It is regarded as an indicator of the disadvantage of females in Irish society until about 70 years ago that men tended to live longer than women. Since the 1930s, this pattern has undergone a reversal, to the extent that men now have a significantly lower life expectancy than women.
Strangely, or perhaps not, this is not widely cited as evidence that men labour under a disadvantage in Irish society. The standard analysis is that this pattern is due to men's inability to look after their health. Is this an instance of the feminisation of logic?
In virtually all areas of human activity, low life expectancy is regarded as a classic indicator of under-privilege. The fact that black people have a low life expectancy compared with whites is regarded as a mark of the inequality that exists between races. The fact that Travellers have a significantly lower life expectancy than settled people is frequently cited as evidence of severe discrimination.
Even between different classes of women, differing life expectancies and mortality rates are seen as indicators of relative privilege or discrimination. But the same logic is never applied to men, who, despite being more likely than women to die young from any of the top 15 causes of early death, are deemed to be privileged in every respect.
In Western society, the average female now starts life with an expectation of living seven years longer than a man born in the same year. In pre-industrial society, men and women had about equal life-expectancies, but this changed with the onset of the 20th century, when women began to live longer than men, the gap widening with every decade of the century. In Ireland up to the 1930s, lower female life expectancy was partly accounted for by deaths during childbirth. Life expectancy for both males and females has increased in the past 40 years, but much more dramatically for women. By the early 1990s, the average Irish female could expect to live until she was 78, whereas the average Irish male would have been well advised to have his affairs in order by the time he reached his 72nd birthday. Life expectancy patterns in Ireland are now almost in line with what we like to call "other developed societies".
THE fact that men die younger than women is now regarded by policy-makers, commentators and experts as a natural circumstance, something as inevitable as, say, the fact that 90 per cent of RUC members are Protestants. I would hazard that, if we were to succeed in bringing the average Irish male's life expectancy into line with that of the average female, this would be denounced by feminists and suchlike as an indicator of our oppression of women - compared, naturally, with "other developed countries".
Those with responsibility for public health in Ireland appear to imagine that there is nothing to be done about the fact that men are less healthy than women. The Irish Heart Foundation, for example, lists raised cholesterol, high blood pressure, smoking, lack of exercise and being overweight as risk factors which "we can influence"; the risk factors which, apparently, we cannot counter are family history of heart disease, gender, age and race. This suggests that the gender dimension of premature death is immutable and fixed.
The consensus among experts is that the explanation for the disparity is men don't take care of their health. A recent survey by the British Office of Health Economics placed Ireland fourth in the world for premature death from coronary heart disease, and quoted the main causes of heart disease as diet and lifestyle, in particular smoking and physical inactivity.
But I don't think it would strike one as obvious that the diet and physical lifestyle of the average male is so significantly different from that of the average female as to result in four times as many men succumbing to premature coronary failure.
In 1992, the year before this survey was conducted, 29 per cent of Irish women were smokers, compared to 38 per cent of Irish men. This is a significant difference, certainly, but not nearly as significant as the disparity in fatalities from the supposedly directly-related heart disease. In general, women were found to have a somewhat better diet, tending to eat more fruit and vegetables than men, and in general tended to be less overweight; but again it seems improbable that this, even in conjunction with the smoking factor, could amount to an explanation for the vast disparity in early fatalities.
And, whereas men come out relatively badly in the smoking and dietary categories, they do much better when it comes to physical exercise. According to 1994 figures compiled by the Irish Heart Foundation, one-third of women, as compared to a quarter of men, were likely to be sedentary during the working day, and similarly during leisure time. Tendency towards obesity - another major risk-indicator for heart disease - is about equal between the genders, at 10 per cent. The evidence about diet and lifestyle, therefore, is neither conclusive nor convincing.
THE things that kill men are not cigarettes, chips or padded armchairs, but duty, honour, risk, responsibility, drudgery, silent strength, loneliness, fear, dignity and ambition. All these translate into one quasi-medical word: stress - undoubtedly the most significantly common factor with heart failure and virtually every killer disease.
There are, of course, biological factors differentiating men and women in terms of susceptibility to disease, but the main difference has to do with the relative roles allotted the genders by industrial society.
Premature death in adult males is the consequence of the attempts of men and fathers to support their families in a merciless world. Men, who for a century or more have left the bosom of their families and walked through those factory gates in the rain, have paid the price in bearing - manfully - the physical expression of the mythical broken heart. The same technological revolution that liberated women enslaved men and banished them from the life-force that is the love of their mates and children.
But whereas the man walks slowly down the steps from his hall door and trudges through those gates, the ideology of the day presents him as skipping gaily down the path, leaving his wife washing his socks and his children crying at the window pane.
In truth, he walks with a heavy heart, which drags him to an early grave.