, it does certainly appear that the number of deaths by suicide was greater than the number of deaths during the Troubles. So the claim, as articulated by Tim Pat Coogan, is Mostly TRUE.
But only as it relates to those specific years. The number of officially recorded suicides in Ireland between 2008 and 2013, for example (which is perhaps a fairer reflection of the most difficult period of austerity in Ireland), was 3,135, less than the confirmed death toll during the Troubles.
If we include all deaths of “undetermined intent”, we get 3,552, only 100 more than were recorded in the Troubles.
But not every one of those “undetermined” deaths will have been suicides, so even if we’re somewhat liberal in interpreting these deaths from 2008-2013, we’re still unlikely to come up with a toll higher than that of the 1969-1998 conflict.
So when it comes to the “austerity era”, defining the years in question makes a difference, statistically.
Obviously we can’t answer that question for each individual tragedy.
Firstly, suicide is an extremely complicated phenomenon, often with many personal, psychiatric, medical, economic, and family-related background causes, as well as contributing factors and triggers.
And secondly, basic privacy issues quite rightly mean there is no way to examine each case and sort through those causes.
So making a statement about suicides in “the austerity era” appears to be an indirect way to link suicides to austerity, causally.
The implication in this claim is that the background of economic austerity caused or contributed to the suicides – something that for very good reason cannot be comprehensively verified.
But we can examine whether there was an association between the levels of austerity, and the rate of suicide.
Let’s check out the number of officially recorded suicides, and the suicide rate, each year between 2000-2015.
Obviously, every suicide is one too many, and each one is its own unique tragedy. However, for the purposes of analysing a trend, the most salient measure is the suicide rate, and not the number of suicides.
This is a (very understandable) mistake that is often made by people who point to the rising or falling number of suicides in a given year as evidence of a particular external cause.
The suicide rate takes into account changes in population, and so is the better measure when doing any sort of year-on-year analysis.
So let’s take the suicide rate (the number of deaths per 100,000 people in the population), and map that on to the trend in unemployment and government spending – two good measures of the era of austerity.
The trend is ambiguous here. If there were a solid, strong association between the rate of unemployment and the rate of suicide, we should expect the two lines to rise and fall together.
That’s not exactly what this chart shows.
While unemployment remained flat between 2000 and 2007, the suicide rate largely fell, from 12.8 per 100,000 in 2000, to 10.5 in 2007.
Although there were significant increases in both measures between 2007 and 2009, an increase in unemployment in 2010 was accompanied by a sharp drop in the rate of suicide.
And to confound things further, there was a steady decline in both the unemployment and suicide rates in the four years between 2012 and 2015.
So, some association, but some divergence, too.
Let’s look at government spending. For this, we’ve taken quarterly net government spending, averaged it out for each year, and then adjusted for inflation, using an annual average of the CSO’s Consumer Price Index, set to November 2016 prices.
If there were a strong association between government spending and the rate of suicide, we could expect that as one rises, the other falls.
That’s only partly what we’re seeing here. The clearest trend is from 2003 to 2007, when government spending rose steadily, and the suicide rate fell steadily.
But look at 2010, when a sharp decline in government spending was accompanied by a sharp decline in the suicide rate.
And between 2011 and 2013, spending fell somewhat, while the suicide rate fell significantly.
Then again, a moderate increase in spending between 2013 and 2015 was accompanied by a moderate drop in the rate of suicide.
So the data does not back up a clear and unambiguous association between the rate of suicide and either the level of government spending or the unemployment rate.
Of course, you could argue that perhaps any decline in the rate of suicide would have been even more pronounced if it weren’t for increasing unemployment and decreasing government spending.
But proving that would require a level of case-by-case examination that is simply not possible.
In addition, if you make this argument about years where unemployment rose but the suicide rate fell (or spending increased and the suicide rate also increased), you would by definition have to accept that, whatever impact unemployment and spending had, it was not sufficient to outweigh the impact of countervailing forces.
However, there’s one important factor we haven’t looked at yet – gender.
Let’s see what association we can find between suicide and unemployment among women and men.
As you can see, there is basically no association here between the two measures. As female unemployment remains flat between 2000 and 2008, the rate of suicide dips and rises from year to year, with no clear pattern.
