WHERE are we with the growing energy crisis? As usual, as Seamus Heaney said, “sucking the hind teat”.

That is, as explained in a glossary of Hiberno-English terms, “accepting being inferior” and “the weakest animal in the litter pushed to the end of the food line receiving the least milk and metaphorically the worst deal”.

In our case, literally. Already we’ve seen the woefully inadequate response from Britain to the shocking surge in heating oil prices which affects more people here than, altogether now, “the rest of the UK”.

It’s going to keep on rising regardless of whether the lying, malevolent clown in the White House walks away from the war he started.

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Who knows when, if ever, oil supplies from the Persian Gulf will return to normal?

When will people here receive their first payments to mitigate the rocketing price?

By the time the squabbling incompetents at Stormont get round to it, it looks like July at the earliest.

Will the British government bring in any special arrangements for the specific problems people face here with a more scattered rural population? Nope.

We’re not entirely alone with these difficulties, however.

Scotland faces similar problems. The difference is the SNP insist that Holyrood should control energy policy and that independence is the best route to lowering Scotland’s energy bills.

The same applies here but unionists would never admit that.

Unionists are condemned to live in the UK’s worst off, poorest place, but can never complain because the obvious question arises: why don’t you look south?

You know all the comparative figures.

Life expectancy is longer in the south. People live healthy lives longer too, a decade longer before succumbing to debility or disability.

Not surprising given you can get a doctor’s appointment next day in the south.

Ah, but sure people in the north wouldn’t give up the wonderful NHS, would they?

More in the south go on to higher education. Here, thanks to the DUP’s stupid policies on education, 20% have “low levels of education”. In the south it’s 7.4%.

In the south 93% of 15-19 year-olds are in full-time education or training. Here it’s 74%.

The north has the highest rate of economic inactivity in the UK – that is, not in work, education or training.

You can look at it all in a bigger perspective. The economist David McWilliams in 2023 said looking at the evolution of the two parts of the island over the last century is a fascinating study of “a type of economic laboratory”.

It’s not like studying East and West Germany or North and South Korea because, as McWilliams says, they were divided by “a profound ideological chasm”.

In Ireland there was and is no real ideological divide, both parts being liberal democracies and capitalist societies with the same natural resources, but the outcomes are dramatically different.

Again, you know the story.

At the time of partition, Belfast was the biggest city in Ireland. The six counties which were partitioned off produced two-thirds of the industrial output of the island and were the richest part.

Fast forward and you also know the story.

The north-east is the poorest part of the island and going to become poorer with low productivity, exceptionally low welfare benefits, and unable to act in its own economic interests with corporation tax, VAT and much else being constrained by the uber-centralism of the British system.

Contrast the south’s ability to tailor its economy to suit its advantages.

They’ve gone big for the digital technical economy, medical devices and biopharmaceuticals.

The top ten biopharmaceutical companies in the world are based in the south and amount to over 60% of the Republic’s exports, the third biggest in the world of such items at €116 billion.

Galway is Europe’s medical technology centre. It employs 15,000 manufacturing medical devices and spends millions on R&D.

Galway’s eastern suburbs produce 80% of the world’s stents – about 2 million a year. You can have more figures if you like for production of Botox and Viagra, but you get the picture.

Yes, there are problems, like the over-reliance on a few giant US companies, the prospect of more trade havoc by America’s malevolent clown and yes, rising energy costs.

Two major points arise.

First, unionists don’t know anything about those statistics because, apart from this paper’s business section – the north’s best – local media largely ignore figures in the south.

All their comparisons are with, yes, “the rest of the UK”, which is in terminal decline.

Secondly, and perhaps more fundamental, even if they did know and had the chance to participate in southern prosperity, the sadly misinformed tribal response of unionist voters is: “We’d rather eat grass.”

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