ONE in three children in Londonderry is living in poverty, it has emerged.
Child poverty in the Foyle constituency was calculated at 33 per cent for the period 2004/05 to 2006/07.
But with a margin of error of eight per cent either way child poverty could be as high as 41 per cent in the North West.
Only North Belfast, We
st Belfast and Fermanagh and South Tyrone had matching levels - at 34 per cent, 34 per cent and 33 per cent respectively.
The source for the shocking statistic was the Family Resources Survey for Northern Ireland - a sample survey of the population reported on in the Department for Social Development (DSD) produced annual Households Below Average Income reports.
According to the Office of First and Deputy First Minister (OFMDFM): "Relative child poverty refers to children living in households whose income is below 60 per cent of the UK median equivalised household income on a before housing cost basis.
"To generate enough cases in the data to enable the parliamentary constituency analysis to be conducted, it was necessary to combine the data over the three-year period between 2004/05 and 2006/07. The 2007/08 figures have not yet been published; it is expected they will be available in late 2009."
The stark reality underlying the statistics is that children brought up in Londonderry will die at a higher rate than their counterparts in districts such as South Belfast and Lagan Valley where roughly one in ten children are hungry and deprived.
Referring to the margin of error for the statistics OFMDFM stated: "Given that the confidence intervals around the child poverty rates for each parliamentary constituency are relatively large, these child poverty rates should be viewed as broad indicators of difference between parliamentary constituencies given that the figures are not precise enough to calculate difference between them with a high degree of certainty."
Cross-border research demonstrates that people living below the poverty line will die at a higher rate than their more affluent neighbours.Mortality rates for the lowest occupational class are estimated to be between 100 per cent and - 200 per cent higher than the rate for the highest occupational class according to the Institute of Public Health (IPH).
A report examining mortality on both sides of the border over the period 1989 - 1998 showed people were more likely to die in Northern Ireland if they were poor and little appears to have changed over the past ten years.
According to the Inequalities in Mortality 1989-1998 report: "This applied to all causes of death. For circulatory diseases it was over 120 per cent higher; For cancers it was over 100 per cent higher; For respiratory diseases it was over 200 per cent higher; For injuries and poisonings it was over 150 per cent higher.
"As well as the huge gap in mortality between the poorest and the richest, for many diseases there was a steep gradient running across all social groups."