And while unemployment soars between 2008 and 2010 (from 4.9% to 9.9%), the rate of suicide drops dramatically.
Now let’s examine unemployment and suicide among men in Ireland, during the same period.
The association is striking. The rise in male unemployment from 2007 to 2011 is mirrored by a similar rise in the male suicide rate, with a sharp rise in both in 2009.
And as the unemployment rate plateaus, and then begins to drop in 2011, the rate of suicide does likewise.
From 2007 to 2013, the curve is almost identical in both measures, suggesting a strong association between male unemployment and the rate of male suicide.
This broadly reflects the findings of a 2015 study by researchers at UCC and the National Suicide Research Foundation, which found that the biggest impact of the recession on suicide and self-harm was felt among men, in particular men aged 25-44.
So there you have it:
TheJournal.ie’s FactCheck is a signatory to the International Fact-Checking Network’s Code of Principles. You can read it here.
For information on how FactCheck works, what the verdicts mean, and how you can take part, check out our Reader’s Guide here.
To embed this post, copy the code below on your site
Surely the key point to be drawn is that even in supposed “good” times, the rate of suicide in Ireland is far, far too high.
Far more can be done and should be done.
Its actually disgusting how little is spent on human mental health in this country. put cjd or mad cow mix into it and the whole government overboard..money money money..thats the only thing this gov can deal with. Not one TD has a capacity for empathy. They’d want to wake up …a bunch of fools, its embarrassing now.
The problem is the same as with health and things like free college tuition, although thankfully since 08 the mind sets shifted massively towards wanting a more Euro style social democracy (why FF, SF and India who ran on this cleaned FGs clocks as they talked about abstracts like GDP) BUT for ages I saw it on campaigns it went like this:
People only cared about special needs, mental health, access to third level, expanding medical cards if THEY or someone in THEIR family needed one of them then you got an awfully specific policy heavy grilling on the door. The rest of the time they decided their vote not on policy but:
•Jayzus he was a nice fella
•He went to UCD/Trinity/Blackrock too!
•He’s local (seriously….no really!)
•He’s young (really…this was all but the entire reason Simon Harris got elected)
•He was big in de GAA
You need to show canvass teams you care about national policy keep the pot holes for the councilers, contrary to what you may think they pay careful attention to the issues you bring up
Go to the 98fm Adrian Kennedy show podcasts and listen to the two about depression and anxiety disorders and you’ll see how fundamentally misunderstood this topic is
The callers in many cases seem to think depression means mean being a bit blue, and an anxiety disorder is like when you’re nervous going to do a speaking engagement at work. The line between run of the mill life bumps and these conditions is relatively easy to define: instead of being bothersome they are paralysing. They prevent you from engaging in basic functions (or severely disrupt them with much drama) like work or socialising. Just doing a normal routine with them is a titanic battle it’s like fighting a war with a force inside your own mind where you’re not fully in control but those people offer nonsense like “pull the finger out cop on and get on with it”
The usual pub talk of suicide also continues to focus on the ignorant and point missing argument that it’s “selfish”. Like LGBT rights we pay ourselves on the back for advances on this but we’re nowhere as far as we think we are
Unfortunately Mental Health doesnt carry a limp.We need to learn as a country to be there for one another. The first step should be speaking out.Learn its ok not to be ok.
@deeze nuts. Being there for someone only goes so far. Try being a child under the care of CAHMS in an area where there is no child psychiatrist. Where your then held in a unit the other side of the Country until one is recruited and then discharged to the care of that psychiatrist (who probably has the workload of 10 psychs). And then slips through the cracks of the mental health system and despite your family begging cahms for help for you as its an emergency being told maybe they should ring teenline. Queue a suicide attempt and another stay in a psych unit. Then amongst all the stress a family having to hire a solicitor to take the HSE to court to force them to take their duty of care seriously and resource a care plan for the child. Then the psychiatrist goes on holidays and there is no cover, then the psych leaves and there is none. Then their is a locum but their out sick so it’s an eternity of cancelled appts. So you end up in A&E for the night petrified there will be another suicide attempt. And you leave exhausted with Valium for a child and an emergency appt that’s cancelled yet again. This is the nightmare of the children’s mental health service in this country.
@Carina Clarke.. that: is it in a nutshell . that’s what parents are up against in this country and all they are trying to do is help their kids . the whole system is broken down . You seem to be talking from the heart and if you are I sincerely hope you do get the help the child needs ..
This suicide prevention cliche should be abandoned now. Those who ended their lives obviously did not believe it was ok ‘to not be ok.’
It’s worth pointing out that the further back you go the more likely suicide wasn’t recorded as cause of death. In more recent years it’s more likely to be recorded as suicide.
There’s a big flaw here. The Troubles were mostly confined to the 6 counties while the suicide stats are for the whole republic. For example, the population of NI in 1971 was 1.53 million, while the population of the republic in 2011 was about 3 times that (4.58 million).
As such, on a per capita basis, there were far more deaths per capita in the areas affected by The Troubles.
Also, as someone else pointed out – (sadly) suicide has always happened, and these figures tell us nothing about the increase in suicide rates (if any) during austerity. I’d bet that if they based the analysys on the increase in suicide rate per capita, vs deaths in the Troubles per capita, the latter would absolutely dwarf the former. That is the only fair comparison, as it’s fair to assume that someone who was shot dead by a terrorist only died at that time because of The Troubles. Conversely, you can’t assume that someone committed suicide because of austerity.
I just looked up the figures for myself – according to the same source (the CSO) that said there were 3,594 suicides from 2008-2014, there 3,386 suicides in the preceding 7 year period (2001-2007) – commonly referred to as “the boom years”.
Also interesting to note that there were fewer suicides in 2014 than in any other year back to 2000, and the year with the highest number of suicides across this whole period was 2001. Sorry, but these figures just don’t support any link between suicide rates and austerity.
The CSO also gives the option of showing the stats per 100,000 population, which addresses my earlier point. And guess what, when you sort by the years with the highest suicide rates this is what you get:
1. 2001 (13.5 deaths per 100,000)
2. 2000 (12.8 deaths per 100,000)
3. 2003 (12.5 deaths per 100,000)
4. 2002 (12.2 deaths per 100,000)
5. 2004 (12.2 deaths per 100,000)
During the austerity period, the rate has varied from 10.0 (2014) to 12.2 (2009). If anything, this suggests suicide rates during the austerity years have been lower than during the boom.
By the way, to provide context, in 1972 there were 497 people killed in NI due the Troubles. That’s about 33 deaths per 100,000 people living in NI at the time.
But Cornelius, the article was about a Factcheck on a comment, not an analysis of suicide versus deaths during the Troubles. It addressed the numbers initially, which as you rightly point out in the south would have been spread over a larger population but this was in the context of the comment.
That was really interesting. However there’s a limit to how useful merely looking at graphs and comparing them is. You’ve highlighted that when you split the genders. If you really want to understand such statistics you need to do the maths to see if there’s a statistically significant correlation. And to really do it properly you need to try to account for as many contributing factors as possible.
It’s been done: a paper by Brendan Walsh and Dermot Walsh, economist and psychiatrist respectively published a few years ago. There’s a big international research literature modelling the effects of the economy on mortality including suicide. Suicides do go up in recessions but they are a small percentage of deaths overall. Other deaths often go down, for example due to car crashes and people adopting healthier lifestyles. The evidence I have seen for Europe is that the Great Recession actually saved lives.
Even back with Emile Durkheim a correlation between major social or economic periods of change and suicide rates was noted, they spiked I seem to recall as the tiger era started to
His theory was times like that loosen social bonds contributing a social factor to the psychological ones
@Awkward Seal: the big question is why are people killing themselves ?Would debt be a big factor mixed with anxiety ?Looking at the graphs,suggests to me that the recession took a lot of lives due to austerity and debt no doubt most suicides occurred during peak recession times 2008 to 2012.When i look at the 2001 rates its high again there was also a crash around that year i can remember that. https://www.google.ie/search?q=What+year+was+the+.Com+crash&hl=en&safe=off&gws_rd=cr&ei=px9XWLugJIanaLHSrpgM
The problem with incorrectly ascribing suicides to austerity is that when austerity is finally fully reversed, the suicide rate won’t fall. So you’ll continue to fail people because you won’t have tackled the underlying reasons and causes. You’ll continue to have a major problem. The fact is Bobby, the average suicide rate for the period 2000 to 2003 was higher than for 2008 to 2011. Acknowledging that this was an issue before austerity is key to properly addressing it.
@Bobby Phelan: Like I said there are many factors that affect it. There seems to be an overall downward trend, then a bump during the recession, after which the original downward trend continues. If I was to hypothesise why I’d say that suicide awareness and openness about mental health issues have been going up in the last 15 years. It’s still somewhat taboo to talk about but those barriers seem like they are being broken down more and more. I hope I’m right.
Another thing to consider about these graphs is that the x-axis is not positioned at zero on the y-axis, which makes them misleading. It appears the rate is approaching zero. There has been been an overall significant decline from peak values but the numbers are still tragically high.
The misaligned x and y axes also make the overall trends appear far more pronounced. The year on year increases and decreases are no more than 10%. We need to identify and address the real reasons for our tragically high rates.
Interesting that the journal was doing this ‘fact checking’ well before all this big hoopla on fake news. You have to say they were ahead of the wave there despite all the comments you read that put them down.
Ahead of the wave in Ireland
I recommend snopes.coms what’s new section as the antidote to your Facebook buddy’s who say they swear this Hillary advisor mysteriously died JUST as he was about to give key info to the Feds etc
They also have a huge library on urban legends
The difference between the troubles and those who died by suicide is the fact those who died by suicide chose to. Sadly…..
@Kerry Blake: the article is about the number of death by suicide during the troubles…
Suicide is not a choice the way we think of choices
Suicide happens when mental pain exceeds coping mechanisms (which is why you hear people say “geez why’d she do it over that I can’t imagine that pushing me over the edge”) different people have differing abilities to cope with stress. It’s also rare for one thing to cause suicide, our survival instinct even under extreme stress is very strong, one thing blows up in your face you’ll try stand back up and fix things. The problem comes when you keep getting shoved back down over…and over…and over again. It’s like vines in a vineyard a certain amount of stress may actually make you stronger give you more depth and character but after a certain point you no longer have the strength to go on you loose any hope it’s going to get better. So you face a choice: do I endure this repeating pattern of pain forever or just check out
This is where the “selfish” argument pi_\\ses me off. You think you’re doing the people around you a favour by removing a burden (as by this’s stage you’ve probably caused a lot of drama) or you don’t think anyone will really care (not their fault the problems probably your own perception of their feelings). Think about what kind of hammering you’d have to endure to not want your eyes to open tomorrow morning then tell me it’s a choice
Kerry, that is the most ignorant comment I’ve ever seen re:suicide and the many victims it claims in our country.
Unfortunately any people who seek help for suicidal thoughts are given medications which often cripple and increase those suicidal thoughts.
So let me put it in lay man’s terms for you. You have a hangover/headache and you take medication to relieve that headache and it goes away. However if you’re suicidal you’re given more suicidal thoughts/tendencies due to the consequences of presenting with suicidal thoughts and wanting to get better. The latest data that was being compiled by Console before their directors were disgraced showed that nearly 60% of people who died through suicide recorded in Ireland from 2011 onwards were in fact on medications to “get better”.
This is a highly offensive and ignorant comment to the families and loved ones who’s lives have been destroyed by suicide.
Surely the comparable number is not the total number of suicides but the increase in suicides? What were the figures for the 10 years 1998-2008? If, for example, there were 1000 suicides in that period, then you could feasibly argue that only the extra suicides correlate to our period of national fiscal responsibility.
Nope. They went up when we started getting (bubble fuelled…) budget surpluses etc too
I wouldn’t call 08-2016 fiscal responsibility I’d call it “oh crap what did we do crap crap crap er let’s fumble incompetently for a solution while doing little to tackle key causes of the mess we’re in”
Fiscal responsibility would have been banking that property tax bubble revenue in a reserve fund to use on a stimulus project on bad times, and using some to finish things like Transport21 instead of adding 10ers to welfare rates and going too far with tax cuts. Ironically though if they had they’d have been voted out by a rainbow govt who would have done the exact same things only the bailouts would have started earlier with eircom shareholders and taxi drivers before any banks
Ok so take that further. Not all suicides are down to austerity because, obviously, there are still suicides in non austerity periods. It’s possible to look at the trend line without the period, then look at the area of the graph between the trend line and the actual line. That’s the first approximation of the number of suicides associated with austerity.
It’s a matter of hundreds, not thousands. The intended inference of the claim is therefore clearly false.
There is so much ‘barstool tripe’ being regurgitated these days that facts pale by comparison. There is an annual baseline suicide rate due to mental illness including depression which would upturn these results but either way it seems suicides did increase during the recession and FF and the bankers should keep this in mind as they try to worm their way back once again.
@winston smith:
How do you account for the fact that the suicide rate was higher in 2000-2007 than in 2008-2014?
You’re here bemoaning “barstool tripe” but you’re ignoring the facts as they appear in this article.
As has been pointed out elsewhere, no statistically significant co-relation has been established.
The key point is that our rate is far above what it should be even in the good times.
Speaking of barstool tripe you’ll find every major party (in Ireland and Europe) were in love with financial deregulation and the magic of tax cuts so much as I’d rather have burned my ballot than voted Cowen in 2011 blaming a global crash on one party is incredibly simplistic besides these days FFs fighting with the banks as much as being on the same page just look at the last 2 weeks
In fairness they’ve more reason to distrust them than anyone, they were assuring their ministers right up to doomsday all was well and if not for the collosol strategic error of Lab going into govt rather than leading the opposition they never would have been able to recover by stealing labours old clothes
Wasted time, Dan. The whole point of this statement is distraction. It serves no purpose knowing the actual figure. True or false it doesn’t reveal anything of use.
We know there are far better questions to be answered in your inbox.
@Charlie Fogarty:
Sorry for double…
Ohh, fact check. You should do another one about white slaves
Wasted time, Dan. The whole point of this statement is distraction. It serves no purpose knowing the actual figure. True or false it doesn’t reveal anything of use.
We know there are far better questions to be answered in your inbox.
@Charlie Fogarty: I see the robot click farm have assaulted your post. You’re bang on.
It’s a line rolled out to try and cleanse Sinn Féin for their role in the Troubles by attributing suicide to government parties.
Aside from the obvious false equivalence, if we’re comparing two political parties on the basis that one caused 3,000 deaths and the other 4,000 deaths then we’re not really in a good place. It’s like asking “would you like a Hitler or a Stalin? We also have a special on Pol Pot over here…”
I think it does a massive disservice to understanding mental health issues to simplify it to just economic factors when there seems to be a huge issue in proper mental health service provision in this country going back to when Jonathan Swift opened St Patricks.
There’s too much armchair sociology going on. When this was all pub talk it was fine but in the age of social media we could end up with some PR convincing a populist that if we spend tax dollars on free sweet days we’ll lower suicide. Correlation is not useful without understanding causation.
Hi Journal, why there’s nothing about situation in Poland neither here nor anywhere else? The country of Solidarity and freedom is on the verge of the Civil War and shocking stuff happen due to aggressive politics of the Law and Justice Party. Police from all country was mobilised and uses a violence against protesters. And there’s nothing in Irish media about it!
This article seems to separate the 2008-2014 suicides with the troubles but there is a link there which can be seen in this article: http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2016/01/conflict-mental-health-northern-ireland-suicide/424683/
Many of them were indirectly caused by the conflict.
FIANNA Fail have a lot of Blood in their hands the Party should have been disbanded . They talk about it like it was a fairytale and not all their fault well it was all their fault 100% and their leader was in the thick of it.
There will be a lot more suicides in Ireland if Kenny doesn’t do something about our homeless crisis and do more with people who are finding it hard to make ends meet Kenny get your finger out now()
Dan Henry, don’t hold your breath waiting for this government to do anything more than its predecessor did for mental health or the welfare of the people as a whole. The money always takes precedence, and keeping it in the hands of the few while it takes activists to do one practical thing to keep people alive over Christmas. Apollo House is a NAMA property which is to say it was bought out by taco ayers money and now they are not supposed to use it to house homeless people? Who are surely an incredibly vulnerable group in terms of mental health?
The correlation of male suicide with the rate of unemployment probably has something to do with the primeval concept of the male as the breadwinner and main provider. The diminishment of status for the male particularly when the female is still employed results in a role reversal that some men may find impossible to cope with especially when providing for children is a factor. The resultant tension created with no solution demolishes the man’s self esteem to the extent he feels totally trapped. Suicide becomes the escape route.
have your say